Skill Systems and Thieves

    One system that keeps creeping into roleplaying games is the idea of skills. Effectively, they are tools meant to show that some characters are better at certain things than others. The origin of full skill systems can be fairly easily traced back to the original D&D Thief class. 

    Before thieves, there were only a few things characters could do (and they weren't officially skills) like listening at doors, being stealthy, and forcing open doors. All of these usually had a 1 or 2 in 6 chance of success. In contrast, thieves were given a list of special skills: climb walls, find traps, hear noise, hide in shadows, move quietly, open locks, pick pockets, and read languages. These skills got rated with a % chance of success and whenever a thief wanted to use one of their skills, they would roll 1d100. If they rolled at or under their skill rating, they succeeded! Fairly simple.

    The problem with Thief characters, and something people have been trying to fix ever since, is that all of those skills are things you would expect any adventurer to be able to do. With a Thief, it is implied or sometimes explicitly stated that other classes just can't do those things anymore. It takes away power from the other classes for itself, which actually makes the game harder when a thief isn't around.

    One of the few things that can be stated positively about these skills, however, is that they don't infringe on player skill. OSR has an ideal about player skill and how it interacts with the game that declares skills which replace or block player skill are bad. For example, in 5E there are several skills like Arcana or Insight which can fall under this, depending on how they are used. Knowledge skills can be used to block off player knowledge by having a character fail the check. Failing an Insight check means that your character just doesn't see through what someone is saying, no matter how ridiculous.

    But, back to the original thread, people have been trying to fix skill systems since the beginning. The original system of using d6s with low odds of success was functional. Unfortunately, it got replaced with the skill system of thieves, which effectively stripped it from the game in most respects. With the benefit of hindsight, many people in OSR have seen this as a bad decision and worked to fix it.

    One example comes from Lamentations of the Flame Princess. This uses the d6 system as well, though it is explicit about what skills it has. The skills available are: Architecture, Bushcraft, Climb, Languages, Open Doors, Search, Sleight of Hand, Stealth, and Tinker. They are fairly self explanatory and do manage to cover a wide swath of adventuring activities. Architecture is a bit of a knowledge skill and so is Bushcraft since trap-making could fall under Tinker. Languages is another knowledge skill, though it is based on seeing if a character can speak a language, so it doesn't really end up blocking or even replacing player skill. It just tells you if you can communicate verbally with some creatures. Specialists (thieves), instead of having a bunch of exclusive skills, are given skill points they can spend to upgrade their abilities.

    This approach of simply retooling the skills is a popular approach, but it isn't the only one. Black Hack entirely ditches the idea of skills, and instead introduces a background system in its place. Basically, characters can have a few backgrounds, which are short blurbs about their past, and they can be used once a session to gain advantage on a relevant check. I don't particularly like the once-per-session bit, but otherwise it is entirely functional. It forces characters to have a bit of depth or backstory and still allows for them to be specialized in ways that set them apart from others. 

    Whew, that was a lot. So, what is the benefit of thinking about skill systems? Based on my reading, I think there are a few:

1. They adjudicate unclear situations not covered by player skill
2. They provide a framework for hampering or boosting character abilities
3. They help differentiate different characters

    These are all pretty obvious, but it should also be noted that a skill system is not the only way to provide these three benefits. For example, Black Hack's background system covers the second and third benefits, but it doesn't touch the first. The first is instead handled by ability checks, where players try to roll under their appropriate attribute to accomplish things. 

    So, for my RPG what approach do I want to use? I really like the way LotFP handles its skills and especially the way it handles the Specialist class. However, I would change the die to a d12 because I think that die needs more use and because it provides a nicer amount of granularity. And, I would change up the skills. I personally don't like Architecture as a skill, Bushcraft is a silly name, and Tinkering could easily fall under Slight of Hand. Having statistics benefit relevant skills would be a nice quality-of-life improvement too. 

    There is a fundamental problem with this, however. Imagine players want to bust down a door. This would probably be what I am imagining is the Force skill. The strongest member in the party has a +3 strength, so they do the check. They have a 5-in-12 chance of success. They roll a 9. What happens? Reasonably, they can either keep rolling to find out how long it takes or the DM could rule that they don't break down the door instantly and instead have to spend a turn or something to get it open. That is all well and good. Now imagine that same strong character is at a local fair and is trying to lift a heavy stone as part of a weightlifting competition. 

    Now, in many systems, this would be when you break out attribute or statistics tests to see if they manage it. I don't like that approach, since it effectively creates two skill systems. Ok, so then the Force skill seems like it would be appropriate to lifting a particularly heavy stone. But then, wouldn't that imply that a peak strength character (18 str) has less than a 50% chance of picking up any heavy stone?

    One solution that has come to mind is to make a Feat of [Statistic] system, where all of these feats start at 6-in-12 odds, and then you add your statistic bonus (or penalty). Maybe double the bonus to make things really swingy. That would work great for the stone example, but gets a little weird for the door example. And it still introduces a second skill system. But maybe I am just overthinking things and these situations that take place out of the dungeon are rare enough that it isn't a problem. 

    Either way, I am going to be taking some time to think this one over and decide what approach will work best for me.