Character capacity for learning

[Superfluous Crow]

Now, as many others have tried through the years I'm messing around trying to create my own system. Now, one of the primary problems i have run into is this: How many skills would a person have? How many skills do you learn during your education and your life?
Now, i realize the definition of skills varies a bit from person to person, but personally i define them as skills such as e.g. acrobatics, fencing, survival, medicine, language etc. If you can make a point on this subject using another definition of skill, I won't really mind though.
Currently I'm thinking somewhere around 7-10, but what do you think?

[Ninja D!]

To me, that is not something that can be easily defined.  You could say the average is 7-10 but then a person like me would probably have something like 10-15 and not be particularly good at most of them.  Then there would be people who would know even more and be better at more.  Then there are some people who would probably have three and be great at them.  The variations are also going to be very common.  And who is most likely to be become an adventurer?

[Nomadic]

I think that humans at least learn many many different skills but they rarely get very good at more than a few of them.

[Superfluous Crow]

That's true of course; we aren't necessarily equally good at all our skills.
Hmm, is anyone capable of listing their real-life skills? :-P
If you play classless, do you think there should be unlimited access to what combinations of skills you can buy? This seems odd to me since the things we learn in school are often relatively similar for the first 18 years or so (with some exceptions). I considered maybe using the skill pack system used in the Riddle of Steel. What kind of skill choosing system do you guys prefer?

[Nomadic]

The classless system I am using requires you to learn the skill before you can begin training it. This means that you won't have ridiculous things happening because a player is metagaming. This is because learning it means you need to be in a position to be able to learn it (including prerequisites, proper teacher, proper tools, etc).

Also while I don't claim to be able to list all my skills I think I could give a fair few to truly show what I mean with humans having lots of skills but few master skills. The first one is the category and the ones in parenthesis are the actual skills.

Art (Drawing, Painting, Digital 2d, Digital 3d, Cross-stitch)
Computer Languages (HTML, CSS, PHP, mSl, VBscript, Actionscript)
Computer Mechanics (General Use, General Hardware, General Software, Computer Setup)
Knowledge (Too many to list)
Physical (Too many to list)
Writing (Essay, Story)

etc... etc...

Anyhow as you can see in full to list a single humans skills would take up a great deal of space. Even if we are to instead abstract the skills within their categories their would still be a huge collection (indeed I only listed a fraction of the available categories). For this reason we tend to simplify characters a bit skill wise.

[LordVreeg]

MM.

I think I can be of some service as a sounding board here, as I have been for other skill based systems (since Guildschool is now about a quarter of a century old).  Once I replace my fried computer in the next few days, please go to the IRC chat room at nights, where we actually wrestle with these (and more mundane) issues in real-time.

There are a lot of logistical issues you have to address.  One of them is the definition of the term 'learn'.  Another is determiningh what a low level character can do, what a medium level character is like, and what a high level character is going to come out as.  Due to the more freeform nature of a skill based system, balance is especially important.  The more important and useful the skill, pretty much the harder it should be to get better at it, so you have to have a mechanism for differentiating how fast people get better at a skill. You also have to look at the generality vs. the specialization of a skill.

when I ask you to define learn, I am asking you at what ability level are you talking about?  7-10 skills known at a cursory level, 7-10 that a character is competent at, or 7-10 that they are masters at?  I mean, PCs and NPCs should be able to be heroic sometimes.  

A begining character in GuildSchool can be really bad at up to 20 skills by the nature of the character design rules, because they can spend their initial experience in blocks as small as 5%.  However, due to how much experience is needed to break levels (and gain some ability) in a skill, no one ever does that, they normally end up with 7-12 skills that they are ok at (level 2 or level 3 at one or 2 skills, level 0 to level 1 at 6-10 skills).  A character that has been around for 6 months normally has (and this is very generalized) 1-3 skills at level 4-5, 3-5 skills at level 2-3, and still 6-8 skills at level 0-1.  This is because characters will want to expand their repetoir, in that the 2 ways to improve your character is to get better at what you do or to learn to do more.

[snakefing]

I think there is a broad distinction to be made between background skills and specific skills. Background skills are things that people know about due to general exposure and cultural experience. Specific skills are those that a person has intentionally developed over and above the usual background level.

Modern people tend to have a lot of skills because our culture and education system provides a lot of exposure to a lot of things. In addition, we have a decent amount of leisure that we can devote to learning things like HTML, CSS, etc. So we have both expanded cultural background (art and music class in middle school, driver's ed, fairly extensive background knowledge about history, science, geography, ...) and lots of opportunity to develop specific professional or personal interests even further. A future or fantasy-based system might have different assumptions about how much skill diversity is really realistic.

In a game system, it is not just a question of what skills, but also which ones are worth capturing. A lot of systems (FUDGE, for example) will just assume that your ability is Average at any given task, unless you've specifically got a relevant skill, advantage, or disadvantage. It is then left to the GM to decide what is an Average-type task given the setting and its assumptions.

It is also worth pointing out that there's a big difference in how things work if you are awarding XP (or equivalent) that can be spent freely. LV's system seems to work fairly well, but there is a big impact due to the fact that character's get experience directly in the skills (or skill groups) they are using. This somewhat limits the ability to minimax the system.

Also, traditional D&D characters (D&D especially, although it is also true in some other systems) tend to be a bit unrealistic because of the "adventuring party" style of play. A character can have a glaring weakness and there's little value in improving it. Weaknesses tend to be covered up by other team members. So there's little penalty to being bad at something, and little benefit to being second-best in your party. Different play style can encourage different things.

