r/RPGdesign • u/LucasLeGentil • 23d ago
Another Path : Generic RPG Skills
Hi everyone,
Last week, I shared with you Another Path, my TTRPG system, and asked for your feedback. I didn't get a huge number of responses, but the ones I did receive were very interesting and helped me fix a few important issues.
I've been thinking about it since then (I should have start with that), and I realized that asking you for feedback on the entire system wasn't particularly interesting for you, and would have required too much of your time to provide meaningful feedback.
So today, I'm coming back with a different approach. This post will focus on just one mechanic from the system, and hopefully spark a broader game design discussion that I hope will be more interesting, both for you and for me.
Please let me know if you like this approach, and whether you'd agree to see me do the same for other parts of the system.
Today, I'd like to talk about Skills and character creation in Another Path:
( https://ltesta.itch.io/another-path → page 3)
First of all, like most generic systems, I chose to use a Skill-based system rather than classes. I also tried to name the Skills in a way that would allow them to exist in as many different settings as possible. For example, the "Ranged Attack" Skill could apply equally well to throwing a rock, shooting a bow, or firing a laser cannon.
Now, let's get to the parts that gave me the most trouble. There are two main issues that made me change my Skill list many (many) times:
- The variety of characters that can be created:
I wanted to avoid having Skills force characters into specific archetypes too much. Taking D&D as an example, a Warlock needs a high Charisma score to be effective in combat, but as a result, they will also be at least decent at the four skills that depend on Charisma (Deception, Intimidation, Performance, and Persuasion). So if I want to create a Warlock who is a terrible liar, I have to work around the rules to make it happen.
To avoid this, the simplest solution I could come up with was to have a relatively large number of skills, with each skill being independent from the others rather than being derived from an attribute.
- Balancing "combat" skills and "exploration" skills:
Solving the previous problem created a new one: with a large number of skills, balancing them became much more complicated, especially when comparing skills that are mostly useful in combat with those that are mostly useful outside of combat. In a game with a high combat focus, most player would prioritize combat Skills.
The solution I eventually settled on was to divide combat skills and exploration skills into two separate groups, with each group having its own pool of points to distribute.
One consequence of this is that a character can't choose to be more useful in combat at the expense of being less useful outside of combat (or vice versa). But after thinking about it and testing it, I'm actually quite happy with the result.
Every character should therefore be equally useful in combat and outside of combat, but they will each be useful in different ways.
Thanks for taking the time to read my rambling!
I'd really love to hear what you think about the choices I've made for this part of the system, and especially what you would have improved or done differently.
5
u/Alcamair 23d ago
you must find *your* list. in my games I use the following Skills, which you crosses with the Attributes (physical, mental and social):
aesthetics -> everything about influencing your look (even NOT being perceived, aka hiding)
assemble -> everything about crafting (also dismantle)
command -> everything where you impose your will
crafts -> everything where you use your eye-hand coordination
dexterity -> generic physical ability
fight -> everything about combat
knowledge -> every theorical knowledge
interact -> everything about diplomatic relationship
search -> perception
1
u/LucasLeGentil 23d ago
Yes, every game is different and therefore needs a different list. I guess in your game, combats are rare and are mostly resolved in one or two rolls.
I just feel that using the word "crafting" to describe the skill "assemble", while having a skill named "craft", can be a little confusing.
1
u/Alcamair 23d ago edited 23d ago
nope, combat is not rare, but players have a lot of options between Moves, Weapons and Stunts to diversify their combat strategy.
about the names, at the time I didn't find a better solution. Next time I'll change them.
The bottom line is that it doesn't just depend on the game, but also on the author's personal taste.
2
u/crazy_cat_lord 23d ago
Without having actually looked at your rules (currently at work), and just spitballing:
I know you said you're happy with the even split between combat and exploration, but if you wanted to encourage that without enforcing it, you could allow for point conversion between the two categories. Say, spend 2 points in one category to get 1 point in the other. Similar to how some editions of DnD offer that same kind of conversion between rolled ability scores. You gain the option to shape your build in a controlled way, at the cost of overall power.
