Skill Checks & Social Skills

One of the most important goals for this working phase of The Myriad has been the implementation of a 'Social Skills' section of character progression. This will explore how rolling a skill check works now and how I came to deciding to do it this way. All that and more...

Goals & Past

Originally, there really weren't skill checks outside of combat. Players would loosely be able to click one of four buttons for either STR, DEX, INT, or MAD and based on the players stat it would generate a value considered to be the players roll for...anything they came up with. The idea was that generally within tabletop RPGs, Strength based characters are always proficient in exactly the same skills. They are good at athletics, climbing, swimming, and lifting things. The phase where you define your general proficiencies has always seemed to be a really weak aspect of character creation. So, my initial thought was to simplify it to the absolute base of your main governing statistics and decide the rest contextually or through roleplay.

The problem here is not allowing a character to feel like they have been pushed in a particular direction for roleplay. It certainly helps you decide the actual personality of your character after you have decided you want to push bluff/deception as far as you possibly can. Or to feel like a real nerd-wizard who will never fail knowledge checks about the things you care about. However, I also see the opposite direction here that I want to avoid. In the Pathfinder tabletop system, getting +50 to bluff isn't that big of a deal. If you really want to specialize in skill proficiencies, you can reach truly absurd numbers. 

As a side note example; I ran a Pathfinder game in another setting that The Myriad borrows a lot from. In that, reading books worked the same way and was just as important, governed by the Linguist skill. A normal d20+Modifiers. Arcadum built an investigator specifically for demolishing skill checks. If I recall correctly, it could push +20-30 around level 3, with explosive dice that could reach even higher. The problem here is not that the player can beat your skill checks, it is that Arcadum felt like there was no reason for his character to specialize any further like this because he was succeeding everything. And he was succeeding everything, because I disagree that just because a +50 is possible that it should become the norm so it has to be achievable. It creates a sliding scale where the DM balances around the group of players in a way that I feel invalidates the choice to specialize to begin with. If you built your character to be so good at something that I need to make it harder just to challenge you. If you didn't build your character this way, things would have been easier - or relatively just as hard.

So, being able to scale incredibly high is unnecessary and can plunge your game into a weird psychological warfare with your players needing to feel validated by their build choices. To an extent I think that is inevitable and always happening, but it can at least be taken into consideration that it should not be allowed to go that far.  Difficult social skill checks should be just out of reach so that when you roll max and actually succeed it, it feels like an awesome moment. To be precise, difficulty of rolls can scale forever (Strength can always lift something even heavier), but giving players ways to do that is bad.

One Failed Iteration

For me, the easiest skill check to design and understand at a base level is how Lock Picking will be determined. You either succeed or you do not, there is very little granularity so there is only the most important parts that need to be considered. When do you pass? When do you fail? Can you do anything about failure?

Here was something I tested quite a while ago to see how it would work. This required players to click on a Lock Picking skill which would automatically find the closest door within your reach and attempt to open it with a DEX roll that needs to beat the Tier of the door. On a failure, it would increase the tier of the lock so that you could push yourself into failure territory by retrying it over and over again. However, you could reroll any roll in Myriad with Focus, so I added a 'Reroll?' button that would use your Focus automatically, reroll the check without the +2 from the initial failure.

This was one of the more complicated things I made for Myriad because of all of those edge cases. The only part that frustrates me about Maptools as a program is that it does not associate connected players with the stats on their token. So that Reroll button also jumps through more hoops than necessary.

Functionally, this isn't bad. Honestly looking back at it, it's a pretty elegant solution that instantly resolves itself on 1 button press. However, with this still being a tabletop game with a DM, it falls short in some strange superficial areas.

•  Every single door in the universe must have a Tier assigned to it for it function. 
• What about things that are not doors, such as lockboxes the players bring with them? Small ones that are barely represented on the map?
• What about complex locks, like a Vault? Anything beyond the scope of a normal door?

And there is the #1 thing I keep coming back to while creating The Myriad. What about the moment between rolling and success/failure where the players continue discussing what this means for them? What about that same moment before the DM reveals the result because how you phrase results has impact. It is so efficient and 'correct' in game design that it leaves out the roleplaying and flexible aspects of tabletop, which are both very important. Players would simple walk up to doors with the attitude of 'another one?' and click their button and move on like it didn't exist. You need this moment to grab control of narrative and description. 

