Skill System Suggestion

[Shevek]

Currently, skills are tied to talents. I would strongly recommend going back to the old skill system. I should not be selecting combat talents with the notion of making sure that it gives me skill bonuses so I can make skill checks. This is truly degenerative game design as it is built in metagaming that gets players to create characters counter a character concept they may desire.

 

Still, the old system was still lacking. Largely because there were not enough skills. How can skill choice mean anything when there are 5 skills and 6 characters in the party? The math is easy.

 

Part of this can be addressed by splitting up Mechanics. This skills involves.. spotting traps, disarming traps, placing traps, picking locks and disabling machines. Wow. In most RPGs that would be an entire skill set. Picking Locks can be Mechanics: Lockpicking. Disarming/Placing Traps can be a skill called Mechanics: Traps. In order to avoid this being a must max skill, the traps skill could require a lower investment to disarm traps (disabling a very hard trap should require only half skill), slightly higher investment to place traps and an even higher investment to retreive disarmed traps. This would allow the party to disarm traps with only moderate investment. Those are attractive skills on their own. You can then use either skill to meet Mechanics checks in scripted interactions.

 

Ok, so now we are up one skill. Other skills are much harder to split apart. Athletics, Stealth, Lore and Survival seem fine. If anything, Lore may need a bit of a buff (maybe minor defensive bonuses or something similar that increases with skill for a character who invests in Lore vs enemies with a full beastiary entry unlocked? sorta, like they "know their enemy"). 6 skills... 6 skills is not enough.

 

How about.. Haggling? This skill could function as a skill which takes the net amount the PARTY invests in the skill to adjust buy/skill prices. Any convo or scripted interactions utilizing the skill could use the value of an INDIVIDUAL party member. This way, all the party benefits from all investment in the haggle skill.

 

Well, thats 7 skills. Not bad, but there needs to be more. So, how about Scouting? This could allow you to spot traps, hidden enemies and maybe also increase your view distance or somethin. Maybe make just spotting traps only require a low investment so a trapper can be effective while investing half in Traps and half in this.

 

Thats 8 skills. MUCH better. But, even more would be nice. The devs need to take a nice, long look at the skilll system and find ways to really make a skill system worth having. Start by disconnecting skills and talents and then increase the number of skills. 5 skills just isnt gonna cut it. I would recommend getting the number of skills up to 12 or so (double max party size). 

 

[Sensuki]

Largely because there were not enough skills.

I don't think it's possible to "add more skills" because what Josh has done is compressed all of the D&D 4E skills into those 5 skills, and rolled a couple of the others into Attribute checks. However you are correct, that one of the main reasons why people are maxing skills is that there are only five skills.

 

I touch on skills in my video here:

 

 

I believe the second reason is because the skill check design promotes maxing skills, and there is no incentive not to do it. There would be incentive if there were skill checks for multiple skills though.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Can't see more skills being added to this game. Wouldn't most if not all of the dialogue have been written by now and all those skill checks in the dialogue? If you change the skills and add new ones, you'd have to change the dialogue as well. I'd think New skill checks would be a nightmare to insert into the dialogue all over the game.

Edited November 3, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Shevek]

Ok, how about this. What if the skill set can be expanded WITHOUT needing to add any more skill checks. What if there could be MORE skill choices within the framework of the 5 skills that exist. 

 

Ok, check this out...

 

So, Athletics, Stealth, Mechanics, Lore and Survival all become SKILL AFFINITIES as opposed to skills. Affinity could be gained by races or backgrounds but they would give no mechanical benefit (other than convo/scripted interactions). Each affinity would have 2 (or more if they wanted to) related skills. Here is a quick and dirty mock up of how it could work.

 

 

Investing 1 skill point in "Run Speed" would make you run faster but also increase your athletics affinity by 1. One could also raise Athletics affinity by taking "Athletic" talents as well. This way, people can get max athletics for convo/scripted checks without feeling that they need to max a skill or set of skills. This would encourage folks to spread the points around a bit as well. 

 

The best thing? No new skill checks needed. Just an idea...

