Skill System Suggestions

[sheadunne]

I'm looking for a good skill system that does the three following things that I often find I like/need in a typical D&D game. It doesn't have to be a D&D skill system that already exists.

1) Provide for use in a tactical combat situation, that doesn't require a bunch of extra rolling on a players turn. In D&D this might be the 3x tumble skill for example or the 4e Acrobatics.

2) Allow for non-action skills that aren't tied directly to adventuring. These might be like NWP from 2e: cooking, dancing, fishing, etc. Basically character fleshing skills that don't require significant player resources to invest in. They may give a small bonus to other skills or actions (such as a bonus to diplomacy for cooking a great meal for someone), but by themselves don't rank up to other skills.

3) Allow for the micro-game experience. This might be something like 4e's skill challenges. Basically half way between a single roll for resolution and a combat encounter, as far as micro-game goes.

4) Don't require additional stats other than the skills themselves.

There are many aspects of different skill systems that I like, including 4e, PF, Cortex+. But I'm not tied to any of them.

Any suggestions are welcome!

 

[GMMichael]

Yeah, this:
http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/p-p-rpg/wikis/skills

1) "Tactical combat situation" skill is called Movement. But you could a) expand Movement into the skills Jump, Swim, etc. or b) allow sub-skill points that can max out at Level+2.

2) Anything that can be improved can be a skill. So yes, Fishing is allowed. But if a character doesn't need to do something at a heroic level, he can just make an ability roll.

3) Micro games: since fighting is a skill in my system, any other skills can be used just as tactically as fighting. Fishing, navigation, and sailing skills can be used to try catching Moby Dick if you want.

4) I thought there were only three things?

 

[Celebrim]

You have mutually exclusive desires.

1) To make skills relevant in combat, you have to have a combat system that allows for concrete actions. If combat is purely abstract, then skills don't obviously relate to the attack/damage sequence. If combat however contains manuevers or stunts, then skills obviously relate to the chance of success in such manuevers. A simple example is how in 3e the escape artist skill can substitute for your 'attack skill' when defending against a grapple manuever. You can expand on that concept - balance defends against trip for example. Sense motive defends against 'feint', conversely 'bluff' or maybe 'disguise' can be used to initiate a 'feint'. The more robust your manuever/stunt system, the more obvious touch points it will have. Think about the sort of manuevers that a skill might let you perform, then create the manuever as a standard option. Think about the sort of skillful things you could do for which their exists no skill - leadership, tactics, etc. - then think about what you want to do with that in combat. Alternately, you can bundle this together - balance, tumble, jump, climb, etc. - might all get bundled into an 'atheletic' skill, which takes all their stuff. However, this is necessarily going to lead to more dice rolling per turn. It also tends to force exceptions of the sort, "+5 on atheletics checks to jump", if you want granularity.

For me the real test of a skill is whether you can use it actively. If you can propose to do something skillfully, the skill has value. If its just something you can use only when the DM puts a hoop in front of you and says, "Can you jump through this?", then it probably doesn't have much value.

2) It sounds to me like you are saying non-combat mundane skills - craft, perform, use rope, appraise, professional skills if you have them and possibly knowledge - are of low worth and so shouldn't compete with high worth combat related skills. One possibility is simply to say that everyone gets 16 skill points to put into craft and perform from the start, and maybe 1 additional point per level, and therefore is basically well rounded without spending any critical resources. They can always spend critical resources if they want on the more mundane skills, but by siloing off a few extra that have to be spent that way you don't have to worry about it. Alternately, you can go the 4e route of just assuming everyone is basically compotent at everything, but if you do that then probably they are gauranteed to be trivial. The fundamental contridiction here is the underlying assumption that the skills are trivial and of little worth. By starting from that you are almost gauranteeing that they will be trivial and of little worth and it never matters if you have them or not. So why bother?

3) If skills matter, then you always have the microgame experience. The danger in creating an exclusive microgame experience is that you'll make skills more or less passive and meaningless. They only matter when inside the microgame, and only for the hoops that the DM puts in front of you. And everyone is basically compotent to begin with, so it doesn't matter if they are compotent in a particular area and besides in the framework skills are fungible. The trick is playing the sort of game where skills matter and obtain useful resources.

4) I'm not sure what this means. But my suggestion would be to think about skills in the context of spells. Spells are reliable packets of narrative force. You state your proposal - "I'm casting fireball" and you get a reliable result. You don't need to be in a special microgame to use your spells. The DM isn't normally going to just say no. If skills are to be meaningful, they have to meaningfully compete with spells on the metagame level. They have to provide generally reliable packets of narrative force for a given skill level, and they have to scale up into the 'superhuman' fairly quickly after ordinary skill usage - by DC 30 for example - because spells do do that. The implication of this is each skills write up should look something like a short spell list - packets of narrative force. The difference is you are, at least for the limits of what you can do, gambling success/failure rather than spending limited resources.

 

[sheadunne]

You have mutually exclusive desires.

I don't find that so, but there are some interesting challenges.

1) To make skills relevant in combat, you have to have a combat system that allows for concrete actions. If combat is purely abstract, then skills don't obviously relate to the attack/damage sequence. If combat however contains manuevers or stunts, then skills obviously relate to the chance of success in such manuevers. A simple example is how in 3e the escape artist skill can substitute for your 'attack skill' when defending against a grapple manuever. You can expand on that concept - balance defends against trip for example. Sense motive defends against 'feint', conversely 'bluff' or maybe 'disguise' can be used to initiate a 'feint'. The more robust your manuever/stunt system, the more obvious touch points it will have. Think about the sort of manuevers that a skill might let you perform, then create the manuever as a standard option. Think about the sort of skillful things you could do for which their exists no skill - leadership, tactics, etc. - then think about what you want to do with that in combat. Alternately, you can bundle this together - balance, tumble, jump, climb, etc. - might all get bundled into an 'atheletic' skill, which takes all their stuff. However, this is necessarily going to lead to more dice rolling per turn. It also tends to force exceptions of the sort, "+5 on atheletics checks to jump", if you want granularity.

For me the real test of a skill is whether you can use it actively. If you can propose to do something skillfully, the skill has value. If its just something you can use only when the DM puts a hoop in front of you and says, "Can you jump through this?", then it probably doesn't have much value.[/quote

I was thinking about how tumble allows you to avoid AoOs in 3e, or bluff to feint, knowledge to identify a creature's weaknesses, etc. What I really want is for those "maneuvers" to be more concrete and playable.

