The Inalienable Right to be Cool
November 10, 2009 Ultimately, there's no need to have a player rolling dice for something that's not an essential part of the game. You use dice to create a moment of tension, when the outcome of something is in question. When the outcome is mandatory or inconsequential, though, resorting to that die roll adds nothing. At best, it's a minor thrill to tinker with the game piece. At worst, it's a frustrating punishment levied by fate.
Instead of using dice to govern skill use, I've been working with the idea of characters possessing, effectively, rights to effect the use of certain skills. Here's how it works.
Being in the band is a right, not a privilege, using this system.If a character puts a point into a skill, that's his way of telling me, "I would like to do something in the game that involves this skill." That's cool -- that's communication between player and gamemaster by using the system as feedback. After all, if a player didn't want to use the skill, he wouldn't have put his points in it.
Thereafter, I make a point of using that character's skill in a situation in-game. A character who took a point of, say, sailing -- he gets to navigate a craft through a dangerous channel, right a listing ship, or launch a rowboat before the galleon sinks. A character with the Drive skill might outmaneuver a pursuer, overtake a fleeing adversary, or thread the needle as a garage door threatens to lock him out of the warehouse. The Computer-savvy character intercepts a damning digital communication or finds the rival's location using a property search database.
The skills don't even have to be literal uses. The sailor character, for example, might recognize a curious knot used to bind a captive and know how to undo it or learn thereby that one of the captors is a fellow seafarer. The driver might perceive the smell of burnt clutch and realize the adversary has escaped. The computer guy knows that the hardware the rival is using to protect his hideout is susceptible to an electrical surge.
The benefit is that the character has the opportunity to feel cool and have a unique interaction with the story. It's just a detail, something that doesn't redirect the flow of the story as the vampire suddenly decides to, um, "hack into the police database" or "create a biotoxin" or "make my own dragonsbreath rounds." The other players don't have to sit idly by as he spins up a tangential minigame. The story doesn't lose its direction and the action progresses without undue lingering over details and set dressing.
You automatically succeed at doing this. It's part of what makes you who you are.It's also a great method by which a gamemaster can inject vital clues into mysteries and intrigues. In all but purely abstract combat games, specialized information needs to flow to the players, and it's tremendously empowering to have it flow to my character in a way that I've described as being his interest or forte.
Also notably, the player effectively has the right to use the skill. He doesn't rely on dice to tell him whether or not he exhibits the characteristic he paid to have. It's a non-system system, a way to grant benefit to a player without having to rely on the whim of mechanics or externalities to convey it.
It needs to be used in moderation, of course. Too many of these little defining characteristics become overwhelming, intrude on niche protection, and again steal the spotlight.
This doesn't fit perfectly into every system as written. It takes a little tweaking to use in the World of Darkness, as a few combat skills and abilities that make Disciplines function are part of the core and the "automatic" skills can't be evenly extracted. Still, these "guaranteed" skills can instead become Merits or even specialties. D&D as well relies on margin of success for some skills to define effects for abilities that call upon them (like feinting and jumping). With a bit of tinkering, though, this player-empowering system can fit into almost any tabletop ruleset.
Reader Comments (5)
I think this application could work very well with things a character knows. You don't suddenly forget something you've studied to learn, like history for example. But an interactive moment, like trying to climb a ladder or hack a database, does have elements of chance that can either be glossed over in the name of making the characters cool or require a quick dice roll to see if the ladder is slippery or not, or if the security team detects the intrusion.
Definitely worth thinking about.
I've been using this technique for a while without making it an explicit right, under the presumption that it Is Fun. It jives well with D&D 4's notions of trained or untrained, and also with Skill Challenges in which players are allowed to choose which skills they use — they'll succeed the majority of the time on average checks of their level when they get to choose, and justify through dramaturgy, what skills they're using.
And, of course, the Gumshoe game system is basically built on this premise. In it, points in investigative skills are almost exactly declarations of "I, the player, want to show off my character's knowledge and experience in this area."
There's also the case where players takes a high skill so as to not be bothered with certain challenges in play, dealing with them swiftly.
I think of character skills as tools the players have at their disposal: It is up to the players to use or not use them, I only put obstacles into their way and interpret failed skill rolls as complications, the players get to deal with them as they will.
Tied captives and players want to learn something of the captors? "Do you have some skill for it?", I ask, and maybe they do, maybe they don't and get to roll beginners' luck. Failure? "Sure, you remember this one bar where one of the locals amuses people by being roaring drunken and still making the knot right." (You don't know who really runs the place, though, and investigating there will be a problem.)
Characters are competent and rewarded for their skills, while failures still create complications without really derailing the game.
Skills tend to bug me in games.
The mechanics rarely reflect the way skills work in real life (e.g. D&D 3.5, you need to have 10 ranks in climbing before you can climb a 11' high wall with any degree of safety).
I much prefer a narrative approach to using skills. Rather than saying "I need a Engineering skill check", I describe the situation and let the players make a pitch on which skills the characters try to use. If I think their approach fits with the character and the situation, I let them.
Players pitching skills at me is my preferred way to GM, too. I'm more interested in the question, "How does your character approach this obstacle?" than "Can your character climb 30 feet?" There are exceptions, of course, but still.
This is one of my favorite things about the circumstantial Att + Skill relationship in the Storytelling System, for that matter. Skills become quite broad and descriptive of individual characters when they start getting matched up with unlikely Attributes. That's good fun. "Can I climb walls with Strength + Craft, to know what'll support my weight?" asks the desperate player. "Well," I say, "You can try to climb this wall that way, but I won't let you do this all the time."
Onward, in other words.