By Yax -
June 7, 2008 -
17 Comments
Good players need more skill points
Random thoughts
I had one too many coffees this morning. I’m a little jittery. Please don’t mind the tyops.
Why your players need more skill points
The character creation session is one of my favorite parts of the RPG hobby. Everyone’s imagination is roaming and, as a DM, I want to keep it that want. I cannot be bothered by the skill point rules. Why is that? Well, there are a few reasons:
- Encourage backstory. If a PC’s backstory would require the character to have a few extra skills, why not allow the player to have more skill points?
- Let the players decide what their character is about. No matter how exotic, weird, or powerful a PC is, there’s always an appropriate challenge. If your players want to circumvent the rules and play something unique it’s a good idea to at least consider ignoring the rulebook.
- D&D is a statistical game. It’s built around combat mechanics. Maybe it’s one of the reasons a PC’s past is sometimes neglected. Create fake skills to reflect a character’s pre-adventurer life. 8 points in farming? Why not! 6 points in Dire Weasel herding? Sure! Tying statistics to the backstory helps everyone remember and make the game richer.
- Make your players happy. A DM can’t ask for more!
What do you think?
Am I on drugs? Am I too nice to my players? Can Dire Weasels really be herded?
Arete
Geez. I just re-read this. I really was hyper when I wrote this. Can’t even spell!
Hi there,
Interesting thougts and yet I see some problems, I’d like to see adressed.
Making your character’s cooler is ofcourse always nice, but are the improvements really useful? Most D&D-games are focused on combats and the non-combat encounters are either handled with a single skillroll or through acting in character. 8 points in farming seems nice, but whenever are you going to need it? How does Weasel Herding have any relevance? The skills you’ve picked seems to me to be illusory awards, as they cannot be used in any meaningful manner and definitively not twice.
Second why is the backstory so important? I don’t ask my players for anything but a superflouos backstory – just a few pointers. Compare the backstory to movies – in Star Wars part 4 we meet Leia and we meet Luke and we meet Han. Not in any case are we introduced to several pages of backstory. Any backstory we need is introduced through exposition in the movie. I prefer doing the same thing in my game – have the player present some sketchy notes and then explore the backstory in the game. If your parents were killed by orcs (a seemingly very common occurence) then let’s play around that – reintroduce the orc chieftain, that commandeered the orc raiders – we see the same thing in every Sword & Sorcery-movie in which the protagonist has his parents killed by raiders. The protagonist keeps encountering his foes.
So let us reward players, that come up with ideas that can be used to further their characters stories in the game. Your parents were killed by orcs? Cool, then you’ll have the bonus feat “Hatred against the Bloody Axe Orc Tribe”, that awards you +1 to attack rolls against those specific orcs. You grew up as a farmerson? Cool, then you’ll have the bonus feat “Friend with farmers”, that grants you +2 diplomacy and the ability to ask for free shelter.
Let’s do as you suggest – let the players create exotic characters or characters with cool abilities. It just adds to the fun.
If you are on drugs, I hope you brought enough for the entire class. ;)
I’m the exact opposite of Morten Greis, I think, but we tend to come out about the same place. For my part, I’d just banish skill points all together. Waaaaay back in the day (when dinosaurs roamed the earth and) when I played Moldvay/Cook D&D, before there were things like skills and feats or even non-weapon proficiencies in the game, I had my players tell me what their PCs did before they started adventuring. It was background, but only a sentence or two. From that came their skills. If the PC had been a pirate, then the PC knew something about ships, navigation by the stars, and tying knots. If the PC was a veteran of the Goblin Wars, then the PC might speak a little goblin, know something about their tribes and customs, and how they fight. The most useful PCs were ex-farmwives, who could take a dead basilisk and turn it into a meal, boots, soap, a pair of earrings and a jacket of leather armour.
We didn’t worry about levels or points because we never rolled dice. If your character was skilled at navigating by the stars, then your PC could do it, and we didn’t need to roll. If your PC was knowledgeable about the history of the Thorin Dynasty, then that character would recognize ruins from that time period, and be able to say which chamber had been a guardroom and which had been a well. If we really needed a dice roll, we usually went with success on a 1 or 2 on a d6 (any better odds than that, and we just gave you the success).
- Brian
A feature I particularly love about the Shadowrun character creation process is that there isn’t just one kind of skills: There are action skills, and knowledge skills (and language skills, which can be seen as a subset of knowledge skills). Now, knowledge skills usually aren’t that useful in actual combat or even when doing footwork, the cases where they’re actually used for rolling on are very rare. But, the prime reason for the knowledge skills to even exist is just what you pointed out in your article: Character backstory.
A character might know about ancient wines, might have explored sewers below the city, might have a good knowledge of gangs in his neighbourhood, or about tigers and their lives (I actually have a tiger shaman myself that has the last one).
Now the good thing about those knowledge skills: They basically come free. You get free knowledge skill points for your intuition and logic stats, one language is free anyway, and further language skills are free due to stats as well. Basically, the player is forced to provide some hints as to what his character is interested in, what he did in his past and where he’s planning to go in the future.
