Reflections on RPG Design: You Need Skills (Just Not That Many)

Examining proficiency proliferation and collapse in Dungeons and Dragons

D&D Has Always Had Skills

First, let’s take a look at B/X’s skill system.

Oh wait, someone already did that.

So now that that’s out of the way, we’ve established that every version of D&D — even B/X — has an actual skill system hidden somewhere inside it.

B/X’s system is pretty popular for retroclones, because it’s simple and straightforward and nostalgic. The essence of that system is: various tasks have an N-in-6 chance of success (or conversely, a [6-N] chance in failure), so roll a D6 to see if they succeed or not. Sometimes ability modifiers influence the N, sometimes your class and level influence the N.

B/X manages to get away with claiming that it “doesn’t even have a skill system” by splitting up all these N-in-6 rolls and refusing to create a unified mechanic for them. In fact, the definition for “actual skill system” seems to be “did you acknowledge that these are all variations on the same mechanic, and group them together in a single coherent place?”. Failure to acknowledge that your system is even a system may have worked for Gygax & co, and it may still work for Wizards of the Coast, but we strive for greater heights here.

A Core Skill Mechanic

Lamentations of the Flame Princess, ACKS, Dolmenwood, and various other “old school” games all use variations of the N-in-6 skill system. I decided to do a variation of that system, because:

• I like trying new things

• D&D gives you a palette of different dice to work from, so why not use them?

• 1-6 variation can get overwhelmed by small bonuses very quickly: if you want ability modifiers to matter for skills, and you want class and level to matter, then you’re going to run right off the edge of your [1 … 6] span pretty fast.

So, I went with the following variation:

1. Each task has a base threshold for success, which would be the N-in-6 in an exclusively D6 skill system.

2. Ability modifiers get added to the die, so if your Intelligence modifier is +2, you add a +2 to any skill that should reasonably benefit from higher Intelligence.

3. Rather than adding another static bonus to the die, increased proficiency simply increases the size of the die, so that higher proficiency increases the average and maximum die roll, without increasing the minimum die roll. A novice that has just learned a skill rolls a d4 (plus their Ability modifier), while a world-class expert rolls a d12. Most characters should have skill proficiencies that range from a d4 to a d6, if they have the skill at all; a few high-level experts should have a few d10s, and maybe one or two d12s in their class’s core-competence Skills.

4. A proficiency die that rolls a ‘1’ always fails, no matter how high the ability modifier and no matter how low the success threshold. If the referee feels that that isn’t warranted in a particular situation, then they should simply skip asking for a roll and declare an automatic success.

5. Since the minimum die size is a d4, and the maximum die size is d12, success thresholds should generally range from 4 to 10. I decided to name each of them, and correlate each of them to a d20-based roll of roughly equivalent difficulty:

   1. Easy difficulty: 2+ (with d20: 10+)

   2. Average difficulty: 4+ (with d20: 15+)

   3. Hard difficulty: 6+ (with d20: 20+)

   4. Extreme difficulty: 8+ (with d20: 25+)

   5. Legendary difficulty: 10+ (with d20: 30+)

This approach has some advantages and disadvantages from a simulationist perspective, but it was the easiest way to keep dice-rolling relevant using the tools already provided by the game engine.

So now we need to ask ourselves the core question that is the purpose of this article:

How many skills do we need?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is “not that many” — but you might have guessed that from the title of this article.

B/X’s Approach

From the RPGHorizon blog mentioned above, the following “skill rolls” can be identified in B/X:

Individual Skills

Inidividual skills are rolled for every person attempting an activity.

• Force open door is used for forcing open doors through strength.

• Listen at door is used to hear monsters through doors (breaking their stealth).

• Search is used to find hidden passages and traps.

• Avoid trap is used to not trigger traps by through chance by stepping over a pressure plate instead of on it.

• Use a tinderbox is used to use a tinderbox.

Group Skills

Group skills are performed by the entire group, with a single character leading the activity who can provide their experience as a bonus to everyone.

• Forage is used to find food while travelling overland.

• Hunt is used to find food dedicating time to the task.

• Pathfind is used to navigate without a road or river.

• Board is used to position vehicles for boarding.

• Stealth is used to be unnoticed by foes.

Hunt and Forage feel like reasonable candidates to combine into a single skill; Search and Avoid Trap also feel like skills that can reasonably be lumped together. “Position vehicles for boarding” and “use a tinderbox” seem like obviously specific tasks, so let’s leave them aside for now.