2) It sounds to me like you are saying non-combat mundane skills - craft, perform, use rope, appraise, professional skills if you have them and possibly knowledge - are of low worth and so shouldn't compete with high worth combat related skills. One possibility is simply to say that everyone gets 16 skill points to put into craft and perform from the start, and maybe 1 additional point per level, and therefore is basically well rounded without spending any critical resources. They can always spend critical resources if they want on the more mundane skills, but by siloing off a few extra that have to be spent that way you don't have to worry about it. Alternately, you can go the 4e route of just assuming everyone is basically compotent at everything, but if you do that then probably they are gauranteed to be trivial. The fundamental contridiction here is the underlying assumption that the skills are trivial and of little worth. By starting from that you are almost gauranteeing that they will be trivial and of little worth and it never matters if you have them or not. So why bother?

That is the issue summed up. But I still want them. They are important to my play experience. The goal is to make them NOT complete with the bigger skills. I need necessarily need those skills to improve through the levels, only to indicate that the character is competent with them. This can be done through flavor background text, which I'm not a fan of, or through a system similar to Pathfinder's traits. Trait - Cook: You receive a +1 bonus to diplomacy, or whatever. It's not for everyone but I find that many of those I play with want them in the game, even if they don't majorly contribute to the mechanics. I don't think they need to be listed as "skills," but they can be listed as "traits" or some other name. The point being, there inclusion is necessary, but their mechanical relevance doesn't need to be earth shattering, since they won't compete with skills, at least the way I imagine it.

3) If skills matter, then you always have the microgame experience. The danger in creating an exclusive microgame experience is that you'll make skills more or less passive and meaningless. They only matter when inside the microgame, and only for the hoops that the DM puts in front of you. And everyone is basically compotent to begin with, so it doesn't matter if they are compotent in a particular area and besides in the framework skills are fungible. The trick is playing the sort of game where skills matter and obtain useful resources.

My microgame experience, I mean in the same way that combat is a micro-game experience. Attacking with a sword is a skill. It should be listed with skills, but instead it is broken out in the sub-system of the game mechanics, or would be if skills and combat were designed simultaneously. While I don't need it experience to be on par with combat (I think may players don't want that) I want the ability to break out an encounter that feels more robust than a d20 roll to determine the end effect. 4e has its skill challenges, but often that just feels like more d20 rolls without any interesting dice mechanics involved in the process. I would like a more robust micro-game experience for skills. If that makes any sense.

You're right on with your assessment that skills need to matter. Those are the game I tend to play, but the existing skill mechanics never quite get there.

4) I'm not sure what this means. But my suggestion would be to think about skills in the context of spells. Spells are reliable packets of narrative force. You state your proposal - "I'm casting fireball" and you get a reliable result. You don't need to be in a special microgame to use your spells. The DM isn't normally going to just say no. If skills are to be meaningful, they have to meaningfully compete with spells on the metagame level. They have to provide generally reliable packets of narrative force for a given skill level, and they have to scale up into the 'superhuman' fairly quickly after ordinary skill usage - by DC 30 for example - because spells do do that. The implication of this is each skills write up should look something like a short spell list - packets of narrative force. The difference is you are, at least for the limits of what you can do, gambling success/failure rather than spending limited resources.

I've seen some skill systems that use "object points" or "Social points" and work the system like D&D combat, with an "attack roll" and "HP" but for objects and social encounters. I don't want the system to have to rely on another stat on the paper in order to play out. #4 was more of a tack on to my original 3 points, because I had just read someone's skill system that did that.

I like your suggestion of looking at it like spells. Right now I've been looking at it like feats. The way I've been toying with it is

General Skill (ie Athletics)
- specialty skill (ie climb, swim, etc)
- feat

If the choice per a level (or whenever) is between increasing your General Skill (which applies to all specialty skills), your specialty skill (which applies only to a specific circumstance), or a skill feat (maneuver or what have you), it gives more options per a level and might help to mitigate the superhero effect that skills often become in D&D, and the opposite effect which is I'm not good at that so I won't do it. I don't know if that's necessarily true though, as you'll certainly have people that want a more simpler leveling experience and dump all their points in the general skill, but I think people might be more interested in doing cool things as well. I don't know, that why I was through it out there.

Thanks though, for your insight. Some good suggestions there and a good grasp of some of the issues facing skills in general.

 

[Celebrim]

I was thinking about how tumble allows you to avoid AoOs in 3e, or bluff to feint, knowledge to identify a creature's weaknesses, etc.

Yes. Bluff and tumble are two of the better designed and more powerful skills in 3e. Tumble for example allows you to avoid AoO, to pass through an enemies square, and to reduce falling damage. Bluff allows you to convince someone else you think you are telling the truth (being honest), to use the fient combat manuever, and to distract someone so that you are no longer observed and can attempt to hide (or is that last one just a house rule?). All of these are options you can take and a player can declare. Note that Knowledge however only becomes powerful if you build mechanical support for it into the system - including with every monster entry a list of things you can know based on your knowledge check. Otherwise, it's not obvious that it is helpful.

What I really want is for those "maneuvers" to be more concrete and playable.

Great. I agree. So what maneuvers do you want? To my game I added things like - 'Circle' (lets you swap squares with the target of the manuever), 'Distract' (forces the opponent to use an AoO on you but with a penalty on the attack), 'Throw' (sorta like trip, but damaging), 'Tackle' (like Overrun + Trip, but if it works you both go down), 'Parry' (increases your AC against 1 attack), and 'Clinch' (sort of like a grapple, except that the smaller creature has the advantage). This is on top of things like 'Bullrush', 'Overrun', 'Grapple', 'Trip', 'Feint', and 'Aid Other'. I also added an 'Offensive' stance that is the inverse of the 'Defensive' stance, and I increased the number of facing status - adding 'Encircled' and 'Surrounded' to 'Flanked'. And I added feat support for all these if you wanted to be especially good at them.

But I also added Skill support to them. Skills like 'Leadership' lets you take the 'Aid Other' action at a distance, and/or as a free action, as well as other do other small buffs like using 'Aid Other' on other character's Initiative rolls. Skills like Tactics lets you treat your position as being in an adjacent square for the purposes of flanking a target, and lets you take additional manuevers like 'Rank Fighting', 'Shield Wall', 'Closed Ranks', and 'Back to Back'. Skills like 'Intimidate', 'Bluff', 'Disguise', 'Balance', 'Sense Motive', 'Escape Artist', etc. all have explicit interfaces with the combat system. Balance for example is a defensive skill to resist trip and circle, and an offensive skill to clinch an opponent. Sense Motive is a defensive skill versus Feint and Distract.

