Messing With The Skill List

[Sanctaphrax]

Hypothetically, how would you write the skill list for this game if you were given the opportunity to redo everything from scratch?

Personally, I wouldn't change much.

But I would redo the combat skills. It kinda bugs me that only a fool or a non-optimizer would take all three of them at high ratings on the same character. And I don't like the way that Fists drops in usefulness when the game assumptions change a bit.

So I'd merge Guns and Fists and Weapons into Melee Combat and Ranged Combat. Each would have a trapping that lets you defend against melee or ranged attacks respectively.

This has the added benefit of making Athletics less mandatory.

(This isn't my idea, other people have proposed it. But only recently did I buy into it.)

Apart from that, I'd just re-emphasize a few trappings. I'd put a bit of stress on Endurance's defensive applications so that people don't just take it at 3 and forget about it. I'd make Craftsmanship's Building trapping as useful as Resources's Buying trapping, because building stuff is awesome and not enough people want to do it. And I'd make it clear that people can make a First Impression roll with basically any social skill, because not all first impressions are about being nice.

I guess I might drop Burglary too, it's a bit unnecessary. Or maybe I'd add an Exactly As Planned trapping that'd let you retroactive Declare that you were ready for whatever happens.

So, that's my take. What's yours?

[Locnil]

I'd cut down on the number of skills, actually, and explicitly include "placeholder" skills for when skills get really high.

Also, what skill would you assign the Exactly as Planned trapping to?

[Mrmdubois]

Do you think this would see an increase in stunts in order to differentiate styles?

Because it does change the flavor of the skill somewhat if one skill covers all the physical means of mayhem and one other covers all of the ranged options.

You can fix somewhat with Aspects and narrative, but it doesn't really change the underlying framework of your proposed change to mechanics.

I totally agree that more people should be crafting though, making Athletics less mandatory, and the social stuff.  Plus I'm also curious what you'd do with Burglary exactly.

[KOFFEYKID]

I'd take Intimidate and Deceit and combine it into "Manipulate", and probably find a way to combite Rapport and Empathy into something that sounds good. Really social skills are out of control, there are way too many of them (Rapport, Deceit, Intimidate, Presence), playing a "social character" means gimping you so badly in almost all other areas that its hardly feasible, especially since Social Combat doesn't come up nearly as often as the other types.

This is in addition to Sanctaphrax's edit, since I like what he did there.

Also, since cutting down on the number of skills in the game radically drops the shelf life of a game, I'd implement my "increased skill floor" idea to compensate. I mean, once you have all the skills you cant actually progress further, which I always thought was silly even if it is completely unlikely that one character would have every skill rated at some number.

The increased skill floor is a mechanic that is added into the rules for improving characters. Instead of raising the skill cap for all skills by one at certain milestones I advocate the option to raise the "floor" by one as well. The Floor starts at 0, and by raising it to 1 any skill that has no skill points invested in it is treated as if it had 1 skill point invested in it for all purposes (including for purposes of skill columns).

[Sanctaphrax]

I'd cut down on the number of skills, actually, and explicitly include "placeholder" skills for when skills get really high.

Also, what skill would you assign the Exactly as Planned trapping to?

Which ones would you cut/merge? I'm curious to see if your take is similar to mine.

Not sure how I feel about placeholder skills. The idea seems to punish anyone whose concept doesn't work with certain skills. I'd rather raise the floor or allow people to make up new skills.

And Exactly As Planned would be part of Burglary.

Do you think this would see an increase in stunts in order to differentiate styles?

Because it does change the flavor of the skill somewhat if one skill covers all the physical means of mayhem and one other covers all of the ranged options.

You can fix somewhat with Aspects and narrative, but it doesn't really change the underlying framework of your proposed change to mechanics.

I totally agree that more people should be crafting though, making Athletics less mandatory, and the social stuff.  Plus I'm also curious what you'd do with Burglary exactly.

You've got a point about the consequences of merging combat skills. I've raised similar objections myself.

But in the end I decided it was worth it.

I'd take Intimidate and Deceit and combine it into "Manipulate", and probably find a way to combite Rapport and Empathy into something that sounds good. Really social skills are out of control, there are way too many of them (Rapport, Deceit, Intimidate, Presence), playing a "social character" means gimping you so badly in almost all other areas that its hardly feasible, especially since Social Combat doesn't come up nearly as often as the other types.