4E & 5E’s Approach

By contrast, let’s see how 5E does it:

• Attack (Strength or Dexterity)

  • Various weapon proficiencies

  • Various armor proficiencies

• Strength Saving Throw*

  • Athletics (Strength)

• Constitution Saving Throw*

• Dexterity Saving Throw*

  • Acrobatics (Dexterity)

  • Sleight of Hand (Dexterity)

  • Stealth (Dexterity)

  • Various tool proficiencies (Dexterity)

• Intelligence Saving Throw*

  • Arcana (Intelligence)

  • History (Intelligence)

  • Investigation (Intelligence)

  • Nature (Intelligence)

  • Religion (Intelligence)

  • Various tool proficiencies (Intelligence)

• Wisdom Saving Throw*

  • Animal Handling (Wisdom)

  • Insight (Wisdom)

  • Medicine (Wisdom)

  • Perception (Wisdom)

  • Survival (Wisdom)

• Charisma Saving Throw*

  • Deception (Charisma)

  • Intimidation (Charisma)

  • Performance (Charisma)

  • Persuasion (Charisma)

Boy, that sure is a lot! I wonder if 2E or 3E have a smaller, tighter list?

AD&D2E & 3E’s Approach

(Peeks into room)

(Backs out slowly, closes door quietly) NOPE. Let’s just leave that door shut.

…

No, I promised you an examination. (grits teeth) Here we go.

AD&D 2E is basically what happens when someone suddenly realizes they need a tool — in this case, non-weapon proficiencies — and then once they’ve invented this perfectly good hammer, everything starts looking suspiciously nail-shaped.

BOY GEE WHIZ were there a lot of NWP’s in 2E.

By 3E, the new owners of D&D were willing to admit that they might have a problem, which is always that crucial first step. So they started paring down the proficiencies, and consolidating them into what I’m sure to them felt like a much more reasonable list, at the time.

It was still nowhere near enough.

I’m also going to say something that makes me a little sad: ACKS inherited AD&D’s philosophy towards NWP’s. It’s the one part of an otherwise beautiful system that disappoints me, and because of how well the rest of the system holds together, it sticks out even more. ACKS with a reasonable, well-trimmed skill system would be so good, that I wouldn’t have had to build my own system.

Going Our Own Way

The thing is, organizing proficiencies by Ability modifier really does seem like a good idea — I feel like 4E and 5E are on the right track, they just didn’t take it far enough. So, let’s see if we can pare everything down to something even smaller!

The first thing I notice, is that some of the skill proficiencies seem to encapsulate a lot of the same kind of talent and knowledge that go into the saving throw proficiencies. So let’s see how much mileage we can get out of folding in some of our skills into saving throws instead:

Attack

Attack is gonna stay its own proficiency. I am *NOT* opening that can of worms. Since we established in our previous post that “Familiarity” and “Proficiency” are different concepts, we can have a single Attack proficiency (which determines how good you are with familiar weapons), and then a list of Familiarities with various weapons, which specifies which kinds of weapons you can apply that Proficiency to.

Strength

Athletics and Strength Saving Throw seem virtually identical, so let’s just create a single new saving throw called “Athletics”. This means that forcing open a door, picking up a heavy load, climbing an rock face, and avoiding getting knocked over by a gust of hurricane-force wind are now all the same proficiency, and are mechanically handled as saving throws, and each of those saving throws will benefit from your Strength modifier.

Dexterity

Likewise, Acrobatics and the Dexterity Saving Throw both seem quite compatible - so dodging an explosion or a dragon’s breath, tumbling to reduce falling damage, and maintaining your balance are also now saving throws, each of which benefits from your Dexterity modifier. I’d rather keep with the skill-like naming theme; we could call it “Acrobatics”, but it does a lot more than that. I’m going to harken back to 3E and 4E, and name the new merged proficiency “Reflex”.

Thievery/Sleight-of-Hand and Stealth each feel like independent skills from balance and evasion, and from each other, so let’s keep them. Tools should be managed with a ‘familiarity’ system rather than each getting their own independent skill, so “tool proficiency” can just fold into whichever skill is appropriate for them.

So, we have one skill (Stealth) that is for full-body precise control, and another skill (Sleight-of-hand) that is purely for how nimbly you can work your fingers. “Thievery” and “Sleight-of-hand” both feel too specific for this new, more generalized version of the skill, so I went with the name “Finesse”. Since most tools require hand-eye coordination rather than full-body control, tool familiarities are now facets of the Finesse proficiency, just like weapon familiarities are facets of the Attack proficiency.

Constitution

Constitution sure looks lonely, doesn’t it? Well, we essentially eliminated the Athletics skill (rolling it into the Strength saving throw), and reduced the Dexterity skill list to two, so it doesn’t seem so bad for Constitution to only have a saving throw and no actual “skills”. Since the Strength saving throw is now called Athletics, and the Dexterity Saving throw is now called Reflex, it feels on-brand to name the Constitution saving throw “Fortitude”.

Intelligence

Intelligence has a lot of skills, some of which could definitely be merged together. Since we have a Familiarity system to specify weapons and tools, it makes sense to just extend that system to include languages and knowledges. But first, let’s turn our attention to the Intelligence saving throw, which seems like it shares a suspicious amount of overlap with the Investigation skill. “Investigation”, as a skill name, seems pretty good, but as a saving throw name we want something a little more raw — so let’s go with “Deduction”. The remaining skills feel like they don’t really fit for merging in with Deduction, so let’s see how many can merge in with each other.