That may sound dramatic, but it comes much more profound when it is not something as simple as picking a lock. When we move to a skill check for reading a book in Myriad, instant success or failure removes all of the tension from how poorly this scenario can go for a player. Also, on a success the DM may still need to briefly prepare what is read. Even if it is pre-written in the most accessible spot imaginable, they still need a brief moment to open it. This brief moment is the players tension. Even if the players fail, the DM needs a brief moment to describe what happens and determine mechanical sanity results. I can automate some of that, but it leaves absolutely no nuance in a severely esoteric action that really needs nuance.

How Things Work Now

 I'm pretty much back to what I wanted to avoid, but with a higher appreciation of why things need to be this way. It is quite the equivalent to rolling a specific d20+proficiency from D&D now, so also easily understandable for players. There are many different specific skills you can roll rather than basing everything off of a single stat and players can pick and choose which ones to focus in. The dropdown menu that occurs when you click 'Social' for each character token is only populated by options a player actually has access to. Nobody is born knowing how to attempt lock picking, you need to have put points into that skill.

There are three universal skill checks anyone can do. Muscle, Mobility, or Subtlety. These are the very basic things I feel anyone should be capable of (may be more later, this is still work in progress). Perception is missing from that list because of the timing rolls are intended to be made. If somebody is hiding, you do not roll Perception to look for them. Instead, they roll Subtlety to avoid you. Based on the DM's interpretation and circumstances of how loud you are being or where you are hiding may increase the required roll for Subtlety. In that sense, perception is already baked in. 

A default skill roll is 1 - 10. The bright green bars in the above image are granted +1's from having skill points placed into Mobility.  Because this roll has a +5, it states the roll is 8/15 rather than 8/10. 15 would be the maximum roll here based on  these additives.

The dark Green bars are what was actually rolled, a 2. 

The Golden bar is a random +1 determined by a players Luck stat. For every 1 Luck you have there is a +1% chance of this occurring. This can occur a number of times equal to how many skill points you have. So, it is actually entirely possible to roll a 20/15 here with luck taken into account. That is profoundly unlikely, which makes it all the more amazing when a roll exceeds your expected maximum. Like the excitement from rolling a 20, the potential for this to occur is really important.

The grey bars continue to represent this unfilled bar.

Forcing Success

It has always been a goal that when a roll is important for a player to succeed at, they have the capability of doing it. If you attempt to pick a lock that requires you roll a 6, but only roll a 4, you may guarantee you succeed at this roll anyway by making up the difference in a cost of Focus. So, in this example a player could expend 2 Focus and succeed. It is intended that this is only revealed after the roll and a player doesn't need to know a lock requires a 6 to succeed before they attempt to unlock it. I'm currently unsure how this effects adding all of your Focus to rolls with more granular results which you technically didn't 'fail', but could possibly have learned more with a better roll.

Acquisition

Social skill points, unlocking spells, and acquiring base abilities are all done with different types of character creation points. The rate at which you acquire the points to apply to these abilities vary for different birth signs. If you want to create a skill monkey, you can do so and greatly out pace your allies.

The max level of skill points you can put in any skill check is equal to your character level, however. This means you cannot just immediately pump a single skill type to absurd levels by using every single social point on the same thing. It is planned that one or two birth signs may be able to bypass this limit, at least by a little bit, so the option is still available for true specialists.

Downtime Phase

Social Skill points may also get you Downtime abilities. This phase may be activated by the DM and grant all players a set number of Downtime Actions (moderated by the system) that they may use with a few default options and learned downtime skills. This is where things like crafting that obviously take time and dedication to complete are intended to go, but also I hope to have some cool social abilities here. There is still no Charisma for rolling things like persuasion. I want conversations with NPCs to be dependent on roleplay and not offer a crutch. However, if you spend some downtime you may devote it to creating a voodoo effigy to gain favor or manipulate specific people.

A lot of work still needs to go into the Downtime phase, solely for creating fully fleshed out options with tangible rewards. As I've started working on it I see how closely it touches upon rewarding the player with items they have spend time foraging or making. Useable items are currently a huge mystery to me how they will be handled. I've thought of a few things, but there seems to be a downside to every solution I'm considering.

One major change that comes with Downtime is that it is the only free way to regain Sanity, effectively forcing players to sometimes take a break from adventuring to help their characters recover. The Myriad sets a different tone than typical high fantasy where traveling to and from dangerous events is an every day event. I've always wanted downtime activities to slow players down so they feel like normal people instead of unstoppable joyful killing machines. Now that the downtime mechanics are more clear, it makes a lot of sense to place Sanity recovery here to fully enforce that. If you did not lose a lot of sanity, than great for you! Even more time to spend on crafting a weapon while your weaker friends recover from their traumas.

In the future (after I make sure another campaign actually starts) I'd like to see if there could be a similar 'Camping Phase' for recovering and using skills within dangerous areas.