Another Skill System: Experience and Training

This was written for HAG, a Hud-less adventure game I am tinkering with. Hud-less gaming assumes that players don't interact directly with any mechanics, that stuff is all taken care of behind the screen by the GM. Other than hud-less I als want HAG to be a true FKR game, meaning that rather than giving you a rule on how to do something, I explain why I do something a certain way and provide options to the GM they can use.

In my game, skills are a leverage that players can use to argue why they should be able to succeed at something. The GM is supposed to take the skill into consideration when determining the risk of a situation. This is inspired by a system from Chris McDowall which I first remember seeing in his Primordial posts, but he describes it very clearly in this blogpost about Mythic Bastionland.

Anyway, here's the system.

Elves: what they do and where they come from

In theory, elves are immortal. This is why they are so incredibly old, though often not as old as you think. 

Elves can recover from the most severe wounds, if they can live until the next moon. This is why elf medicine is so sought after. That no such medicine exists has broken many desparate travellers who came to the elves looking for aid. 

And somehow, they always already knew you were coming. Elves seem to know everything that happens. Information spreads among them like wildfire, they seem to understand each other without ever needing to speak.

Their armies are undeafeted, as there always seem to be more of them, each as highly trained as royal guards and with experience unequaled by even the most seasoned human veterans. That these elfs all seem remarkably similar in their physical appearance always seems to go unnoticed in the disorder of battle.

And yet the world is littered in their ruins, their great empires collapse. Somehow calamity always strikes. Somehow these miraculous beings never seem to last. And when their world crumbles they 'return home', often traveling great distances to do so.

All of this is due to a few important differences between elf and human bodies.