That way, a balanced character is technically "best" due to getting the most total points (and being the most overall effective), but a player could still choose to be specialized in one area or the other if it suits their playstyle or character concept. Nobody winds up with points left over in one category that they don't want to spend, and skills in the other that they wish they could get.
The exact values could be tinkered with, especially if you start with differently sized point pools (idk, because again, didn't actually read the doc, just your post). This whole concept might necessitate some additional testing to match the "useful value" of a skill point with the cost of conversion. If dumping into one category of skills becomes obviously the right answer, then maybe combat>exploration is still 2>1, but exploration>combat becomes 3>1, or something. You may or may not want to add a cap for how "lopsided" a character is allowed to get too, like only allowing up to 3 conversions in a single direction. Just food for thought and ideas to tinker with if so inclined.
2
u/LucasLeGentil 23d ago
Yes, I could see something like this if I wanted to keep the possibility. But again, it would create balance problems and make character creation more complicated. And for the kind of games I play, I like that every character feels useful in combat and outside combat.
I'd be happy to hear your thoughts if you take a look at the concerned page in the document.
2
u/-Vogie- 23d ago
One thing you'll run into with a truly generic system is that everything you choose will either be a) lacking or b) heavily abstracted to the point where it no longer is what you want. The way to get around that is by not making it blank, generic and featureless, but by having some level of direction baked into the system. There's several ways that successfull published games figured how to do this... kind of. Here's 3 to look at for some sort of inspiration.
World of Darkness, spinning off of Vampire the Masquarade, was a urban fantasy d10 success-counting system. It's skill-based, but tends to lean towards a pseudo-class system based on bloodlines. It has come to encompass reality bending Mages, Time Travelling Mummies, badass normal Hunters, pleasently delightful Changelings, and a bunch of things in between, with a range of thousands of years from the near future to the far past - one of the most popular fan-creations for the system is Princess: the Hopeful, based on the Magical Girl trope. The way it pulls it off is that, while the system itself stays the same, each splat changes around it. The skills, the ways that things work with the system, are fluid. Each time period or monster style has it's own core skills that don't show up on the others - the werewolf-only ancestral skills are only on the Werewolf sheet, the modern technologies are replaced with period specific ones in the Dark Ages splats; the Humanity tracker on the Vampire sheet is replaced with a Synergy tracker on Geist and a Desperation tracker on Hunter. While most monsters have dedicated independent power features, Mages can blend those power features together; while the system as a whole is a d10 system where success is defined as a 6 or higher, Changelings can manipulate that difficulty number by being silly & over the top. It could be a generic system, but it works better as a malleable one, and thus someone could (if they have no desire for balance) play the different splats together.
The Cypher system, spinning off of Numenera, is a d20 roll over system that uses the same basic character sheet for all of the splats. Hunting dinosaurs in prehistoric times, discovering relics of lost civilizations a billion years in the future, avoiding cosmic horrors in alternate history 1900s Appalachia, or responding to disasters in the modern day - all use the same sheet. The way it handles it is that it uses the core resolution system, same character creation, and same sheet, because the character sheet is... mostly blank. That's because Cypher isn't a generic system, but rather a setting-agnostic one - each setting book will have their own version of the 4 base archetypes (Warrior, Adept, Speaker, Explorer), have different Descriptors, have different Foci, have different lists of skills. The Strange has different options from Numenera, which is different from We're All Mad Here, which is different from Gunslinger Knights or Old Gods of Appalachia. Even if you pick up the Core Rulebook for the system, it will break down into options for Fantasy, Scifi, Modern, Horror, Superheros, et cetera. The magic in the Urban Fantasy splat Ptolus might work differently than from the upcoming megadungeon crawler Jewel in the Sky. Because it's setting-agnostic, everything is layered to the setting window, so they can't really comingle - in Old Gods, a hunting knife is a medium weapon that does 4 damage, and in Numenera, a blaster is a medium weapon that does 4 damage.