This is in addition to Sanctaphrax's edit, since I like what he did there.

Also, since cutting down on the number of skills in the game radically drops the shelf life of a game, I'd implement my "increased skill floor" idea to compensate. I mean, once you have all the skills you cant actually progress further, which I always thought was silly even if it is completely unlikely that one character would have every skill rated at some number.

The increased skill floor is a mechanic that is added into the rules for improving characters. Instead of raising the skill cap for all skills by one at certain milestones I advocate the option to raise the "floor" by one as well. The Floor starts at 0, and by raising it to 1 any skill that has no skill points invested in it is treated as if it had 1 skill point invested in it for all purposes (including for purposes of skill columns).

I can get behind the idea of merging social skills, but I don't think Deceit and Intimidation go well together. Con men aren't that scary, and thugs aren't that tricky.

Perhaps, instead of merging social skills, you could expand each one so that you don't need to take more than a couple.

Raising the floor seems like a good idea, but it bugs me that investing 1 point in a skill does nothing under those rules.

[Taran]

An idea I've had - and I'm not even sure it would work:

If you merge skills (and their trappings), you could have it where you choose, for example, 3 trappings at mediocre and then get an addtional trapping for every point above.  (maybe have it follow the stress track proggression).

That way, if you merge something like deceit and Intimidate, you can have one player choose all the deceit-type trappings(the con man), while another might choose the intimidate-type trappings(the thugs).  Someone else may mix and match. 

This will make it so not every character is the same.  It also encourages raising low skills to unlock additional trappings.  You could even have stunts that give trappings as well. 

What do you think?

[Tedronai]

Unfortunately, this combination of changes makes 'jack of all trades' characters incredibly difficult to represent, requiring significant refresh simply to attain low level proficiencies in wide ranging fields.

[Sanctaphrax]

Eh, I don't think that'd work so well. It would vastly increase the complexity of any given character. And in order to work it would require all trappings to be equal, which they aren't.

[JDK002]

While I agree some of the games skills are under utilized, crafting, driving, survival are near useless so far in my game.  I don't think I would personally try and make any sweeping adjustments.  This is mostly due to the fact that making them almost always created drastic changes to the core mechanics that you never consider until it happens.

I perfer to keep the mind set that it's the GM's responsibility to come up with scenarios and situations were every character has their time in the spotlight and play to/against the characters strengths/weaknesses.

If doing so becomes a regular issue with a character, then it's time to talk with that player and re-evaluate their character.

[crusher_bob]

I perfer to keep the mind set that it's the GM's responsibility to come up with scenarios and situations were every character has their time in the spotlight and play to/against the characters strengths/weaknesses.

I really don't like this attitude when talking about game design.  In theory the GM could do it, but it's not really the GM's main job.  The designer should be trying to make the rules set as easy for the GM (and other players) to use as possible, so that the GM can concentrate on other things.

It's just like arguing refresh points costs.  Sure the GM could try to balance everything, but if the refresh point costs are done correctly in the design, it's not something the GM has to worry about.

In addition, we should assume that every GM has ultimate system mastery, able to make good rulings every time something comes up.  Most people don't have good system mastery

Now, things I'd think about changing.
I don't like exactly how the social skills are split up.  I'm not sure what having high levels of deceit is actually good for, since almost all of your actual social skills are covered by rapport.  Next, there's no explicit skill to provoke people.  As often as Harry does this deliberately, you'd think there'd be a skill trapping for it.  Adding a 'provocation' skill trapping to intimidate might help, but even then, intimidate seems to be a rather limited skill when compared to rapport.

Part of the reason the driving skill gets no use is that there aren't any chase mechanics. Are there any good chase mechanics for other games that might be stolen?  Or does anyone want to take a crack at coming up with some?

An additional problem is that car chases work fine when you only have one or two protagonists, but tend to get odd when you have 4 or more.  One guys makes a character who's good at driving, and he expects to get into cool car chases.  What he really gets to do is drive the minivan that the rest of the team rides around it.  And if there is a car chase, the car character has the embarrasment of driving a minivan for his part of it.  Or even worse, the wizard in the back of the minivan waves his staff around and all the cars chasing the minivan suddenly explode.  All that's left for the car character to do is drive the minivan back to base, carefully obeying the speed limit the whole way.

