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Champion
 
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Me & Jeager are currently arguing over a LARP system he's writing/written.
He's of the opinion that you should avoid ranking skills where possible, so the ranked skills are:
Toughness
Strength
Regeneration
Dex
Stealth
Tracking
Forgery
Disguise
Plus magic.
I'm of the opinion that skills like backstab, lockpicking, weapons spec (more damage from a weapon), 1st aid and {type} lore should also be ranked to give people something to aim for.
He says that people won't be frustrated by only having a relatively limited number of skills to buy at higher levels (as a fighter I'd only want strength, regen & toughness!) and I'm worried people wouldn't have anything to aim for if there isn't a decent spread of high level skills for people to focus on. At the moment I feel the system allows everyone to get a very broad base of skills and not actually specialise easily as there's a lot of skills that only have 1 rank and 1 cost, so are cheap & easy to get... And you can specialise up to a point and then you can't go any further up that area - I could get backstab, but I'd never be able to improve it, or lockpicking and I can pick any lock... And then I'd have to go into the combat skills or magic skills which might not fit my character!
He also thinks that undead lore (for example) would allow people to know about any & all types of documented undead. I think it should be ranked so at rank 1 you know about generic documented undead (zombies, ghouls, skeletons), rank 5 you know about Mr X who eats Y and can be killed with Z... Or that dracoliches even exist at rank 3...
Then there's the argument that buying skills shouldn't be the focus of an adventure and you should go out for plot... I can agree that if there's an IC reason you should go out, but, I'm sorry, if I'm not going to be able to progress my character other than yet another level of dexterity then I'm not going to play them because I'll never progress other than take things I don't want & don't fit with my concept...
Because I've been told to put more of his reasoning in: Ian's trying to keep it simple.
So, should skills be ranked?
R7: Xarra // RL: Clare Selley // PD: Serengeti Blackpaw
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Wag
Group: System Moderators
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| You can take ranking of skills too far but there are also occasions where it is nice to have ranked skills. When we were 'writing' the rules for Pirates (I say 'writing' because they weren't really rules, more a rough collection of guidelines we'd bunged together to prevent players taking the piss too badly in a freeform system) one of the refs wanted to have a rope use skill with 4 levels of rope use. The other two refs considered this to be far too complex for a freeform system and a skill which was not necessarily all that interesting in game. We figured a one off 'you can do lots of things with rope so long as you have this skill' was sufficient. Ranked skills are mainly useful in cases where there are likely to be 'skill contests' or where certain knowledge is only known to characters with high levels of lore skills. By skill contests I mean cases where you have (for example) a trap setter and a trap detector. If there are no ranked skills in these (whether it is one 'trap making' skill which allows making and detection or two seperate skills) then any trap detector can detect any trap made by any trap maker. Its a simple system but rather limited. If, however, you have different ranks of skill then a basic trap detector can only detect basic traps so an Intermediate trap setter can set traps that fool him and so on. Its a simple, level versus level contest. I generally like to resolve as many situations like these (where two characters are going against each other in this way) as possible in this sort of way and prefer to have a philosophy that there is no skill or ability or power which is not resistable or defeatable or whatever by another skill (or sometimes the same skill). Basically, referees setting encounters can give things 'levels' and refs who are adminning them can ask what skill and what level they are using and decide if it is enough. Players doing things can equally state the level they are using to the ref so they know what it is if another player tries to deal with that situation. For knowledge/lore skills I also like the idea of skill ranks representing the level of academic achievement you have as a character in that area. Going from 'basic school level' all the way up to 'University post graduate' (though, obviously these are modern day or sci fi concepts. But a lot depends on the setting and how important you want lore type skills to be and how often you think a situaiton may arise where an important piece of information is only available to players with high levels of a lore skill (occult style skills often work well this way - rising levels of knowledge representing getting closer to 'the truth' and filtering out all the 'superstition and mumbo jumbo' which lesser adepts are prone to) However, for skills where there is not likely to be any form of contest you can generally get away with single level skills. It makes a system quick and simple.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Whispering God is your friend... trust the Whispering God... Ruins of Empire 1st - 3rd Feb, 2008, Gladstone scout centre, Chester
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Wag
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Wot he said, basically.
When we did C² I was just emering from a dark, dark place (called Aberddu Adventures) in which basically everything was ranked, for no real reason other than masturbatory number-waving. For this reason, I was dead-set against using ranks in the system, and being a game in which it was quite possible to gain a skill simply by slotting a chip into your neck that actually helped a lot.
Then I came to work on the science and technology stuff, and realised that ranks have their place for much the same reasons balor mentioned up there. Still, I was determined to keep ranks out of the character creation system, so I had skill packages for technology ("Basic Science Training/Advanced Science Training/Specialisation Training") which gave you a specific number of ranks in things.
By the time 6P came around, I'd mostly gotten over my rank-abhorrence. The numerous "x-uses-per-day" mechanics in the game lent themselves naturally to ranked skills, as did the 3 Heroic Traits in the game. But it's still something you should keep to it's place in my opinion.
PD - Brother Farael of the Ordo Dictum Dominus
EOS - Some Raggard Scum, previously Some Arimin Scum
6P - System creator (now retired), Andrei Treune of Clan Suner (for the moment)
RL - Will Robinson
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Champion
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| Like Balor said, it depends on setting and style of play, mostly. Apart from that, there are indirect ways to rank 'skills'. A locksmith can set a rank 'better' lock to stop a rank 'lesser' lockpick by having a higher ranking in the skill, or he can take more (game)time to construct the lock (better suited to longer events, obviously), or better materials (i.e. money), or by having (access to) a better equipped workshop, which might be a measure of how well established he is as a craftsman (longer running character, or simply more effort put into the workshop than others), or of IC connections. Ranks in craft and lore skills can follow a shared techtree rather than the individual`s skill. So all players in one faction can contribute to the 'ranks' of their various craftsmen and sages, by uncovering and bringing home hidden lore and tradesecrets. Skills can be governed by attributes like strength, dexterity, toughness, which then either lend their ranks directly to those skills, or set the X-times a day feature, which may be stackable, as suggested above. Lastly, instead of handing out XP to be spend in between events to buy new skills (or ranks in skills), one can hand out XP to be used during future events, to boost skills used to higher ranks.