Further, I actually have a skill called 'Run' that increases outright your base movement rate - no skill check required.

But this comes at a small cost. My game is slightly more complex than RAW.

That is the issue summed up. But I still want them. They are important to my play experience. The goal is to make them NOT complete with the bigger skills.

As an alternate goal, why not make them bigger skills because they are important to your play experience? Profession I did away with entirely. I realized that all the Professions were either an existing skill, or else they were a craft, or else they were 'Boating' or something else that should be its own defined skill. The Knowledges are as you've pointed out useful if you provide support for it and as a DM agree to yourself to allow them to be useful. The Crafts are situationally very useful depending on how much access the players have to NPCs that can do the Crafts for them (in a Wilderness campaign, craft can be a very valuable skill indeed), but even then they come up as a form of knowledge check if you make the Appraise skill more relevant (provide more information, like hardness, hit points, break DC, defects in workmanship, age of item, who likely made it, etc.) and have ranks in craft give you a big bonus to appraising anything that is a product of your craft and as a means of adjudicating pretty much any attempt to modify the environment. We don't average a craft check every session, but its probably close to every other session. I know Craft (Butchering), Craft (Masonry) and Alchemy are in common use. I think there may be some others on the character sheets. For background skills, what else is there? Perform is probably never going to be a hugely important skill unless you work hard to make it so. General mundane skills that will show up in ordinary working class backgrounds like Appraise, Diplomacy, Navigation, Use Rope, Handle Animal, and Survival can all be made into powerful and useful skills. Appraise can be turned into, "I see an item. I want to know everything about it." Diplomacy is well known as being OP as written. If you transform 'Intuit Direction' into 'Navigation' it becomes, "We're lost and the party mapper screwed up. How do we get back?". Use Rope can be allowed to become 'I can use lasso and bolos; I can accurately throw grappling hooks; I can tie things up; I can swing on any rope like thing safely; etc., plus it helps me escape from ropes and climb things." If you just allow skills to be epic, then I think most of your problems will go away.

Again, if you want to have players to have a minor background, just give free skill points to start that can only be spent on Craft. Minor background problem solved, save that it's not obvious to me that everyone has 'tradesman' or 'good with tools' in their background. Maybe it would be just enough to add more skill points. I've got more skills in my game, so characters get more skill points (fighters for example have 4+int modifier, clerics and sorcerers 3+int modifier, rogues 11+int modifer). It's pretty easy of a martial class character to pick up a few crafts if they want them - it's not unusual for example for a rogue in my game to have ranks in 17 or so skills and still be very skillful.

I need necessarily need those skills to improve through the levels, only to indicate that the character is competent with them.

Why? I mean what do you want to get out of this? Is this just deepening the players background? I still don't understand what exactually you consider 'minor' or why you want it. What's so special about the craft skill anyway?

but they can be listed as "traits" or some other name.

Aha!

One thing I've done for that is categorized almost all feats that merely enhance skill as [General, Trait]. All 1st level characters begin play with a free Feat, but they also begin play with a second free Trait - taken from any feat that has the Trait descriptor. So this let's them take one Feat of general combat utility, and one feat that makes them particularly skillful in something or which expands their background. If they want more Traits, I also have Disadvantages that they can take during character creation to get more Traits. Since Traits are really popular, most choose a Disadvantage too. Thus, most characters in my game usually start with a Feat, a Disadvantage, and two Traits that they use to enrich the characters background.

In my game, a players says, "My character is a fisherman.", and I'll say, "Ok great. So, if your class is something like Hunter or Explorer, make sure you take Survival as a skill, since one of the thing that does for you is let you acquire food in the wild - ei fish - and Boating to represent your skill with boats. If your class doesn't have Boating, Survival, and the like as class skills, consider spending your free trait on Unusual Background or Fisher Folk. In fact, you may want to consider Fisher Folk as trait even if you are explorer if you are thinking about using Nets as weapon. If not, consider the Seafolk Blood trait. If you really want to highlight the characters skill as a fisherman, consider Acclimated (Ocean) as a feat or possibly just Skill Focus (Survival)." My goal in character generation is to create a tight coupling between the background text and the mechanical flavor.

Personally, I don't like Pathfinder. They've a few good ideas, and at some point I'm going to have to rewrite my house rules to use their cleaner language on Combat Manuevers, but a lot of what they've done just isn't really well thought out.

The point being, there inclusion is necessary, but their mechanical relevance doesn't need to be earth shattering, since they won't compete with skills, at least the way I imagine it.

Consider my Trait concept then, and the way it doesn't compete (at least at first) with combat feats. I think my concept goes well beyond what you are talking about here, as my primary goal was supporting background text - Temple Educated, Adopted, Feral, Misanthrope, Milita Member, Noble Rank, etc. - and not just giving players a raft of minor skill bonuses, but I think it covers a lot of what you seem to be trying to achieve.

My microgame experience, I mean in the same way that combat is a micro-game experience.

Is it? I don't see it that way. I see combat as 'the continuation of role play by other means'. I don't see skill usage as a micro-game. I see it as an integral part of the game as a whole. There are more skill checks in an average session than attack roles. The game experience I think you want is simply the game itself.

Attacking with a sword is a skill. It should be listed with skills, but instead it is broken out in the sub-system of the game mechanics

Not really. It's a special skill silo'd off from the rest for the purposes of game balance. Essentially, if it wasn't done this way, 'Combat' would be a skill tax and it would be a 'well, duh' choice for most characters anyway, which would probably be a tax on character creation in other ways. But both attack rolls and skills involve rolling a D20 and overcoming a difficulty target. It's the same fundamental mechanic. The 'D20' concept unified the games subsystems in a single coherent mechanical idea.

The siloing of the skill 'Combat' off into its own special category is part and parcel of the whole concept behind class based character generation. The idea is to force well rounded characters on the player by limiting their choices. Just as you are thinking about adding 'minor background skills' to character generation to force the player to have them instead of trading against 'more important things', by siloing off 'Combat' you are saying, "On the one hand, you don't have to trade off to be good at combat. You are gauranteed good at it, so you can spend other resources on things not directly related to your combat skill. And on the other hand, just because you don't need it - say you intend to play a spellcaster that uses area of effect attacks - doesn't mean you aren't forced to 'buy' some minimal rank in 'Combat'. You aren't allowed to min/max to that degree."

