Re: [Forge-main] Re: Re: Skills List [LONG] (Ricardo Gladwell)

[Ricardo Gladwell]

On Thu, 2002-12-12 at 03:11, Enrique Perez wrote:
> Well, the difficulty scale or our rules range has to give. We haven't even
> discussed magic and equipment bonuses that could easily give another five
> points. We might end up with a 0-30 range; but, whatever difficulty scale
> we end up with, that's going to be it, we'd really have to squish every
> other scale to knock off five or ten points. I believe that gamers can
> easily handle 0-whatever, as long as it ends in a zero or a five.

Personally, I don't believe there is no reason here to break the 0-20 -
as you point out, we haven't discussed the super-human range, but the
0-20 range is for human-possible tasks, only, which I haven't mentioned
before. It is quite likely that difficulties may exceed 20+ but only for
tasks that are impossible for humans. I really want to keep the range
for normal humans within the 0-20 range, for obvious human-readable
reasons. It is, for example, far easier and intuitive to figure out a
difficulty from 0-20 than it is from 0-25 or even 0-30.

In the case of the group skills you suggest we would have a two-skill
system - one skill system for group skills (0-10 scale) and one for
normal skills (0-5).

> In any case there is going to be a continuum of difficulties, there's not
> going to be a number where you can say this is exactly the highest that a
> human can ever go, because there will always be a synergistic combinations
> of abilities, skills, spells, equipment, tactics or whatever that push it
> in some area, especially as the game evolves.

I think this is rather the point - in this respect we don't want the
game to evolve. What we decide now should remain the standard for all
future releases. The reason we want to concentrate on scales/die rolls
and so on now is so that we have a balanced and simple fundamental
structure that is open enough to deal with further complexity so that
non-standard plugins to the rules are not required.

> > Another suggestion would be to simply have the skills groups as they
> > were (collections of related skills, such as Animals(Horse),
> > Animals(Dog) and so on) without the generic skills (Animals) and instead
> > have an optional substitution rule - you can subsitute a skill from your
> > group for another skill in the same group, if you don't have it, but
> > only if you make the action at a -3 penalty to difficulty.
> 
> This leads to the same problem as the seperate skills, you could have a
> higher ability in a generic skill than a specific skill. Say for example
> you have a bow skill of five and a thrown dagger skill of one, your generic
> skill of 5 ( bow ) - 3 ( generic penalty ) = 2 would be higher than that of
> your thrown dagger skill ( 1 ).

True, I didn't think of that. Saying that, this is only a problem for
very low skills - it would still be worth a player's while progressing
with a low skill to increase their chances. Similarly, this problem can
be reduced by increasing the penalty to -4 or even -5.

What do you all think?

-- 
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free Roleplaying Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
address@hidden