I agree with you. I have a homebrew world of my own where I have split the class skills in to two categories. Regular skills and knowledge skills (including craft, knowledge, perform, and profession). I did this because I thought the knowledge skills were very important but most people wouldn’t put points into them because it would take away from the points they would put into Tumble say. So this way they get more skill points overall but they are forced to use them in knowledge skills to improve background story and overall character development.
It’s been my good fortune to play with DMs who follow this same basic line of thought. If in my backstory I reference something that would indicate I have a developed skill, several of my DMs have granted some points in that area. For instance, in one campaign, we were all friends/family from a port city, and we all had some experience out on the sea. So the DM at the time gave everyone 4 ranks in an appropriate Profession. It didn’t much change the outcome of anything, but it was a recognition of who we were before we became heroes out to save the world.
You are gonna hate 4th edition then. No skill points. I just played last night a into game at a D&D Gameday event and also looked over the PHB. There are skills yes, but no skill points.
the game has truly been MMO’ed. Its fast paced rounds for combat are great…the power system is cool, but I don’t know if I’m completely sold on it yet. It gonna take good game master to get the older players and DnD veterans to really dig this. I always say have one heck of a story and the rest is Candy
I quite like the new D&D. It is a fast paced combat-engine, and it does seem to be more aware of the limited use of skills, than the earlier editions. As long as the premise is to give the players mechanical awards for their backstory, it is still easy to reward them using the new rules. Actually I suspect it might be even easier. However if the desire is to reward them specific skills for their backstory, then problems will occur – introducing a new skill, something like the “profession” or “backstory”-skill would solve it.
I like the idea, may have to use it. I also like the suggestion above of breaking the skills into two groups, “regular skills” and “knowledge” skills. Perhaps under this idea, you might give the players the rule’s standard number of skill points for both groups, essentially doubling the number of points available to each character but they’d be forced to spend points in knowledge skills that way? Hmmm…
Would you then also increase the max skill points per skill (based on level)? Or leave it at 4 for first level and so on?
Yeah. It’s a good idea to break down the skills into “gives a mechanical combat bonus” and “knowledge stuff that will come into play every now and then”.
I don’t like to mess with the balance of the game. It’s precarious enough already.
I was going to mention Shadowrun style Knowledge skills, but see that Guido beat me to it. A few points of knowledge skills (say 6), profession skills as SR mentions, or background feats like Morten’s in comment 2 are all good ideas. Small handy stuff that’s cool but doesn’t upset balance… nor encourage gamey backstories.
I haven’t actually used Skill Points, since as a 1e merchant I predate the Dinosaurs mentioned above! I am however all for anything which details, or individualises, the Character, giving him/her personality; the most important thing I miss in using the old Edition (simply never learned later ones, nobody to play them with) are Feats, which seem a great way of doing that. Skills however seem another good idea for developing a character, an enticement to make the Player put some effort into “himself”; and I’m also all in favour of Backstory, even though it may not help the Player, it gives the GM something to hang his story on, the character has a vested interest in rescuing the maiden if it is his own sister/niece/whatever? He can call in favours from old friends – “You look at the Sea Captain, and by the Gods, he is familiar! How did old XXXX become a sailor? Would he give you passage to XXX?” Skills are also an incentive to plan the character, rather than trying to min/max him? It even allows the GM to add personality to his NPCs, as the players start to look for what makes them “tick!”? If it makes the players get into the game, I favour it! As for herding Dire Weasels, I would hate to be the one who tries to shear one….
As an aside, I always liked the system of “advantages” and “disadvantages” (ads and disads) in GURPS (or was it the Hero game system, I can’t remember?). There, you took an advantage, roughly equivalent to a feat, but then you took a disadvantage, kind of an anti-feat that gave you a character flaw – for example, sure you were really strong, but you were also an alcoholic, had lost an eye (with negatives to hit), you were weakened by the presence of Kryptonite, or whatever. Not sure how this would work in D20. Perhaps you could give players an extra Feat, if they take an Antifeat – but you’d have to come up with a list of Antifeats and what they do to the character.
I love dire weasels!!!
Bob, I haven’t seen GURPS but I think the Hero system had what you describe. Worked fine for me. Made folks actually think about their character, I found, rather than min-maxing they had to think about it; and if you were DM-ing there was a readymade problem for them when some Villain discovered their weakness for Cheddar Cheese or whatever! Almost anything can affect the Character but the Player has to get into it; and skills or ads/disads are a good way to crowbar them into it.
Dooda – what do you DO with the dire Weasels, or is that a personal question??
Another system which has a similar mechanic is Deadlands. All players are required to choose a series of edges and balance them out with a series of hinderances. THis definetly worked towards character development because the hinderances were sometimes not even character flaws. If someone had a combination of edges that gave a total point value of five they would need a combination of hinderances that balanced it out. An example would be “heroic” would be worth 3 points and a severe “hankerin” or addiction would be worth 2 balancing out the five points in there edges. Also by playing off their hinderances they would gain a series of bounty points or fate chips which they could use in play and and in enhancing their character.