I want the ability to break out an encounter that feels more robust than a d20 roll to determine the end effect.

This is an encounter design issue, not a rules issue. Think about how a skill focused game like Call of Cthulhu plays out. It has that encounter robustness but it doesn't have a 'micro-game'. The robustness comes through well designed problems where skills are the solutions. These are 'Man Vs. Environment' problems, or problems of dealing with a Foil that isn't actually an Enemy (or if it is an Enemy is protected such that killing the Enemy has undesirable reprecussions.) One of the really interesting things about 4e skill challenges, is that if you set them in 3e or some other skill rich game, you get pretty much the same level of interaction through skills but without the arbitrary elements that make a 4e skill challenge feel like a rote mechanical process rather than really manipulating the environment and solving puzzles. If you want a robust puzzle solving and investigation experience, you have to create that. It isn't just going to happen on its own.

You may also need to tone down magic as an 'I win' button. Look for any magic spell that can substitute for a skill and consider toning down the spell effects and/or increasing its level so that it doesn't show up until the skillful character can compete with it at least somewhat.

You're right on with your assessment that skills need to matter. Those are the game I tend to play, but the existing skill mechanics never quite get there.

I think that the concept behind D20 skills and the mechanical resolution of them is sound, I just think that they were designed too tentatively. The 3e team adopted the existing 'Spells or Powerful' D&D ideology, but they then established the new character resource competitor of a spell - skills and feats - too tentatively and cautiously. We have enough experience now to know that spells are maybe a bit too earth shattering, and skills and feats maybe not earth shattering enough.

I've seen some skill systems that use "object points" or "Social points" and work the system like D&D combat, with an "attack roll" and "HP" but for objects and social encounters. I don't want the system to have to rely on another stat on the paper in order to play out. #4 was more of a tack on to my original 3 points, because I had just read someone's skill system that did that.

Yeah, I've thought about systems like that from time to time, but ultimately I think they'd get too complicated and I'm not fully comfortable that they'd produce logical and desirable results.

Right now I've been looking at it like feats.

Well, right now I'm looking at the three things as different things you can spend your character resources on, and so, they should be roughly equivalent in utility. If someone spends most of thier character resources on acquiring spells, then alternately spending most of your character resources on skills and feats shouldn't leave you greatly disadvantaged. I think it follows then that a martial character of 10th level or higher is or should be to a certain extent a superhero. A high level fighter has to be able to not just fight and endure trauma that would kill a lesser being, but to run at superhuman speed, leap small buildings, carry great weights without strain, and/or perform other superhuman feats of skill or they just aren't going to compete in spotlight and utility with that character whose schtick is manipulating the basic laws of reality. The tiers between the core classes need to be narrowed.

 

[sheadunne]

Great. I agree. So what maneuvers do you want? To my game I added things like - 'Circle' (lets you swap squares with the target of the manuever), 'Distract' (forces the opponent to use an AoO on you but with a penalty on the attack), 'Throw' (sorta like trip, but damaging), 'Tackle' (like Overrun + Trip, but if it works you both go down), 'Parry' (increases your AC against 1 attack), and 'Clinch' (sort of like a grapple, except that the smaller creature has the advantage). This is on top of things like 'Bullrush', 'Overrun', 'Grapple', 'Trip', 'Feint', and 'Aid Other'. I also added an 'Offensive' stance that is the inverse of the 'Defensive' stance, and I increased the number of facing status - adding 'Encircled' and 'Surrounded' to 'Flanked'. And I added feat support for all these if you wanted to be especially good at them.

But I also added Skill support to them. Skills like 'Leadership' lets you take the 'Aid Other' action at a distance, and/or as a free action, as well as other do other small buffs like using 'Aid Other' on other character's Initiative rolls. Skills like Tactics lets you treat your position as being in an adjacent square for the purposes of flanking a target, and lets you take additional manuevers like 'Rank Fighting', 'Shield Wall', 'Closed Ranks', and 'Back to Back'. Skills like 'Intimidate', 'Bluff', 'Disguise', 'Balance', 'Sense Motive', 'Escape Artist', etc. all have explicit interfaces with the combat system. Balance for example is a defensive skill to resist trip and circle, and an offensive skill to clinch an opponent. Sense Motive is a defensive skill versus Feint and Distract.

Further, I actually have a skill called 'Run' that increases outright your base movement rate - no skill check required.

But this comes at a small cost. My game is slightly more complex than RAW.

Those are many of the maneuvers I'm currently using. I like some of your additional ones as well. The Leadership, aid other, for example.

I guess the question I have, is do you require those maneuvers to be chosen, or are they just lumped in the skill and as long as you have ranks you can use them? Common as opposed to special? I'm not for or against either way, just curious on your method.

As an alternate goal, why not make them bigger skills because they are important to your play experience? Profession I did away with entirely. I realized that all the Professions were either an existing skill, or else they were a craft, or else they were 'Boating' or something else that should be its own defined skill. The Knowledges are as you've pointed out useful if you provide support for it and as a DM agree to yourself to allow them to be useful. The Crafts are situationally very useful depending on how much access the players have to NPCs that can do the Crafts for them (in a Wilderness campaign, craft can be a very valuable skill indeed), but even then they come up as a form of knowledge check if you make the Appraise skill more relevant (provide more information, like hardness, hit points, break DC, defects in workmanship, age of item, who likely made it, etc.) and have ranks in craft give you a big bonus to appraising anything that is a product of your craft and as a means of adjudicating pretty much any attempt to modify the environment. We don't average a craft check every session, but its probably close to every other session. I know Craft (Butchering), Craft (Masonry) and Alchemy are in common use. I think there may be some others on the character sheets. For background skills, what else is there? Perform is probably never going to be a hugely important skill unless you work hard to make it so. General mundane skills that will show up in ordinary working class backgrounds like Appraise, Diplomacy, Navigation, Use Rope, Handle Animal, and Survival can all be made into powerful and useful skills. Appraise can be turned into, "I see an item. I want to know everything about it." Diplomacy is well known as being OP as written. If you transform 'Intuit Direction' into 'Navigation' it becomes, "We're lost and the party mapper screwed up. How do we get back?". Use Rope can be allowed to become 'I can use lasso and bolos; I can accurately throw grappling hooks; I can tie things up; I can swing on any rope like thing safely; etc., plus it helps me escape from ropes and climb things." If you just allow skills to be epic, then I think most of your problems will go away.

