D100 – Skills

Part II of many in a series looking at my design choices in building a d100 game system. This post is looking at skills. Given how much of the text in rule books is devoted to skills and how they are used, this post is just the tip of the iceberg for this topic.

Back in 1978 the first edition of Runequest (RQ) introduced a new approach to roleplaying games. RQ did not rely on classes and levels. Rather than restricting play within archetypes like D&D, RQ allowed characters to adopt a wide range of skills, weapons, armour, and spells.

Cover art from RQ2

d100 Core Mechanic

The d100 game mechanic is seductively easy – you have a skill % to check when you attempt an action, so you roll some dice to generate a number form 1 to 100 – and if the roll is equal or less than your skill, then success! Otherwise you fail. Some d100 games specify automatic success or failure on rolls of 01-05% and 96-00% respectively.

Its a roll under mechanic, so differs from D&D where high rolls are nearly always better.

Degrees of Success

As well as success/failure, d100 games usually have degrees of success:

• A Fumble is the worst possible failure, and might occur on between 01 and 10% of rolls.
• A special success usually occurs about one-fifth of the time.
• A critical success might occur anywhere from one tenth to one twentieth of the time, or even as low as only happening on a roll of 01%.

d100 games do not usually have mechanics that “fail forward” or have success “with complications”, except those that occur from following the gameplay procedures, eg when you parry your weapon may take damage and break.

Degrees of success can be called “roll under blackjack”, as the best roll for winning an opposed check is to roll exactly your skill level, e.g. rolling 67 for a skill of 67% is great, but a 68 is a bust, a failure.

Bugs and Features of the Core Mechanic

As simple as it is, the core mechanic has some boundary issues and edge cases that crop up sooner or later in play:

• Whiffing: if you had a low skill, you could fail a lot in attempting actions. In combat this could be frustrating and life threatening to the PC. In investigations it could stall play as you tried to find the clue to get to the next lead in the mystery.
• Blocking: at high skill levels, opponents could stalemate, with successful attacks being consistently parried or dodged. This leads to a game of waiting until someone gets a critical hit.
• Rolling to suck: on character sheets with long skill lists, it is not uncommon in some d100 games to have a lot of skills listed at 00% or 05%.

Situational modifiers might also be applied to skill checks:

• In some games this is a flat bonus or penalty, eg +20%, or -15%. This has a greater impact on low skills compared to high skills.
• Using a complementary skill, invoking a passion, buff spells, or special tools might grant a bonus (one-fifth of a skill in Mythras, up to +50% in RQG)
• Applying a multiplier, or dividing the skill (eg hard difficulty in Mythras reduces skill by one-third)
• Advantage or Disadvantage on a roll, where an extra 10s die is rolled, and either the best or worst outcome kept. This has a greater impact on medium level skills, while low and high skill ranks are not so greatly influenced.
• Call of Cthulhu 7E (CoC7E) has an interesting approach. Against opponents with a skill below 50%, difficulty is not adjusted. Against opponents with skills between 50% and 90%, difficulty is hard (reduce your own skill by half), and against opponents with 90%+ skill, difficulty is extreme (reduce skill to one-fifth).

A range of dice tricks have also been experimented with over the years:

• Luck, Hero, or Fate points for rerolls or changing success levels
• Flipping the roll, e.g. a 72 becomes a 27.
• Divine intervention mechanics
• Changing special successes to doubles, rolls in ending in 5 or 10, or in RD100 having critical success occur when the singles die is less than the ten die (eg 54% is a critical success, 55% is not)
• In CoC7E, you can escalate the stakes with a pushed reroll, with failure on the second roll being worse than accepting failure on the first roll.

My recollection is that an old Wizards of the Coast survey found that a success rate of 60-70% was considered fair by players of D&D. Some of the solutions that can make d100 games feel fairer to the players have included:

• Only calling for die rolls in stressful situations, eg you ask for Drive skill checks when your car is being pursued by monsters, not for a milk run to the supermarket.
• Specifying competence levels, so judgement could be applied for when to call for a roll, eg in Basic Roleplaying (BRP) 0-05% in a skill is Novice competency, 06-25% is Neophyte, 26-50% is Amateur, 51-75% is professional, 76-90% is Expert, and 91+% is Mastery.
• With opposed rolls, specifying that whoever got the higher degree of success would succeed, or having a method to break the tie, eg attackers win ties in CoC7E.
• In Mythras and similar games, the method for calculating standard skills on the sum of two ability scores, usually results in a much higher minimum skill level than the 05%.

Cover for the player’s handbook of Call of Cthulhu 7th edition

Skills Over 100%

Skills over 100% are well into heroic or super heroic levels. While there is always a chance of automatic fumble or failure, different d100 games handle skills over 100 in different ways:

• Mythras and RQG – your skill over 100 reduces your opponents skill level, so if you have 120% skill, a foe with 80% skill has 60% effective skill.
• BRP – split the skill in two or three, so 120% could become two actions at 60%, but each action has a minimum of 50%.
• Cthulhu reduces skills by half or more, so until you get close to 200% skill it can cope.

Experience progression over 100% can be a bit tricky, usually its a d100 roll with a modifier from something like INT, trying to score over 100.

