Saturday Morning Adventure Dev Diaries #5: Skills and the Ability Check

Hey all, in this Saturday Morning Adventure development diary I'm going to go into what my plans for the skill system in SMA.

It should be no great surprise to regular readers of this series that I am once again citing The Angry GM, this time particularly the articles "I Hate Ability Scores (In D&D 5E)" and "Being In-Flex-Able".

The core ability check system that is widely used in many modern RPGs can go really underappreciated. I would wholly recommend the Angry GM articles I mentioned earlier for anyone that wants to learn a little more about what RPGs were like before the ability check was broadly adopted. But to summarise, the ability check system - in which a player describes their action, then the GM decides which attribute it falls under and if any skills apply - is a very solid and versatile foundation when done right.

However, Angry also points out one of the issues with the skills system, in that often players can see their skill list more like a list of fixed options (or "buttons to press" as Angry describes it) rather than just things their character is good at. The skill system I'm planning for SMA will ideally remedy this issue to some extent.

My proposed change is inspired by something I read in one of Angry's articles when I was writing Dev Diary #3. In summary, it was that having each ability check tied to one and only one attribute leads to a system that requires very definite boundaries between attributes - what Angry refers to as "bright lines". And designing a system this way can be difficult and restrictive. Sometimes the attribute set you want to use for other reasons just has some fuzziness, like the distinction between Intelligence and Wisdom in D&D. If you're making an ability check that suits both Intelligence and Wisdom fairly well, you are forced to make a choice between which is more influential in the circumstance. And in my opinion, even having these "bright lines" in place doesn't totally remove the issue. It's entirely possible that an action someone is taking in the game world would benefit from more than one attribute, so the issues about making these difficult choices persist.

My proposed solution to this half of the problem is to msotly do away with ability checks relying on one and only one attribute - that is, I want to allow for the possibility that an ability check utilises more than one attribute. The current vague idea is that when the player describes their action, the GM would choose 1 or 2 stats that are beneficial to it. If 2 stats are used, they both just give their mechanical bonus to the action, and if only 1 stat is being used it gives double it's normal bonus.

This also serves to remedy the issue Angry brings up regarding Charisma in D&D 5e - that it serves as a universal interaction skill, which dumbs down social interactions and cuts of some interesting possibilites in game. Under this system, an intellectual debate could rely on both a characters Intelligence and Charisma, while threatening someone could use both Charisma and Strenght, or Charisma and Intelligence if the threat being made is non-physical in nature.

This proposal is kinda inspired by the skill system in the RPG Runequest, where skills will usually get bonuses from two stats, but I'm planning to swerve away from the sort of skill system used in Runequest and D&D in a small but significant way. I do not plan on having a fixed skill list within the game. Instead, I want to  have a more "loose" set of skills, in which overlaps are possible and it is easy to insert new skills. I'm shooting for somewhere in the midground between a fixed skill list like in D&D, and a more off the cuff system where the GM decides if a character is skilled at a given task based just on the description/role of the character like in Lasers & Feelings.

Basically, a character sheet for SMA won't have a list of skills on it. It'll just have a box for players to note down their skills and relative bonuses. When it comes to making an ability check, here's the general steps that will happen:

1. The player describes their action, and checks their character's skills to see if they think any would apply.
2. The GM rules on one or two attributes that apply, and decides whether the skills suggested by the player do apply here.
3. If multiple skills apply, only the highest bonus available is given.
4. The player rolls and adds the attribute(s) bonus and the skill bonus.

I don't know exactly how skill bonuses will work mechanically yet (or attribute bonuses for that matter). But let's assume we're just using a basic fixed number bonus system and go through a quick example. Our character is Aaron the Adventurer. Aaron has a +2 to Intelligence, and a +3 to Perception. He has the skills Blacksmitihing +4 and Appraisal +2. He's trying to assess the quality of a sword he's found. The GM rules that Intelligence and Perception apply, and that both his Blacksmithing and Appraisal skills can be used. So his total bonus would be 9 (2 + 3 + 4). Now when Aaron is judging the quality of a gemstone the GM would likely rule that their "Blacksmithing" skill does not apply, so they would simply take the +2 from their "Appraise" skill for a total bonus of 7 (2 + 3 +2).

Now using this kind of system does have a couple obvious flaws to me. Firstly, passive checks are probably going to need some extra rules to work well, and secondly it'll likely end up causing a bit more work for the GM during the character creation process.

Well thats all for today. I'm surprised, I somehow managed to stay on my intended topic this time. The next Dev Diary will almost certainly be on magic in SMA, boy I'm excited for that. Got some hot takes. I hope to see you then!