________________________________________________________ - IRL: Edwin Hofstra
- - mostly crewing at the moment
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Heroic Knight
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My vote for skills which have an in-game effect would be to avoid Ranking them as it makes things more complex, and often confusing. But it depends on how you are managing it.
Who remembers what information you get with Undead Lore 2 and Undead Lore 4? More to the point, if you have two players with Undead Lore 2 and Undead Lore 3 and are trying to ref a busy situation, you'll likely tell them pretty much the same thing, which isn't fair. If however, you supply each rank with detailed written background sheets before the game for them to study and memorise if they can, then you have more control and it would be fairer.
Perhaps an alternative would be to have some Prerequisite Skills, which might satisfy both of you? So if you want to buy Impressive Strength (+1 Damage, first successful blow each combat), first you have to buy Sturdy Frame (1 additional global hit point). So you get skills which are each specific, but at the same time there is a sense of building on existing abilities as you get from a rank structure?
If you take a look at the rules I wrote for Scavenger, you can see there are Ranks of a sort, which have a limited in-game effect, but allow you to buy Skills which are used in-game (many of which have Prerequisite Skills): http://www.scavengerlrp.co.uk/rules.php
_____________________________
Maelstrom - Carl Whitesnake
Scavenger LRP - Organiser
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Heroic Knight
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What they said. With the possible exception of weapon skills (where people are going to be calling damage anyway so having several level isn't a huge problem), in-game stuff should avoid ranks where possible. If you do have several ranks for a skill, try to engineer it so that it doesn't need ref intervention to ensure that the character has sufficient skill to overcome the .
For example, if you do have ranks on the lockpicking skill, invest in about a dozen padlocks; for rank 1 lockpicking give the player 2 keys; rank 2, 4 keys; rank 3, 6 keys; and so on. That way when they come across a lock, you don't need a ref around to check skill vs. difficulty of lock. It also means a poor lock-picker could still get lucky, and that an excellent lock-picker can't necessarily pick every lock they find.
I'm not saying you should have ranks for lockpicking (or any other skill), but if you do try to reduce the number of times it is necessary to have a ref around. Obviously the above example wouldn't work at a fest, but I got the impression this is going to be a system for club linears and the like.
Xarra (4/15/2007)
He's of the opinion that you should avoid ranking skills where possible, so the ranked skills are:
Toughness
Strength
Regeneration
Dex
Stealth
Tracking
Forgery
Disguise
Personally, I tend to dislike direct physical skills at all (strength and dex) as you hit anomalies and contradictions which throw SoD for a loop. The seven-stone, skin-and-bone fighter has a higher strength skill than the six-foot, rugby-playing mage. When it comes to in-game situations, as long as everyone is careful as to how they go about it, everything should be fine. However, at the end of the day, you still end up with the mage carrying the chest of treasure because they're stronger OC. The other reason I dislike strength as a skill is that it encourages people to think it's ok to grapple a random stranger. Yes, LRP is a contact game; I expect to get hit by padded swords and I accept they don't always strike where the wielder intended, but I do not expect to be put in a headlock.
Xarra (4/15/2007)
He also thinks that undead lore (for example) would allow people to know about any & all types of documented undead. I think it should be ranked so at rank 1 you know about generic documented undead (zombies, ghouls, skeletons), rank 5 you know about Mr X who eats Y and can be killed with Z... Or that dracoliches even exist at rank 3...
The trouble with ranking any lore or knowledge skill is that people frequently pick up information in bits and pieces, here and there, with no predetermined order. If Bob the Fighter, having not seen any undead before, bumps into a draolich on an adventure then does his player now have to buy "undead lore 3" and, presumably, the lower ranks of that skill? If so, is it fair that he has to gain those skills when Bob would rather train for something else? If not, is it fair that he has knowledge of dracoliches existing when others have had to buy a skill to find out about them? If you rule that Bob can't use that knowledge in fairness to others, then how is it fair on Bob? The questions don't need answers, they're just there to highlight the minefield.
Lore and knowledge skills, IMO, should just be the one level and should only cover things which people are unlikely to find out about during the adventures they're on. Barring a highly bizarre set of circumstances, a character is not going to learn much about carpentry by going out and fighting / casting spells / picking locks / etc. and so carpentry is a decent example of something that would be acceptable as a knowledge skill. Whether it's worth having is entirely dependent on what style of game you're running. In other words, L & K skills should be things which need to be studied rather than things a character could pick up as they're going along.
PD: Dr. Jon Flynn
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Heroic Knight
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Having just rewritten the lore skills in our system...
It's possible to have lore skills that still have effect even when much of the information is out there, but it takes work. Our undead are effectively modular, and undeath lore tells you which modules went into that undead you just killed (and examined) - which in turn tells you the resources available to the one who raised that undead, as your briefing sheet contains 'You need x resources to produce y module, which has z effects'. Most people only want to know that that zombie was slightly harder than normal, or that wight was regenerating.
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Maelstrom: Auriel, Seraph of Fire and Stone, Lieutenant of the Teacher's Host in the Lands of Hell, Celestial Messenger of Lord Sun.
CUTT Head Ref 2007/08
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