Designing Outside the Character Sheet
Alex goes on a semi-coherent discussion about how the presence of large skill lists in ttrpgs push the game into simulation territory
Or, who's solving the problem, the player or their character?
When you talk about designing how characters interact with their world, there are a couple of different approaches you can take and some behaviors you can encourage. Do you want to simulate the character inside of a sandbox world complete with them being good and bad at a wide variety of things? Do you want them to be a window for the Player experiencing the environment? How will your players engage with the game?
This post is going to talk about some game design principles across three styles of game: D&D 5e, Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA), and OSR games.
To me, these games exist on a spectrum when it comes to design principles for how the characters inhabit their world. There are many other design factors that are affected by these decisions (just how simulationist is your game world, for example), but for this post I'm going to focus heavily on how characters are designed - in particular, I'm going to pick on skills.
Character Complexity: The pile of skills
When you look at a character sheet for a game, you're bound to immediately discern just how complex a character is going to be. For example, let's look at the 5e Character sheet:
As far as character sheets go, this one isn't extremely complex. Let's have a look at an Anima: Beyond Fantasy character sheet:
On both of those, have a look at the number of skills present on the sheet. For 5e, that's 18 skills. For Anima, it's 38.
They are signaling to you, the player, that this game is going to rely heavily on how you build a character's skills and what the character can do with those skills.
Let's contrast this with a Shadowdark Character Sheet (I'll borrow one from my Solodark Post):
There are zero skills on this sheet, only attributes (the same core 6 attributes of yore - yes, this is a TV Tropes link). There are a few talents which augment what you can do, which will influence player behavior, but largely the "what you do" will not be adjudicated with skills.
Finally, I want to show a PbtA-derived playbook. Here's one from my work-in-progress game, Nix Noctis:
This playbook comprises attributes, a couple of bars, and "moves" (there's a second page with Powers as well) - likewise, nothing approaching a skill.
Skills in Game Design
So, we've established a couple of things at this point:
- Some games have a lot of skills.
- Some games have very few or no skills.
What was the point of that exercise? Well, the presence of a skill list, and a long list of those skills, gives a strong indication of how a game is going to play.
If a character has a list of skills, and those skills have numerical values, those skills will have to come up in play. That means a "skill check". The more skills you put into your game, the more situations you will need to put skill checks in front of. They become a key element of character differentiation, and as a game designer, you need to work through a lot of situations where those skills would be relevant. You're probably going to want to list those out in your game to help the players and GM understand them.
This also means players are incentivized to build out their characters to a certain concept, and then most frequently use the skills that they're best at.
The "Face" character with the high persuasion check is going to be the one doing the talking. The one with the high "Trap Lore" is going to be on the lookout for those traps. Sometimes the players will subvert this expectation, or the situation will demand it. Frequently it'll just go with the flow.
The side effect of this for players, especially new players, is that they're going to look at the character sheet for what their character can do to get out of a situation and then cross-check that against the main skills list. What skills am I numerically likely to succeed at this challenge? Having a skill list in your game is liable to encourage players to look at their characters first, and then prod the environment second.
The skill list becomes the menu of "things the character can do", rather than "help adjudicate how well characters do things".
Skills as "Simulation Fidelity"
For those of you who have played some of the other games at the beginning of the post might think "wait, there are checks in these other games - you're just rolling with an attribute instead of a skill", and you'd be absolutely right.
The skill list vs "rolling against attributes" essentially acts as a kind of "fidelity" metric, pushing the game world either towards or away from simulating a virtual world. The more skills you put into the game, the further you're going to have to subdivide the things that occur in that game so that you can ensure characters with points in a skill can actually use those skills.
That further reinforces the "do I have the skill or ability to solve this situation" impulse in the players, since it's likely the GM will call for a particular skill roll in response to a situation.
For the games that don't have skills, and instead compress things into ability scores (or, for those games that only have skills and not attributes, like some 24xx games) - that impulse is a bit inverted because there's typically not a "set menu" of things that you can do.
Let's dig.
Only Attributes: Shadowdark
To start, I want to quote the section in the Shadowdark rulebook on how checks work.
When attempting a risky action, roll a d20 and add a modifier. That’s called making a check.
The GM chooses the check's linked stat and a number called a difficulty class (DC). If the total of your d20 roll + stat modifier equals or beats the DC, your action succeeds.