The various Intelligence-based tool proficiencies don’t really fit with Arcana, History, Religion, or Nature, so we basically need a new skill to represent all of them. Since they’re all essentially crafting tools, we can just pull the Crafting skill from 4E to stand as their catch-all, with each individual tool becoming a Familiarity within the Crafting proficiency.

History, Religion, and Nature are all variations of a the “I read a lot, so I know stuff” skill. “Knowledge” is a good name for that, but “Lore” sounds more fantasy-adjacent, so we’re gonna call the new merged skill ‘Lore’. Nature has a practical aspect as well as a knowledge-based aspect, but that facet of Nature really belongs in the Wisdom skill bucket (merged with Survival).

So now we’re down to three actual Intelligence skills:

• Arcana (the medieval equivalent of Science and Math degree)

• Crafting (the medieval equivalent of Engineering degree)

• Lore (the medieval equivalent of a Humanities degree)

Wisdom

Wisdom also has a lot of proficiencies. Three of them are basically variations of “I’m good at noticing stuff”, which is also the point of the Wisdom saving throw, so we can merge them all altogether. So Insight, Perception, and the Wisdom Saving Throw all get merged into a single saving throw proficiency. Traditionally, this proficiency is called “Willpower”, but willpower feels much more like a Charisma thing than a Wisdom thing.

The thing is, we’ve already been treating Perception as if it was a saving throw — this is why there’s a passive Perception value — so why not just call the Wisdom saving throw “Perception”?

We’re then left with Animal Handling, Medicine, and Survival. Merging in various bits of the Nature skill from Intelligence, it feels more “medieval fantasy” appropriate to call these three skills Animal Ken, Medicine, and Nature.

Charisma

We’ve already settled on the “Willpower” name for the Charisma saving throw. I’ve had an argument for a long time that Intimidation should simply a contested Willpower roll, handled as a subset of a ‘morale’ system, so Intimidation gets eaten by Willpower. This leaves Deception, Persuasion, and Performance.

Aside: Why I hate the ‘Deception’ Skill, and why you should, too

Deception is a terrible idea for a skill. It automatically implies that you need to be specifically trained in lying, and that how well you can persuade someone of something depends on whether you’re being honest or not. This gets into all sorts of ontological problems. That said, there’s definitely a difference between “good-natured-seeming” interaction, vs. “fast-talky” interaction. So there should definitely be too different skills.

Anyway.

After a long, arduous process, I finally settled on two Charisma skills called Charm and Wit. Since this is an Old-School clone, these two skills are explicitly tied to the “NPC Attitude/Reaction” system.

• Charm is for adjusting an NPC’s reaction towards you, making them more friendly

• Wit is for exploiting their current reaction level to get them to actually believe what you want them to believe or do what you want them to do.

• Both skills explicitly require “talk-it-out” roleplay before you roll, to establish the baseline chance of success. The best argument in the world won’t help if you suck at arguing, but by converse, the best argument skills in the world won’t work if your actual argument sucks. (That’s what beguiling spells are for, amirite?)

So, let’s look at what we have, now:

• Attack proficiency (Strength or Dexterity)

• Athletics saving throw (Strength)

• Fortitude saving throw (Constitution)

• Reflex saving throw (Dexterity)

  • Finesse skill (Dexterity)

  • Stealth skill (Dexterity)

• Deduction saving throw (Intelligence)

  • Arcana skill (Dexterity)

  • Crafting skill (Dexterity)

  • Lore skill (Dexterity)

• Perception saving throw (Wisdom)

  • Animal Ken skill (Dexterity)

  • Medicine skill (Dexterity)

  • Nature skill (Dexterity)

• Willpower saving throw (Charisma)

  • Charm skill (Charisma)

  • Wit skill (Charisma)

That’s much tighter. I think we’re done here.

Using Proficiencies to Build Classes

Now that we’ve got all these proficiencies, it feels pretty clear (to me, anyway) that various classes are basically just a collection of associated feats that hang off of a particular proficiency.

• Warriors are built around the Attack, Athletics, Fortitude, and Reflex proficiencies

• Thieves are built around Stealth, Finesse, and Reflex

• Rangers are built around Stealth, Animal Ken, and Nature

• Bards are built around Charm, Wit, and Lore

• Wizards are built around Arcana

• Druids are built around Nature

• Clerics are built around Willpower

Since proficiencies are now dice, which increase in die size as the classes level up, it seems like we can duplicate a lot of 5E’s complexity just by tying various class powers directly to skill dice. So Thieves get sneak attack bonuses linked to their Finesse and Stealth dice, Wizards use their Arcana die to determine spell damage, Clerics use their Willpower die to determine buffs, debuffs, and hit points healed, and so on.

You could build a whole system out of this idea.