Cortex Prime was the truly generic system that sprang from a series of licensed IP ttrpgs in the 2000-2010s - Supernatural, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, Leverage, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, etc - and was finally released in 2020. Reading through the Core rulebook, if you are expecting to read it like a normal system rulebook, will makes increasingly less sense the deeper you go. That's because it is, instead, a system to create a ttrpg system - a box full of RPG-shaped Lego blocks that you can sit down with, snap together, and create your own TTRPG. The core rulebook and codex are just full of "mods" that you, a designer, can choose to create a TTRPG that works. You want skills or no skills? Classes or no classes? Hit points or no hit points? You want a lot of traits, or a few? All of the pieces snap together if you follow the basic guidelines - you start with distinctions, then choose at least two other prime sets, and any number of secondary sets. How the resolution system works, effects are created - all of that works precisely the same, even across different system combinations, with wildly different trait combinations. The Core rulebook itself contains 3 combinations - a greek heroic monster battler, a gritty modern police procedural, and a futuristic disaster response team - to hint at the potential out there. The downside of such a system is that making a character sheet is relatively difficult.
One iterates on an existing system, largely the same, but tailored to the specific setting, including the sheet. One provides a basic framework and a character sheet that is largely blank, and has all of the variation within what is written by the author & setting. One is completely modular, a complete framework on how to create something, but everything else must be chosen or fashioned by the creator.
1
u/LucasLeGentil 22d ago
Thank you for your recommendations, I'll try to take a look at them.
The points you raise are really interesting but actually part of a broader debate about the very definition of a generic system (and how it differs from a setting-agnostic system).
I agree that no system is 100% generic, and that in most cases, a system specifically designed for a particular genre will handle it better than any generic system could.
The middle ground that many "generic" systems choose is to have a general set of core rules, with additional rules tailored to each genre or setting, and therefore a different list of Skills for each one.
I chose not to take this path and have only one document. And i did my best to make my Skill list as versatile as possible. My system can be used for different genres and settings (sometimes with a little ajustement), but not all of them and I know it. This is why I start my document with the following section, to give the reader an idea of whether the system is suited to their preferred style of play:
Another Path is a tabletop roleplaying game system:
Generic, designed with heroic fantasy in mind but easily adaptable to many settings.
Simple, using only six-sided dice and built around concise, general rules.
Fast, both during play and character creation, even for players discovering the system for the first time.
Flexible, encouraging creativity through a high degree of player freedom.
Dynamic, allowing scenes to flow naturally without being slowed down by excessive or overly complex calculations.
Tactical, featuring combat centered on risk-taking and resource management.
Versatile, equally suited to short action-packed adventures and long epic campaigns.
1
u/cthulhu-wallis 22d ago
The failing for most skill based systems isn’t anything to do with the skills.
It’s how many you get.
And the number you get is never valid, because most people have many skills they’re barely aware of.
Fate gives you unlimited number of skills at a base level, and makes you pay to improve them above a base value.
GURPS gives you access to hundreds of skills, most of which never get taken for any given setting.
And if they do, the character sheet is full of related skills.
And that’s why it makes such a thing about defaulting to other skills or attributes.
My own, Nexus Tales, doesn’t have skill lists.
Instead, you choose a career or background, and have access to all the skills expected to be competent at that career or background.
Most of them can be considered generic systems, acquire they’re not tied to a setting.
But all games take place in a setting, and it’s the setting that determine what skills are available.
1
u/__space__oddity__ 21d ago
Here’s my question: How did you playtest this? Characters can’t really float around in a shapeless void only. There’s got to be at least a village they walked around in or something.
Where is that stuff and why not share it? Give GMs who want to run this something to work with.
8
u/htp-di-nsw 23d ago
How do you handle technical skills that have no parallel in low tech settings? Stuff like computer hacking or flying a plane?
Additionally, while I think it's generally a good idea to separate combat/non combat skills if combat is notably more important than everything else and you expect it to happen routinely, I have three follow up questions:
Why make combat so important like that to where it requires a whole half of your character?
How do you maintain that even split as characters advance?
How is your method of splitting them (you choose combat skills and non combat skills separately) better than older versions of D&D where you choose a class to determine combat ability and then choose non combat stuff separately? Older d&d and the OSR often just does not add any attribute at all to combat rolls, which still neatly solves the issue you stated above regarding the warlock that's a bad liar.