That's it. That's literally the only guidance you get for how checks need to occur. If you, as a player, want to figure out what your character can do you'll need to figure it out because the game is not going to to list out things that a Strength check to cover. That's handed off to the GM to adjudicate as they see fit.
There's no "menu", everything is a conversation. Sure, there are some logical conclusions you can draw - moving a boulder is probably a strength check (or it might be dexterity if they're using some finesse based tool). Who knows? It's up to the table.
This is designed (at least I think) like other OSR games in that the game encourages the Players to prod at the world and come up with fun and unique solutions to problems. The rolls are secondary to that, and I'm not even really convinced attributes matter that much at all to the fiction. They are randomly rolled, after all.
OSR games want you, the player, to interact with the environment more naturally, and rely on your own ingenuity rather than the character's abilities.
This means the characters themselves are "thinner" to the fiction - and that's the point. They're an abstraction for you to experience the game world, and you don't even really need to engage with them as separate entities outside of those few things that differentiate them.
Let the Fighters Fight
I'd be remiss if I didn't call out another design principle of Shadowdark. The character classes are designed to be the best at a thing, generally. A fighter is always going to out damage the other classes and be better at fighting. That, of course, means that if you're getting in a fight, they're liable to be out front.
I'd also argue that encourages them to be out front, just as the game encourages the thief to be the one climbing walls and tossing a rope down for the rest of the group. But, because there's no particular skill level attached to a thing, it boils down to "if you've got the dexterity, you've got a good chance of making it happen" rather than allocating a series of points to simulate a character's life experience.
Attributes and Moves: PbtA
PbtA characters tend to be very similar (generally) to OSR characters in the number of things on the actual playbook are very small. You'll probably have some attributes to roll against, a few moves to differentiate yourselves from your peers, and maybe a smattering of other contrivances based on the playbooks you picked.
To make a close comparison, let's look at Dungeon World (which also has an SRD so I can just link to the rules).
Here's the Bard.
You have a name, the 6 stats, four starting moves (Performance, 2 knowledge moves, and one social move), and your gear. Everything else you do is based on the basic moves.
Now, the bard is the only one who gets that Performance move (at least until you get the ability to take cross-playbook moves ala "Multiclassing"), but there's not a lot here around solving problems with your skills. So it still fills a niche.
To do this, it has the concept of "moves" which trigger a roll when you say your character does something in the fiction - encouraging you to play your character and try stuff. In a sense, it puts more emphasis on the character's motivations and personality and to a lesser extent the unique elements on their playbook. So, while there are some things implied by your playbook (for example, in Apocalypse World, if you're playing an Angel you're a medic of some sort), the game places less emphasis on how you interact with the narrative at its core.
Narrative and Simulationist, a Sidebar
Part of the premise of this article so far is "the more skills you have, the more simulationist your game becomes", but that's not exactly the level of nuance I want to convey.
For games like PbtA, Fate, Blades in the Dark, and the others that come from a more narrative lineage, the same concept applies, but the focus is less on simulating a congruent game world and more on simulating a congruent narrative. So the skill list for those kinds of games helps you adjudicate whether a character can pull off what they want in the story much like a simulationist game would, but the structural focus is different. Add too many systems (and yes, skills), and you wind up tipping the balance further away from narrative and further into simulation. The lines get really fuzzy here.
I'll pick on Avatar Legends again.
Alex Ward
That took a PbtA game, and added system after system after system onto it in order to convey the feel of the show. In my opinion that backfired and made the game really difficult to play and well outside of the realm of a narrative story game.
Blades in the Dark takes the PbtA core and adds a skill adjudication system onto it, but keeps the overall level of skill small. That does encourage character specialization (which I think is exactly one of the design goals), but it does it well without getting too far into the "what does each skill do".
Tying it all together
The summary of this post in a sense "how much is your game attempting to simulate the world" and "how much of that simulation is codified on the character sheet". The more you turn the dial towards encoding a world simulation on the character, the more incentivized the players are going to be to look to their sheets for solutions.
The further away from the simulation you get, the less individual characteristics you have, the more the players will need to interact with the intangible elements of the game, but you lose elements of character customization (and in Shadowdark's case, most things are random, not selected).
For the games I'm designing for (24XX and PbtA), I try to strike a balance of differentiating the character options sufficiently so there's enough meat for players to interact with the system, but not so much that the narrative suffers from "wait, what skill was that again".
So yeah, it's all really just "dials", and hopefully this provides some (probably obvious) insight into where you can tune them to make the game you want to make.