Again, if you want to have players to have a minor background, just give free skill points to start that can only be spent on Craft. Minor background problem solved, save that it's not obvious to me that everyone has 'tradesman' or 'good with tools' in their background. Maybe it would be just enough to add more skill points. I've got more skills in my game, so characters get more skill points (fighters for example have 4+int modifier, clerics and sorcerers 3+int modifier, rogues 11+int modifer). It's pretty easy of a martial class character to pick up a few crafts if they want them - it's not unusual for example for a rogue in my game to have ranks in 17 or so skills and still be very skillful.

Why? I mean what do you want to get out of this? Is this just deepening the players background? I still don't understand what exactually you consider 'minor' or why you want it. What's so special about the craft skill anyway?

All good points. I certainly could increase them, but I'm thinking about a very long list. My enjoyment of them simple comes as an inspiring function of character creation. I don't need or have any desire to roll on whether my cooking was good or bad. It's not that important as far a game play goes. But I would like it show that my cooking has a positive effect on my character's interactions with the game world. Rather than have an explicit skill in cooking or a fluffy note added to my character sheets, there should be some small token that represents that my character is a cook. I think traits is a better place for it than actually calling them skills (less confusing as well). You're a cook, great, let's say you get a +1 to your heal checks or diplomacy checks and leave it at that. I don't know, I just like looking at the list and getting interested in the "life" of the character. Hell, I'd probably be satisfied with just having the list available every time I create my character lol so I'm pushing for this to be integrated into the skill system.

One thing I've done for that is categorized almost all feats that merely enhance skill as [General, Trait]. All 1st level characters begin play with a free Feat, but they also begin play with a second free Trait - taken from any feat that has the Trait descriptor. So this let's them take one Feat of general combat utility, and one feat that makes them particularly skillful in something or which expands their background. If they want more Traits, I also have Disadvantages that they can take during character creation to get more Traits. Since Traits are really popular, most choose a Disadvantage too. Thus, most characters in my game usually start with a Feat, a Disadvantage, and two Traits that they use to enrich the characters background.

In my game, a players says, "My character is a fisherman.", and I'll say, "Ok great. So, if your class is something like Hunter or Explorer, make sure you take Survival as a skill, since one of the thing that does for you is let you acquire food in the wild - ei fish - and Boating to represent your skill with boats. If your class doesn't have Boating, Survival, and the like as class skills, consider spending your free trait on Unusual Background or Fisher Folk. In fact, you may want to consider Fisher Folk as trait even if you are explorer if you are thinking about using Nets as weapon. If not, consider the Seafolk Blood trait. If you really want to highlight the characters skill as a fisherman, consider Acclimated (Ocean) as a feat or possibly just Skill Focus (Survival)." My goal in character generation is to create a tight coupling between the background text and the mechanical flavor.

I'll probably do something similar.

Personally, I don't like Pathfinder. They've a few good ideas, and at some point I'm going to have to rewrite my house rules to use their cleaner language on Combat Manuevers, but a lot of what they've done just isn't really well thought out.

I'm not thrilled by it either. I actually prefer late edition 3.5 over PF, but we've all go our individual preferences. There's a few nice things in PF, but nothing really great about it. Which I suppose was their intent.

Consider my Trait concept then, and the way it doesn't compete (at least at first) with combat feats. I think my concept goes well beyond what you are talking about here, as my primary goal was supporting background text - Temple Educated, Adopted, Feral, Misanthrope, Milita Member, Noble Rank, etc. - and not just giving players a raft of minor skill bonuses, but I think it covers a lot of what you seem to be trying to achieve.

I will.

Is it? I don't see it that way. I see combat as 'the continuation of role play by other means'. I don't see skill usage as a micro-game. I see it as an integral part of the game as a whole. There are more skill checks in an average session than attack roles. The game experience I think you want is simply the game itself.

Perhaps, but I'll explain more down below.

Not really. It's a special skill silo'd off from the rest for the purposes of game balance. Essentially, if it wasn't done this way, 'Combat' would be a skill tax and it would be a 'well, duh' choice for most characters anyway, which would probably be a tax on character creation in other ways. But both attack rolls and skills involve rolling a D20 and overcoming a difficulty target. It's the same fundamental mechanic. The 'D20' concept unified the games subsystems in a single coherent mechanical idea.

The siloing of the skill 'Combat' off into its own special category is part and parcel of the whole concept behind class based character generation. The idea is to force well rounded characters on the player by limiting their choices. Just as you are thinking about adding 'minor background skills' to character generation to force the player to have them instead of trading against 'more important things', by siloing off 'Combat' you are saying, "On the one hand, you don't have to trade off to be good at combat. You are gauranteed good at it, so you can spend other resources on things not directly related to your combat skill. And on the other hand, just because you don't need it - say you intend to play a spellcaster that uses area of effect attacks - doesn't mean you aren't forced to 'buy' some minimal rank in 'Combat'. You aren't allowed to min/max to that degree."

I disagree with this a bit, but not enough to get into a long discussion about it. Here's an example of what I want the skill system to be able to handle in the same way that combat handles fights. When I ran this it was fun but awkward, not from a DMing stand point but from a mechanical stand point using d20 rules. How would you do this from a mechanic stand point in a way that doesn't become a series of d20 rolls? Assume no magic and neither player is particularly good at swimming, climbing, or pulling (let's say 40% chance of success on any roll).

Player A has fallen off a ship into the ocean at the conclusion of a fight. The water is rough.
Player B throws a rope down from the ship.
Player A swims to the rope.
Player B pulls on the rope to help Player A on to the ship.
Player A climbs the rope.

When I talk about a "micro-game" this is an example of what I'm talking about.

This is an encounter design issue, not a rules issue. Think about how a skill focused game like Call of Cthulhu plays out. It has that encounter robustness but it doesn't have a 'micro-game'. The robustness comes through well designed problems where skills are the solutions. These are 'Man Vs. Environment' problems, or problems of dealing with a Foil that isn't actually an Enemy (or if it is an Enemy is protected such that killing the Enemy has undesirable reprecussions.) One of the really interesting things about 4e skill challenges, is that if you set them in 3e or some other skill rich game, you get pretty much the same level of interaction through skills but without the arbitrary elements that make a 4e skill challenge feel like a rote mechanical process rather than really manipulating the environment and solving puzzles. If you want a robust puzzle solving and investigation experience, you have to create that. It isn't just going to happen on its own.

