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.
Skills
Your player characters (PCs) are one of the following in each skill you can think of:
- Unskilled = everything you cannot competently do. You suck and don’t even realise just how badly.
- Novice X = you know the basics. You can't do much more, but you are aware of this.
- Experienced X = you've done this a lot. You can do this well, but still have a lot to learn.
- Master X = you have little left to learn. You can do this outstandingly and are coveted as a teacher.
Whenever you attempt something during the game, you can use relevant skill levels as leverage. The GM will keep your skill level in mind when determining the Risk and Cost of the action.
Skills can be very broad (fighting) or specific (german longsword fighting). As long as it is something a person without any experience or training would have trouble with, it counts as a skill.
GM section: When skills are more general they are more broadly applicable. In return they should be less impactful. When skills are more specific, they are less broadly applicable. In return their impact should be bigger.
Experience
If you do something for long enough you’ll get the hang of it eventually.
Each time you consciously use a skill to attempt something risky you may mark that skill, even if you are completely unskilled in it at the start.
These marks represent your experience with that skill.
Once you gain enough experience, you will become better at that skill. From Unskilled to Novice, from Novice to Experienced.
Once Experienced you continue to track your experience, but you cannot become a Master through experience alone.
GM section: Pick a number. Once a PC gains that many experience marks, their character reaches the next skill level. Feel free to make the required experience to go from Unskilled to Novice different from that to go from Novice to Experienced.
When picking the number of marks required keep in mind things like play frequency, play time, tone of the setting, and player investment. This isn’t an exact science, but I recommend picking a number that corresponds to a die size to make Training easier to adjudicate.)
Training
If you want to advance more quickly you can spend your time off training.
Training is always done in relative risk free environments. This is what makes it different from experience.
You’ll learn faster if you train under someone more skilled than you. The bigger the difference in skill, the better they’ll be able to teach you.
The more experience you have the easier it is to improve during training.
GM section: Decide under which conditions training results in advancement of Skill Level. I like training to speed up Skill Level progression, without making it guaranteed in all cases, so I do the following:
When a character dedicates downtime to training, roll x-in-y. X is current number of experience marks and y is experience needed to advance.
If they are training with someone more skilled then them, add +1 for each Skill Level the training partner has over the training PC.
On a success, the PC advances to the next Skill Level.
On a failure, the player marks 1 experience for the trained skill.
You can only become a Master through training, though the number for y should match what you consider a Master of a skill. Use the same procedure as above.
Discussion
This was cooked up based on thoughts I had after reading this blogpost on skills on Aboleth Overlords.
The system presented in that post looks solid, but I don't like having to deal with target numbers. They feel fiddly and arbitrary to me. This is why I want skills to influence what success and failure looks like, rather than influence what the odds are one fails or succeeds.
For me, this works really wel. I've been running games using this for a long time. If it doesn't work for you, it should be really easy to change this skill system to odds based by making each skill level equate to a cummulative +1 or +2 to relevant rolls, depending on the resolution system.
Having only three (secretly four) skill levels as an abstraction of differing skill mastery makes it easy for me to keep track of them. Obviously there is a difference between one novice chess player and another, but that is a level of granularity that I don't find particularly interesting. Only when one person can consistently outperform another do I feel it relevant to differentiate their skill levels.
I am pretty happy with how this system deals with the difference between experience and training, at least on paper. If players find this satisfying will have to be evaluated when I bring this to the table.
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