[Superfluous Crow]

Nomadic; i realize it's near impossible to write your skills up without a good deal of generalization; it was mostly meant as a joke :)
Anyway, I actually like your idea about requiring teachers and stuff. Now, i had originally planned that you had access to a few types of education, but reading your post i got an idea i might continue working on. Have you posted anything on your system yet?
And great to see a comment from the Master of Skills himself (LV). I was thinking 7-10 skills at a somewhat competent level (how many levels do you operate with?). This was mostly based on how many subjects people usually had in school, and then slightly extrapolated to accommodate hobbies and the fact that people aren't good at all the subjects they have in school.

[Pellanor]

This is a tough one. It really depends on how broad skills are, and if you're talking "average" people, special "heroes" or "special" people.

Let's use me as an example.
I'm a professional software developer. I have a good understanding of Databases, PHP, Java and various design principals. I'm relatively poor at networks, and have little exposure to topics like AI, Graphics, and Low-Level Programing (which I'm going to school to fix).
In addition to this I have a wide range of other skills which are not at a professional level. I've taken Math and Logic courses at university. I'm better at WoW than most people who play it. I've read a broad range of material on Wikipedia, including history, ecology and meteorology, plus of course all the socials studies, physics, and other courses that I took in grade school. Then there's Basketball, DDR, RPG Design, World Building, French, and a few other odd skills.

I'm also fairly lazy. Were I more dedicated, or had some kind of special talent (like typical PCs), I could be much better at some of those skills. However if I was in a situation were I had less free time and less access to information my depth of skills would be a lot less.


How are you planning on having your skill system work? Are people going to get to just pick a handful of skills from a list to be trained in, while the rest are untrained (like 4e)? Will it be point buy (like 3.5 ranks)? Is there any way to focus within a skill? How big is your skill list going to be? Do you have any plans for handling mostly fluff vs mostly crunch skills?

[Nomadic]

Nomadic; i realize it's near impossible to write your skills up without a good deal of generalization; it was mostly meant as a joke :)
Anyway, I actually like your idea about requiring teachers and stuff. Now, i had originally planned that you had access to a few types of education, but reading your post i got an idea i might continue working on. Have you posted anything on your system yet?
And great to see a comment from the Master of Skills himself (LV). I was thinking 7-10 skills at a somewhat competent level (how many levels do you operate with?). This was mostly based on how many subjects people usually had in school, and then slightly extrapolated to accommodate hobbies and the fact that people aren't good at all the subjects they have in school.

My system is a variation of LVs guildschool so you are best off asking him.

[Acrimone]

There's something else that needs to be noted, although it might be ignored as a matter of game theory: there are radically different learning curves for different "skills."  Experience and performance levels are not necessarily the same.  Furthermore, natural untrained talent matters differently for different skills.

Swimming, for instance: there's huge functionality at the lower ends.  1 "rank" or "dot" gets you about 30-40% of the way to maximum human potential, because the initial threshold (not drowning) is so high and so different from the default.  The difference between not knowing how to swim and knowing how to swim as a beginner is far greater than the difference between a beginner and an Olympic athlete.  At the same time, the same amount of knowledge and training and experience means far less for swimming than it does for other "skills" -- some people are just plain better at it than others.  So if you wanted to reflect reality, you would have a greater "ability bonus" for swimming skill.

Now look at something like a language: a tiny little bit of proficiency in a language is next to useless.  People talk to fast and unless you are up to a certain level of performance, you get almost nothing out of it.  So 1 rank/dot gets you at beast 3-5% functionality.  You need a bunch o' dots before you get up to the relative performance level of a 1-dot swimmer.  But once you've gotten to a certain level of fluency, additional training makes you better, but not that much better.  Language skill is broad on the bottom and narrow on the top.  And natural talents help with languages, but they don't dominate the way they do with most athletic skills.

Then there's skills like drawing and painting and sculpture.  With these skills, a little bit of training goes a long way: you can definitely tell someone who has practiced against someone who hasn't.  So in that respect it's like swimming with one rank giving a big step up.  But it's also like languages -- art talents are not just broad on the bottom, but they are broad on the top, too.  And talent matters a LOT at all levels.

Medicine skills, especially surgery... HUGE on the bottom, narrow at the top.  Not a huge effect from natural talent, but some.

Mathematics: narrow at the bottom, incredibly broad at the top.  Natural talent is almost meaningless except at the higher levels.

The list goes on and on... if you wanted verisimilitude in your role playing game, you'd have to sketch out a separate set of ranks for each and every skill.  Obviously this would be time consuming and confusing, so we're stuck balancing ease of play and intuitiveness against realism.  But it's something to think about.

[Nomadic]

Alternatively you could simply have different levels of a skill mean different things. One rank in swimming, hey you can do the dog paddle and keep your head above water fine. One rank in mathmatics, you best stick to basic math for now.

[LordVreeg]

Alternatively you could simply have different levels of a skill mean different things. One rank in swimming, hey you can do the dog paddle and keep your head above water fine. One rank in mathmatics, you best stick to basic math for now.

yep, that might work.
 :-p
maybe even do something crazy and set up a mechanism so you learn differnt skills at differnt speeds.... :demon:

[Superfluous Crow]

I have around 30 skills as of yet, with one of them being profession/perform/craft melted into one (although you still have to pick it for each craft you know). 8 of my skills are inaccessible to most characters as they require a good deal of devotion. Each skill has 10 levels (although level 9 and 10 are reserved for great masters of the skill), where each level includes a talent, which increases the usefulness of the skill in some way beyond the increase in skill value. Languages are going to be either/or skills though, to simplify it slightly. It's a point buy system, and although the system is classless, I'm planning to implement some limitations on what skills can be chosen (mainly by the fact that the person has to "buy" mentors).

[Superfluous Crow]

maybe even do something crazy and set up a mechanism so you learn differnt skills at differnt speeds.... :demon:

Shameless self-promotion :-p