Edited November 4, 2014 by Shevek

[Karkarov]

I don't dislike your suggestions Shevek, in fact I wish skills in Eternity were far more robust than they are.  However it is too late in the game for these kinds of huge changes you are talking about.  Also with so few skills I just don't see a ton of point in putting a complex system behind it.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

I was having the same idea Shevek but I was calling it an 'umbrella' where a whole subset of skills would fall under. It'd have to be shown in a way where it shows the subset of skills under each of the five that you can choose from. That might gel with people at character creation or level up.

 

But I think it may come across as confusing when you might have 20 skills falling under 5 with a different name in dialogue. It seems like doubling up to me. I choose one point but the game assigns two.

 

Also, you can have a master locksmith with no points in traps getting assigned Mechanic points in dialogue and when a dialogue choice comes up with traps, your master locksmith who has no trap skills passes easily. No, I've tried and every time I come up with something, I find faults in it.

Edited November 4, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Shevek]

If you approach the umbrella skill or affinity as a derived stat or a "rating" , then its not confusing at all.

 

Example:

If you increase your Endurance skill, your athletics rating goes up. Other ways to increase Athletics include taking this dual wield talent. As you get a higher athletics rating you pass more athletic checks.

 

I dunno, makes sense to me...

Edited November 4, 2014 by Shevek

[Hiro Protagonist II]

It doesn't get around the fact that a check in dialogue is covering all those subset of skills even if you don't have any of them. Such as the case with the Master Locksmith who has no trap points but when a dialogue option comes up with Traps, the Master Locksmith can pass it without any points in traps at all. This is were the system can be abused. You choose points like lockpicking but are also passing all the trap dialogue checks because the dialogue is assigned to Mechanics. You're passing things you have no points in.

 

EDIT: I meant another skill under Mechanics. I've now changed it to traps.

Edited November 4, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Shevek]

Why would stealth dialogue checks be assigned to mechanics? Thats not what i am suggesting at all.

[CatatonicMan]

I don't dislike your suggestions Shevek, in fact I wish skills in Eternity were far more robust than they are.  However it is too late in the game for these kinds of huge changes you are talking about.  Also with so few skills I just don't see a ton of point in putting a complex system behind it.

 

The problem, I imagine, is that a "robust" skill system would end up entirely imbalanced with a lot of one-shot and/or worthless skills. This was a big problem with the D&D CRPGs that tried to be "universal", especially since there was often no indication as to what skills would actually be useful.

 

Overall, a concise, well-supported skill system is a hell of a lot better than an expansive, sporadically-supported one (which could probably be condensed down to the previous one anyway).

 

It makes a lot of sense to have many varying skills in a tabletop game where the player has a lot of agency, but, generally speaking, it's not been very practical for CRPGs.

Edited November 4, 2014 by CatatonicMan

[Shevek]

I am not advocating a GURPs clone or something with its expansive skill list. I am saying like 10 or 12 skills. 5 skills is a waste.

 

For reference:

http://gurps.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Skills

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Why would stealth dialogue checks be assigned to mechanics? Thats not what i am suggesting at all.

 

I meant another skill under Mechanics. I've now changed it to traps. See my two posts again.

Edited November 4, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Shevek]

 

 

Why would stealth dialogue checks be assigned to mechanics? Thats not what i am suggesting at all.

I meant another skill under Mechanics. I've now changed it to traps. See my two posts again.

Oh, I get you.. Ya could be troublesome for mechanics. Not so much the other skills though. The devs might able to work with it.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

It depends on the dialogue and I see it for all of the 5 main skills. For instance with Lore. You invest all your points in items and not one point in Beasts and yet you pass all the dialogue checks with both items and beasts. Does not make sense. It's all the skills. It doesn't work when you have 5 skills in dialogue but possibly double or triple the subset skills out of dialogue but are still counted under those 5 main skills. And you're going to have gamers gaming the system such as the lore example I just gave.

[Lephys]

Hiro is quite right. You'd pretty much have to go through and change each check in each dialogue/situation to its "sub-skill," instead of the umbrella. Which... is a lot less work than straight-up adding in things that aren't already checked. BUT, I don't know that that means it's necessarily easy to do, or that they have plenty of time to do that. Also, you'd have to change all that code to check "traps" and "lockpicking" and such, instead of Mechanics, for individual skill checks. Which, that's easy enough in and of itself, but it's more the sheer number of changes you'd have to make that would likely be the issue.

 

*shrug*. I can't really definitively say that that would be impossible, either. But I wouldn't want the skills expanded if those changes weren't made.