I've never been a fan of the CoC skill system, for the same reason I'm not satisfied with the d20 system. Roll and done never works for me when skill play is needed. I'm fine with it when the skill is secondary, like tumble in combat, but not when it's the primary method of resolution (as with my above example).

You may also need to tone down magic as an 'I win' button. Look for any magic spell that can substitute for a skill and consider toning down the spell effects and/or increasing its level so that it doesn't show up until the skillful character can compete with it at least somewhat.

Already working on that.

I think that the concept behind D20 skills and the mechanical resolution of them is sound, I just think that they were designed too tentatively. The 3e team adopted the existing 'Spells or Powerful' D&D ideology, but they then established the new character resource competitor of a spell - skills and feats - too tentatively and cautiously. We have enough experience now to know that spells are maybe a bit too earth shattering, and skills and feats maybe not earth shattering enough.

Agreed.

Yeah, I've thought about systems like that from time to time, but ultimately I think they'd get too complicated and I'm not fully comfortable that they'd produce logical and desirable results.

Agreed.

Well, right now I'm looking at the three things as different things you can spend your character resources on, and so, they should be roughly equivalent in utility. If someone spends most of thier character resources on acquiring spells, then alternately spending most of your character resources on skills and feats shouldn't leave you greatly disadvantaged. I think it follows then that a martial character of 10th level or higher is or should be to a certain extent a superhero. A high level fighter has to be able to not just fight and endure trauma that would kill a lesser being, but to run at superhuman speed, leap small buildings, carry great weights without strain, and/or perform other superhuman feats of skill or they just aren't going to compete in spotlight and utility with that character whose schtick is manipulating the basic laws of reality. The tiers between the core classes need to be narrowed.

I agree. For skills to be useful they need to be useful for all levels and not just for those in the early part. Skills needed to be designed along with the system instead of tacked on at the end (which is what it feels like). Which either means toning down high level play or boosting up skills. I think somewhere in the middle is what I'm aiming for.

 

[Celebrim]

Here's an example of what I want the skill system to be able to handle in the same way that combat handles fights. When I ran this it was fun but awkward, not from a DMing stand point but from a mechanical stand point using d20 rules. How would you do this from a mechanic stand point in a way that doesn't become a series of d20 rolls? Assume no magic and neither player is particularly good at swimming, climbing, or pulling (let's say 40% chance of success on any roll).

Player A has fallen off a ship into the ocean at the conclusion of a fight. The water is rough.
Player B throws a rope down from the ship.
Player A swims to the rope.
Player B pulls on the rope to help Player A on to the ship.
Player A climbs the rope.

When I talk about a "micro-game" this is an example of what I'm talking about.

Ok, that's very clarifying. This is not what I thought you meant by 'micro-game' when you used the term.

Ok, the situation you describe is a pretty common one during my play. First, the things you describe are not 'hard' by my definition of hard. It would be surprising for someone who is particularly good to only have a '40% chance of success'. Swimming in rough water is generally DC 10. An unencumbered swimmer who is 'particularly good' probably has at least a 75% chance of success, and notably cannot fail by more than 5. The worst thing that can happen here is he can't make headway. He's not going to start drowning until he tires out or begins to suffer from hypothermia or other exposure damage. A Hero can probably tread water for hours. One who is 'particularly hardy and enduring' can probably tread water for days. So the first thing I might ask is, "Is this situation really threatening enough to throw the dice over?" Apparantly, in your case it was, because the players weren't 'particularly good'. Ok, more on that in a bit.

My characters are now 6th level. The above situation isn't heroic enough to bother them with, unless the character that just went overboard is wearing platemail or can't swim. None of the things on that list involve more than about DC 10, and so for the character that is good most of that just happens. Its equivalent to challenging 6th level characters to kill 4 or 5 ordinary rats. It's not exciting because its trivially easy for them and involves a small portion of the party working on the problem. If however, it's a small child that just went overboard in a storm, the visibility is bad, and the boat is moving rapidly away from the child, and the water is freezing cold - now we are talking. Now you have a situation that will be as dramatic as a combat, and which everyone will participate in and which we can engage in depth play during the scene. Heck, I can even imagine Craft (Cooking) coming into play here - I'd give a circumstance bonus (as aid other) to the heal check to have the child recover from hypothermia to a player who said, "I put on a pot of tea" or "I heat some broth to help warm the child" and who made a simple skill check.

The other thing I would note is that, even if this is a challenging situation - the players are on a reef during a storm and there are 15' high breakers, the 'series of D20 rolls' you describe isn't that awkward. You could just as easily describe combat as nothing more than a 'series of D20 rolls'. What I think you miss in your description is that each of the steps involves a meaningful choice. In 4e skill challenge, what you propose or do really has only a limited impact on the outcome of the mini-game. All propositions that are valid within the skill challenge come close to doing exactly the same thing. The mini-game largely ignores the fiction created by the players. In this situation though, the decision to resolve the problem by throwing a rope is meaningful, and the sitaution evolves largely in response to those players choices.

The third thing is that your players in this situation weren't 'particularly good' at swimming or using rope. As a result, they are struggling in a situation where normally compotent individuals - say NPC sailors - probably wouldn't be struggling. As such, they are in an awkward spot precisely because this is unusual. These are first level characters fighting ordinary rats and having problems with it, which may feel really odd depending on what they are used to. Sir Reginald the Dragon Slayer is used to striding around the world hewing his way through the forces of evil, and now he's drowning in a mild storm. Some would say, "Of course Sir Reginald can swim heroicly. He's Sir Reginald." That's a 4e approach. A more traditional approach is, "If Sir Reginald doesn't want to drown, he should learn to swim." In my game, we had an encounter early on in a lake filled cavern surrounded by giant flowstone. Traversing the room involved lots of climb checks, balance checks and hauling on ropes to get everyone safely over, and a few dramatic moments where someone fell in the water and was nearly eaten by a giant crawfish.

So again, returning to the mini-game you describe, there are all sorts of branching points depending on whether or not the characters fail or not.

