Fundamentals Idea
Break skills up into fundamentals and specialties
- Fundamentals are things that are critical to adventuring and get used all the time. These have their own budget and are only traded off against other fundamentals. This includes things like attack bonus, AC, damage, saves, perception checks, combat-based athletics checks, stealth, etc.
- Specialties are niche or situational benefits that help to make a character feel unique. Characters get a separate pool of resources to spend on these so they don’t compete with fundamental advancement resources.
Tiered Idea
Skills belong to high-level categorical groups. Each skill feat you gain also increases your bonus with generic checks in the high-level category. For example, Athletics might be the high-level group, and taking feats in swimming, climbing, endurance running, etc. all contribute to increasing your bonus on Athletics activities.
An example of high-level groupings:
- Athletics
- Awareness (Observation?)
- Communication
- Knowledge
- Stealth
- Survival
- Technical (manipulate devices, manual dexterity, dexterity)
Skill Balancing
Basic idea: there are a couple high-level skill categories that are used for basic skill checks in that area. Within each high-level category are specialized skill feats allowing you to do cool things and giving bonuses to situational checks. Players get a lot of skill feats, and they are a completely separate resource from combat/class feats, so there is no competition for advancement resources.
To provide skill balance, the more broadly useful skills are broken down into very highly specialized effects or are watered down such that it requires a lot of feats to get good at the most useful skills. For example, a lockpicking feat may allow a character to pick only a small subset of locks. To cover all the common types you may need to invest 3 or 4 feats. Anybody can do it, but it requires significant specialization to get reliably good at it.
Additionally, each feat you take in a skill category gives you a +1 bonus on general checks in that category. So you get a general bonus for each feat even if the specific uses are highly situational (note: consider capping the general bonus or providing diminishing returns to disincentivize hyper-specialization).
Skill Category Tiers
- Top Tier (essential)
- Athletics
- Stealth
- Investigation
- Perception
- Persuasion
- Mid Tier (moderately useful)
- Acrobatics
- Sleight of Hand
- Arcana
- History
- Religion
- Insight
- Survival
- Deception
- Intimidation
- Low Tier (bad / too situational)
- Animal Handling
- Medicine
- Performance
- Nature
| Tier 1 | Tier2 | Tier 3 | |
| Athletics | IIIIII | ||
| Acrobatics | IIIIII | ||
| Sleight of Hand | II | II | |
| Stealth | IIII | II | I |
| Arcana | III | IIII | |
| History | IIII | I | |
| Investigation | IIII | III | |
| Nature | III | III | |
| Religion | IIIIII | ||
| Animal Handling | IIIIIII | ||
| Insight | II | IIII | |
| Medicine | I | IIII | |
| Perception | IIIIII | ||
| Survival | IIII | I | |
| Deception | I | IIII | I |
| Intimidation | I | III | II |
| Performance | IIIIIII | ||
| Persuasion | IIII | II | I |
How many categories of specialization? (generally allow 3 tiers deep of specialization, +/-). Maybe 5 or so per high-level category?
Possible Categories of Specialization
- Athletics
- Stealth
- Investigation
- Perception
- Persuasion (more generally: social skills)
- Contexts:
- High Society
- Merchant Society
- Trades Society
- Low Society
- Methods:
- Build Rapport
- Seduction
- Charm
- Authority
- Exhortation?
- Debate / Rhetoric
- Oratory
- Storytelling
- Situations
- Haggling
- Coalition Building
- Bribery
- Mettle (getting others to back down)
- Contexts:
Core Activities
These are the things that are written into the core rules. Anybody can do these without special training (at some level…training might make success more likely)
- Physical Activities
- Balance on narrow ledges or slippery surfaces
- Climb
- Escape from grapples
- Escape from bonds
- Wriggle through a tight space
- Hide
- Jump
- Ride
- Eavesdrop
- Palm an object
- Swim
- Hold your breath
- Tumble around an enemy
- Quickstep (treacherous flooring, caltrops, etc. or move through difficult terrain)
- Sprint especially quickly
- Dodge to evade a pursuer
- Endurance (in running / swimming / climbing / walking all day / etc.)
- Social Activities
- Lie convincingly
- Put on an act (includes acting in disguise)
- Con someone
- Seduce
- Innuendo / doublespeak
- Stall a conversation
- Inquire (get somebody to share information)
- Look innocuous (in a social setting) / blend into a crowd / defuse suspicion
- Create a diversion
- Gather information by speaking to people (gossip, interviews, etc….canvas)
- Persuade / negotiate / influence others
- Detect when somebody is lying / being evasive
- Verify rumors
- Find somebody in a city
- Intimidate / get others to back down
- Discern someone’s intentions
- Impress others
- Inspire others
- Behave appropriately in a social setting
- Craft/Intellectual Activities
- Appraise the value of an item
- Identify what a mysterious thing is
- Create a convincing disguise
- Make basic repairs to an item
- Jerry-rig a device
- Figure out how to manipulate a contraption
- Figure out how a contraption works (for example, a trap trigger)
- Blockade a door
- Sabotage a contraption
- Research (library)
- Deduce information from clues
- Manipulate animals, calm animals down, drive an animal-powered vehicle
- Tend wounds / diseases
- Diagnose medical issues
- Determine cause of death for a body
- Recall knowledge
- Make connections between a current situation and something you know
- Search for hidden objects / fine details / clues
- Hiding an object
- Hide an item on your person
- Tracking
- Hunt animals / forage for food
- Navigate natural settings
- Find medicinal plants / ingredients
- Prepare for outdoor expeditions
- Read the land through animals’ behavior
- Find a path through the wilderness
- Use rope: tie knots, manipulate lines, tie someone up, swing on a rope
- Identify magical effects and likely interactions
- Identify what an item does
- Competitive game(chess, handball, etc.)
Defensive skills:
- Detect others’ stealth
- Detect when others are acting suspicious
- Situational awareness
- Instinctively realize something is off / missing