Another problem is the linking of athletics to defense.  This means that almost all combat characters can move around like jet fighters if they feel like it.  A gun generally has a range of two zones, a combat character can move somewhere between 4-8 zones per round, if they want to sprint.  This means that any fight that someone wants to run away from will quickly leave everyone who isn't the road runner behind.  That social character who wanted to help by doing some maneuvers?  Now that the fight is finally over, you'd better call him and tell him where you finally ended up, so he can get a cab here.  If you had to wait for him to run all that distance, like you'd just done, you'd be here all day.

[Sanctaphrax]

@JDK002: What you say makes sense if and only if you don't have the understanding of the system necessary to see what the repercussions of your changes will be.

I'm pretty confident in my ability to hack DFRPG, so I prefer to solve issues at the design level rather than the play level.

@crusher_bob: There actually is a Provocation trapping for Intimidation. But your point about Rapport is pretty true.

As for Driving, Spirit Of The Century has some chase rules. I've never actually played SotC, so I'm not sure whether they're good, but still I'm kinda surprised that Evil Hat didn't bring them into DFRPG.

Exalted also got some chase rules in a recent supplement. They look pretty solid to me.

Personally, though, I think the lack of rules for using a vehicle in combat is a bigger issue than the lack of rules for chases. If I make a wheelman, I want to run some vampires over. Needing to ad-lib the rules for that makes me a little less keen on playing a wheelman.

As you may remember, I tried to come up with some vehicle combat rules ages ago. They were okay, thanks mostly to devonapple doing most of the work, but they were never really complete. Recently I've been thinking about taking another shot at at them.

[KOFFEYKID]

I think, if I were to do Driving rules for combat I would treat the vehicle as a sort of "zone within a zone". All attacks moving from outside in would face a border penalty of a rating equal to the quality of the vehicle (tanks would be, say, 5 with a high armor as well).

Drive would modify movement based on the speed of the vehicle, and then ramming would be a contest of 4dF+Drive, Weapon Rating: Armor as an attack roll against their 4dF+Drive & Armor rating.

Attacks from inside out would depend on the vehicle, but generally would be either 0, half or full depending on the type of vehicle in question.

[Ophidimancer]

I don't think I would mess with the Skills very much, though certain other tweaks I use kinda change how the Skills are used.  For example I kinda changed Mental and Social stress a bit in that Social stress is only inflicted by attacks meant to change the character's image, whereas Mental stress is inflicted by attacks meant to change the character's mind.

This makes Conviction useful in making an unflappable character, as it should be, and it also makes persuasive characters more powerful against casters, since they can throw them off their game with Mental attacks.

[crusher_bob]

When it comes to dealing with vehicles, I think covering chases and crashes are more important that rules for using vehicles as moving platforms for gun battles.  The assumption with most combats is that they would be over long before a 10 minute car chase could resolve things, which would mean that actual car chases are almost always resolved by shooting at each other, never by one guy crashing, or whatever.  But most people who want car chases in their games want actual car chases, not a gun battle with moving cars as a set piece.

[admiralducksauce]

I half-assed some car chase mechanics in a session a few months back. I have the overview here in my Highway to Hell thread, but I'll quote the relevant bit here as well.

Ever since Spycraft I’ve been entranced by the idea of simulating car chases in RPGs. I’ve worked up homebrew chase mechanics for everything from Savage Worlds to ORE, but hadn’t tackled FATE yet. This scene was pivotal, and I wanted to emphasize the monster-hunting bikers aspect of the campaign by having a chase. But because I didn’t have anything concrete mechanically ready to go, I asked the table. We felt the “default” suggestion of “best X of Y” rolls wasn’t going to be satisfying. The SOTC idea of “follow the leader’s roll” was too simple - again, not varied or satisfying enough. Each party in the chase had a stress track?  Too fiddly, and how would you handle this three-way chase if there was only 1 stress track? I felt going back to the FATE fractal was the right idea, though, and Diaspora’s social combat popped into my mind. My ORE chase rules involve participants shifting in between abstract states or range bands, and this idea mapped well to a zone map! I hastily scribbled out the following zones on our map:

Lost
Trailing
Sight
Shoot
Ram
Cornered

Abel’s men and Dallas started in “Sight”. The gang all started in “Trailing”. The idea here was if you and another character were in the same zone, you could do that action to them. I ruled that opposed Driving checks would let you move yourself OR another character, and if you beat the DC by 3 you could move an additional zone. Abel’s goons, Rowsdower and Troy, wanted to get themselves and Dallas Junior Brown into the Shoot, Ram, or Cornered zones. Dallas wanted everyone “off the map”, and tried to keep himself down towards the “Lost” zone. The PCs mostly went after Abel’s men but worked to hinder Dallas and keep him from giving them the slip. I saw a few potentially weird conditions in this thrown-together map but the problems were specific to the map I’d designed and not the basic idea.  I’ll get into that after the session writeup.

