Musings on skill design in a tabletop system

So it turns out I wasn't the only one who was blogging about skills yesterday.

Over at Wizards of the Coast, Rodney Thompson (one of the designers working on D&D 5th edition) also made a post about skills. In that post he mentioned the design team is leaning toward most skill checks to just be an ability check, as in earlier editions of D&D.This likely means that you will no longer gain ranks in skills that add a bonus to the rolls you make.

I don't really like the ability check as the sole bonus to the roll. The reason I have a different opinion is because I likely don't view skills as being a very significant way to "customize" the character ( I view the package of abilities obtained from classes as more crucial to character customizing) .  Instead I think skills are great for adding more depth by way of building sub-systems on top of them.

For example, if you have a skill like Athletics that covers the character's aptitude to swim, climb, and jump, you can then create items and talents which grant additional bonuses to the Athletics skill. You can also create other abilities that rely on the Athletics score to grant a modifier.

Let's say you want to implement rules for a character to learn some kind of martial art style, like Jiu-jitsu or something. You can make it so all the attack techniques they learn from that art get an Accuracy or Damage bonus from the skill level of the character's Athletics score.

Additionally you can have the character equip items that increase their Athletics score -- like say, a black belt -- so they gain a further bonus when they are doing that attack which incorporates the Athletics score into it.

Without having these general skills, the only way you could make bonuses apply to the Jiu-jitsu moves is if you have items that increase STR or directly add a bonus to Jiu-jitsu moves. The problem with this is that there becomes too little diversity in equipment; it will be obvious for characters to just stack STR items, which can have other unbalancing issues (since STR applies to ALL attacks, it's not just Jiu-jitsu moves which get the bonus -- STR is also tied into everything from how much weight a character can carry to other things like how many hit points they have) that aren't desirable in a game.

So when you have a skill system in a game, it's not just players who get more control over the way their characters are built; designers also get more systems to manipulate so the game can have greater depth and balance to it.

It is my belief that in D&D 3rd edition, the designers went a little crazy with the bonuses to skills. They ended up creating way too many splatbooks filled with feats and classes that had circumstantial bonuses to skills, like, "this character gets a +2 bonus to Climb checks but ONLY during a full moon!" or "The character gains +2 bonus against mental attacks from a vampire" and so forth. The skill system ended up incorporating tons and tons of circumstantial stuff that doesn't apply half the time or perhaps at any time, and doesn't fit neatly onto the character sheet; there is no extra space in the skill modifier for circumstantial stuff.

I've tried very hard to not design circumstantial things into my skill system, instead a bonus applies all the time or it doesn't. The exceptions are bonuses against certain races and elemental alignments, but to me these aren't so circumstantial since every enemy belongs to a race and many characters are elementally aligned.

What I have done is designed some attack techniques to rely on General Skills to obtain a bonus; for example, the Minstrel and Dancer Specializations have talents that gain bonuses from Perform and Acrobatics skill ranks.

I still feel that my skills system has a layer of complexity more than it needs, and am looking to trim the fat away, but one thing I am positive about is that there will be General Skills so that the game has the kind of depth I believe a modern tabletop RPG should have.