Player A has fallen off a ship into the ocean. If he fails the swim check badly enough, he'll sink and start to drown
Player B throws a rope down from the ship - if Player A has sunk, this plan has already hit a snag. Maybe player B will have to jump in after Player A to rescue him. Player B may decide to take the rope with him, but if it holds it it might effect his ability to swim. Maybe he should risk tying the rope around his waist? Maybe he should forgo the rope and have Player C throw it to both of them.
Player B dives in. If Player A doesn't come up, player B may need a spot check to find him in the water. If the spot check fails, maybe he needs a search check to find him by feel.
Meanwhile Player A is trying to rip his armor off with a strength check while swimming, sometimes sinking, maybe sometimes bobbing to the surface if he's lucky.
Meanwhile the boat is drifting off. Maybe Player D needs to take the helm to turn the boat around in the storm.
If it takes too long to get a rope to player A, he may be fatigued or unconscious. You may have to tie a rope around him to haul him up, because he lacks the strength to do it on his own power.
Either way there may be reflex saves to avoid colliding with the hull of the boat in the rough water (resulting in bashing damage).

There is in my opinion a lot of meat here. What did you find awkward? What do you mean by 'roll and done'?

Particularly with a high chance of failure as in your example, its more like to be 'roll and things just got worse'. There is also a lot of rules in D&D where 'success' and 'failure' aren't the only options. Many skill checks are 'success', 'failure', and 'no progress'. In the case of climb, you either 'go up a certain ways' or 'fall off' or 'make no progress this round'. Swim, IIRC, is similar. Your swimmer had a 60% chance of going under, a 20% chance of treading water in place (whether on the surface or 15' down), and a 20% chance of moving somewhere (back to the surface, toward the boat, etc.). Meanwhile the boat is probably moving as fast or faster than he can swim, and even if he grabs the rope he still has to swim he just now has assistance, both with staying afloat, +2 bonus maybe, and more importantly with getting closer to the boat (the being pulled in part).

There are a few things I have found awkward in D20. One of them is the 'long climb'. Let's say you want to climb a 100' cliff. At every point there is a risk of dramatic failure. If the character's climb skill is good enough that he's likely to climb the cliff, but not so good there is no chance of fall, you have roll like a minimum of seven climb checks. It's awkward to narrate that, and can be tedious. But on the other hand, resolving it as a single die roll - as I sometimes do in other circumstances - is also awkward. If the player falls 15' up the cliff, he may have second thoughts and decide to forgo the climb. But if I decide it is resolved as a single throw, and I arbitarily decide the fall (if it happens) is halfway up, the 50' fall is possibly lethal. And I've arbitarily decided against a fall from say 90', where for a low level character it likely would be lethal. Not sure what to do there, it may just be inherent to lengthy dangerous tasks (you'd have the same problem walking on a wire above a great height, with a character that can't quite hit the DC automatically).

 

[GMMichael]

There are a few things I have found awkward in D20. One of them is the 'long climb'. Let's say you want to climb a 100' cliff. At every point there is a risk of dramatic failure. If the character's climb skill is good enough that he's likely to climb the cliff, but not so good there is no chance of fall, you have roll like a minimum of seven climb checks.

D20 actually has one solution for this: if your bonus to your skill check is equal to the DC, you can't fail. But that doesn't happen so often.

I use a rule in my homebrew to solve the risk-of-dramatic-failure problem: take 10 anytime. So long as your skill bonus plus ten exceeds the DC, you automatically succeed. If circumstances change, start rolling. If the GM wants to add interest, he can roll the DC. Otherwise, take 10, and you'll pass every check you need.

 

[sheadunne]

D20 actually has one solution for this: if your bonus to your skill check is equal to the DC, you can't fail. But that doesn't happen so often.

I use a rule in my homebrew to solve the risk-of-dramatic-failure problem: take 10 anytime. So long as your skill bonus plus ten exceeds the DC, you automatically succeed. If circumstances change, start rolling. If the GM wants to add interest, he can roll the DC. Otherwise, take 10, and you'll pass every check you need.

I don't particularly want to hand-wave the encounters, unless they're simply obstacles rather than dramatic points of interest. But it may be nice to have a skill system that is designed to allow for something like the take 10/20 mechanic in situations that don't need dramatic tension. I don't know.

 

[sheadunne]

Ok, that's very clarifying. This is not what I thought you meant by 'micro-game' when you used the term.

Yay, I make terms up it seems and fail to clarify them lol. Sorry about that.

Ok, the situation you describe is a pretty common one during my play. First, the things you describe are not 'hard' by my definition of hard. It would be surprising for someone who is particularly good to only have a '40% chance of success'. Swimming in rough water is generally DC 10. An unencumbered swimmer who is 'particularly good' probably has at least a 75% chance of success, and notably cannot fail by more than 5. The worst thing that can happen here is he can't make headway. He's not going to start drowning until he tires out or begins to suffer from hypothermia or other exposure damage. A Hero can probably tread water for hours. One who is 'particularly hardy and enduring' can probably tread water for days. So the first thing I might ask is, "Is this situation really threatening enough to throw the dice over?" Apparantly, in your case it was, because the players weren't 'particularly good'. Ok, more on that in a bit.

My characters are now 6th level. The above situation isn't heroic enough to bother them with, unless the character that just went overboard is wearing platemail or can't swim. None of the things on that list involve more than about DC 10, and so for the character that is good most of that just happens. Its equivalent to challenging 6th level characters to kill 4 or 5 ordinary rats. It's not exciting because its trivially easy for them and involves a small portion of the party working on the problem. If however, it's a small child that just went overboard in a storm, the visibility is bad, and the boat is moving rapidly away from the child, and the water is freezing cold - now we are talking. Now you have a situation that will be as dramatic as a combat, and which everyone will participate in and which we can engage in depth play during the scene. Heck, I can even imagine Craft (Cooking) coming into play here - I'd give a circumstance bonus (as aid other) to the heal check to have the child recover from hypothermia to a player who said, "I put on a pot of tea" or "I heat some broth to help warm the child" and who made a simple skill check.

Just a picky point. DC was 15 for rough water. I think the player had a +2 maybe (never bothered to put in any ranks in swim or climb if I remember correctly, it was years ago). And the rolling was horribly bad which added a bit to the tension of the scene and probably caused way too many rolls. There were only two players in the game at the time so it wasn't a usual D&D situation. It obviously wasn't a played encounter either which would have made a difference in how it was presented.

The other thing I would note is that, even if this is a challenging situation - the players are on a reef during a storm and there are 15' high breakers, the 'series of D20 rolls' you describe isn't that awkward. You could just as easily describe combat as nothing more than a 'series of D20 rolls'. What I think you miss in your description is that each of the steps involves a meaningful choice. In 4e skill challenge, what you propose or do really has only a limited impact on the outcome of the mini-game. All propositions that are valid within the skill challenge come close to doing exactly the same thing. The mini-game largely ignores the fiction created by the players. In this situation though, the decision to resolve the problem by throwing a rope is meaningful, and the sitaution evolves largely in response to those players choices.