Engines roared and tires squealed as Dallas and his pursuers ripped through the strips and suburbs of Austin. It was a close thing - Dallas had a Driving +4 compared to everyone else’s +2, but the bikers used Maneuvers and teamwork to even the odds.  Rowsdower and Troy got Dallas into “Shoot” - Dallas threw the Chevelle into reverse down a narrow alley and the Crown Vic followed, headlights to headlights.  Troy carved up Dallas’ hood with a Micro-Uzi but Dallas blanketed the mercs’ windshield with buckshot. Rowsdower and Troy didn’t see Bill roaring up alongside them until it was too late. The former denarian host unloaded his Judge into both the Crown Vic’s left tires (it could’ve been damage, but Bill wanted to name the nature of the Aspect himself and so rolled it as a Maneuver). The black sedan trailed sparks as it slid into the main throughfare, unable to follow Dallas as he executed a perfect J-turn and headed for the highway. In zone terms, both Dallas and the PCs conspired to move the Crown Vic into the “Lost” zone.

Scott was ahead of the chase nearly the entire time. He saw Dallas trying to escape and swerved in front of a semi making for the onramp.  The truck blocked the freeway exit and forced Dallas back into the rat’s nest of strip malls and Whataburgers. Dallas knew he had to get these bikers off of him one way or the other.  He chanced moving Scott into the “Ram” zone (it’s like the friend zone but more violent), but it backfired.  Scott’s store of FP prevented him from falling back and clever use of saved free tags led to Dallas being forced into the loading dock at the local Home Depot.  The wheelman, a showoff until the end, put his blue Chevelle up on two wheels to fit through the loading door. Tires squealed, the car slid sideways, and Dallas parked his muscle car - hard - into the lumber aisles.

And also:

I really liked the idea of using a zone map for relative positioning during a chase scene, and for the most part I think it worked out well. I’m not sure how much I liked the simplification where you moved 1 zone on any success and an additional zone if you rolled 3 over the difficulty. That could be fixed by having a series of intermediate zones or obstacle ratings, then you could simply use your Driving effort-as zones moved. I do know I liked the ability to move other participants, and that’s a key feature towards making this rules variant work. That part’s taken straight from Diaspora’s social combat, though, so I probably just need to locate their SRD and reread it a bit.

Another bugbear with the system occurs when you have A chasing B who is chasing C, like the Dallas Junior Brown chase (I can’t not write his full name). You can end up with a situation where Alice rolls against Bob but manages to end up in a zone more suited for tackling Charlie, effectively using Bob’s lower skill to bootstrap her way into an advantage. Another hiccup is that when Bob is “Trailing” Charlie, he’s automatically also trailing Alice.  Maybe a Venn diagram-style zone map would fix multiparty chases, I don’t know yet. I think the idea is sound, the maps just need some thought.

Shooting the car vs. shooting the driver: I ruled Kathryn’s attack on the helicopter pilot as a “RCV blood sack” situation. First, she has to be using a weapon that can penetrate the vehicle - no headshotting tank drivers with a rifle unless they’ve stuck their head out. Second, she needs to hit by 3 over the difficulty or have an appropriate Aspect to tag for effect, much like starting a grapple requires an Aspect placed first.

My car stats were basically just stress tracks (Armor:1, 3 stress boxes), but you could easily use the FATE Fractal to give them Aspects (“Supercharged”, “Last of the V8s”), Stunts/Powers (“Turbo Boost”), and Skills (“Maneuverability”, “Durability”, “Speed”). IMO car “skills” would work best as modifiers to the driver’s own skill. The stress tracks I kept low because it was fairly difficult to line up shots, so a successful shooting attempt should have significant impact.

Although we should maybe take car chase discussion out of here and into a separate thread, and leave this one for skills?