The third thing is that your players in this situation weren't 'particularly good' at swimming or using rope. As a result, they are struggling in a situation where normally compotent individuals - say NPC sailors - probably wouldn't be struggling. As such, they are in an awkward spot precisely because this is unusual. These are first level characters fighting ordinary rats and having problems with it, which may feel really odd depending on what they are used to. Sir Reginald the Dragon Slayer is used to striding around the world hewing his way through the forces of evil, and now he's drowning in a mild storm. Some would say, "Of course Sir Reginald can swim heroicly. He's Sir Reginald." That's a 4e approach. A more traditional approach is, "If Sir Reginald doesn't want to drown, he should learn to swim." In my game, we had an encounter early on in a lake filled cavern surrounded by giant flowstone. Traversing the room involved lots of climb checks, balance checks and hauling on ropes to get everyone safely over, and a few dramatic moments where someone fell in the water and was nearly eaten by a giant crawfish.

I agree. It was an usual situation. I don't find the 4e approach particularly satisfying at the table. I don't think it adds anything significant to the game. Tacking on the success/failure to the d20 skill system doesn't really do that much for me.

That's a good encounter. I might have to borrow it.

So again, returning to the mini-game you describe, there are all sorts of branching points depending on whether or not the characters fail or not.

Player A has fallen off a ship into the ocean. If he fails the swim check badly enough, he'll sink and start to drown
Player B throws a rope down from the ship - if Player A has sunk, this plan has already hit a snag. Maybe player B will have to jump in after Player A to rescue him. Player B may decide to take the rope with him, but if it holds it it might effect his ability to swim. Maybe he should risk tying the rope around his waist? Maybe he should forgo the rope and have Player C throw it to both of them.
Player B dives in. If Player A doesn't come up, player B may need a spot check to find him in the water. If the spot check fails, maybe he needs a search check to find him by feel.
Meanwhile Player A is trying to rip his armor off with a strength check while swimming, sometimes sinking, maybe sometimes bobbing to the surface if he's lucky.
Meanwhile the boat is drifting off. Maybe Player D needs to take the helm to turn the boat around in the storm.
If it takes too long to get a rope to player A, he may be fatigued or unconscious. You may have to tie a rope around him to haul him up, because he lacks the strength to do it on his own power.
Either way there may be reflex saves to avoid colliding with the hull of the boat in the rough water (resulting in bashing damage).

There is in my opinion a lot of meat here. What did you find awkward? What do you mean by 'roll and done'?

There was a lot of meat, which is why it was fun. The awkward part was having to use DM fiat to keep the swimming player alive because of a series of bad rolls with a slightly below average chance of making those rolls to begin with. I'm not sure how the rolling could have been different to keep the drama but not kill the player, which is why I started this thread to begin with.

Unlike combat, in a skill encounter scenario there isn't an "enemy" in the classic sense. The ocean is there, the height of the ship is there, but they aren't actively trying to kill the player (perhaps passively though since there is a risk of dying). Which I think makes combat's roll a d20 different than swimming's roll a d20. Both have a risk of death, but one can only kill you if you roll bad, the other can kill you even if you roll well. The drama is there in combat regardless of your die rolls. I don't know, I'm just working through it in my head now.

Roll and done is what can often happen in skill checks. If you succeed you're done with the encounter. It can remove the drama before it happens. Which is fine is many skill rolling situations, but when it's a high drama encounter, I don't want it to end with a single die roll, nor do I want an endless repetition of d20 rolls. And while I understand what you're saying about the description and story elements being roleplayed out during the encounter, I certainly do that often enough, I just would prefer the mechanic to be a little more dramatically synced, if that makes any sense, and I'm not sure it does. But I feel there is something different when you roll a d20 to hit a creature and then roll other types of dice when you deal damage. Damage feels different than attacking, even though it's still rolling dice and adding numbers. I think what I want is something more like the different feeling of attack and damage. Skills should feel different than making an attack roll. I don't know, just thinking out loud.

Particularly with a high chance of failure as in your example, its more like to be 'roll and things just got worse'. There is also a lot of rules in D&D where 'success' and 'failure' aren't the only options. Many skill checks are 'success', 'failure', and 'no progress'. In the case of climb, you either 'go up a certain ways' or 'fall off' or 'make no progress this round'. Swim, IIRC, is similar. Your swimmer had a 60% chance of going under, a 20% chance of treading water in place (whether on the surface or 15' down), and a 20% chance of moving somewhere (back to the surface, toward the boat, etc.). Meanwhile the boat is probably moving as fast or faster than he can swim, and even if he grabs the rope he still has to swim he just now has assistance, both with staying afloat, +2 bonus maybe, and more importantly with getting closer to the boat (the being pulled in part).

Yes, it's there, but it's not there very well. I find it can drag the encounter on to the repetitious stage more often than support the dramatic tension. It certainly helps though when it's all you've got. Again, I don't have anything better to replace it with, so it's what I use, but I just feel that there should be a better way of handling skills than a d20 roll. I'm not against using other dice or systems. While I like the unified d20 mechanic, I don't have a problem with having the mechanics different based on the activity (d20 roll for combat and a d6 roll for skills, as a poor example) as long as it's consistent so players know that when you using skills you roll this and when you're in combat you roll that. Not that I'm advocating this type of divide, simply that I'm not limited in my thinking to sticking with Mr. d20 for skills.

There are a few things I have found awkward in D20. One of them is the 'long climb'. Let's say you want to climb a 100' cliff. At every point there is a risk of dramatic failure. If the character's climb skill is good enough that he's likely to climb the cliff, but not so good there is no chance of fall, you have roll like a minimum of seven climb checks. It's awkward to narrate that, and can be tedious. But on the other hand, resolving it as a single die roll - as I sometimes do in other circumstances - is also awkward. If the player falls 15' up the cliff, he may have second thoughts and decide to forgo the climb. But if I decide it is resolved as a single throw, and I arbitarily decide the fall (if it happens) is halfway up, the 50' fall is possibly lethal. And I've arbitarily decided against a fall from say 90', where for a low level character it likely would be lethal. Not sure what to do there, it may just be inherent to lengthy dangerous tasks (you'd have the same problem walking on a wire above a great height, with a character that can't quite hit the DC automatically).

I think climb and swim are the worst offenders with climb being at the top and you described the issue spot on. Thanks for helping me get my mind around some of the issues I'm having.