Skill Lists

So how many skills should the game have? Too few and all the PCs quickly become indistinguishable from each other. Too many, and suddenly you have a five page character sheet with entries for “Underwater Basket Weaving”. It makes sense for a gladiatorial themed campaign to have several dozen weapon skills, but that would out of place for a game where schoolkids investigate mysteries in a small town. A quick comparison of the number of skills in some different games:

• Runequest in Glorantha (RQG): 104 skills
• Mythras: 22 standard skills, plus 36 professional skills
• Call of Cthulhu: 47 skills
• Revolution D100: 15 skills (further differentiated by a large number of traits)
• Basic Roleplaying: 66 skills

Sometimes skills can be bundled in packages, eg a Combat style in Mythras might cover use of five weapons, or a range of skills might be connected by a cultural background, profession, archetype, or social organisation. Some skills require further definition, eg a Lore skill might require you to pick a specific field of expertise, so the number of skills above is an undercount. The BRP supplement Enlightened Magic is interesting in that has tiers of magic skills, known as circles, and you cannot learn the next tier until you have at least 75% skill in the previous tier. This kind of sequential skill is rare in d100 games.

Some skills might be evocative of the setting, such as Cthulhu Mythos in CoC, Sense Chaos in RQG, Torture in Aquelarre, or Seduction in Mythras (as a hyper-specialised form of Influence, Seduction is only available to few professions, suggesting that arranged marriage is a common institution in the default setting).

Something else to consider is rarity in the game world versus rarity in heroic adventurers. Its a classic design mistake to go from “this skill is rare in the setting” to “this skill must also be rare for PCs”.

The Cthulhu Mythos skill is an exception to the general rule that a higher skill is always better. Your maximum Sanity score is equal to 100 minus your Cthulhu Mythos score. Failing SAN checks can result in loss of control over your character. While this was an innovative mechanic in the 1980s, I am uncomfortable with it now, with its link to outdated stereotypes of mental illness, and its embedded reflection of H. P. Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia. The Awareness skill in Masks of the Mythos sounds more interesting – as your knowledge of the truth of reality increases, your character is less subject to the whims of fate.

Cover Art for Mythras, note the homage to RQ.

Skills as a Universal Mechanic

I do not think d100 skills are quite as fractal as Aspects in FATE are, but the 1-100 range and die roll does get applied to things that are not quite skills. These are mostly commonly life or death skills (saves) and skills that focus on interactions with NPCs:

• Saving throws such as Dodge, Endurance, or Willpower (some of which in early d100 games were resolved via a “Resistance Table” that involved an opposed contest between ability scores). Unlike other skills, you do not want to be rolling saves – making the roll in the first place indicates a failure (this is really clear in Mothership, where your saves often have low values).
• Passions – an emotional element that can tie you to NPCs, ideologies, and social organisations
• Reputation – how you are perceived by others
• Honour – as a constraint on your own actions (less murder hobo, more social work)
• Credit rating or wealth – used in some social scenes or purchasing equipment.

One thing I found with saves, is that the players in my last d100 campaign felt that having anything less than 90% in a save made them feel incompetent in an opposed check, because they both had to roll under their skill, and above the threat roll. Which gets to the fairness thing above, I think that without luck points, the save system would not have worked for them.

How Powerful are the Player Characters?

I think there are two parts here. First, how powerful are they when created, and secondly, how quickly do they progress over time. I will have another post on experience later, so for now I will just focus on power at character generation. Going by the defaults for a few different games:

• BRP: for a normal game 250 skill points (to max 75%), for a heroic game 325 points (to a max of 90%), for an epic game 400 skill points (to a max of 101%), for a superhuman game 500 skill points (no limits). Add 80-180 points based on INT (x1.5 for heroic, x 2.0 for superheroic, and x2.5 for superhuman games).
• CoC7E: skills vary by starting profession (usually EDUx4, or EDUx2 plus another ability score x2), plus INTx2. Some profession points may need to be spent on credit rating. So a PC with EDU 55 and INT 65 might have a total of 350 skill points. I am not seeing any cap on initial skills, but maybe I missed it in the rules.
• Mythras: 100 skill points from Culture (max 15% increase in one skill), 100 skill points from Profession (max 15% increase in one skill), 150 bonus skill points (max skill increase +15), for a total of 350 skill points (on top of base skill levels that are often higher than in BRP). As its hard to increase one skill by more than 45%, starting skills are rarely above 75%.
• RQG: a history life path system can change some skills, most professions then grant +10-30% in around ten skills (around 150-170 skill points total), cults then increase a few more skills by +5-20% (total 75 skill points), and then the character gets four skills at +25% and another five at +10% (to a maximum of 100%). So a typical character has around 385 skill points.

A common option is to give more skill points to older characters, possibly at the cost of reduced ability scores. You could also shortcut a lot of point crunching by simply handing out the a number of skill levels for the players to allocate, eg one skill at 90%, two at 75%, etc. Initial power can also depend on what skills are open to the character, magic in particular may be restricted to a limited number of professions. Most professions have access to around ten skills in the games listed above. Which suggests that a group of five PCs will be able to cover most of the bases if the skills list is not too much bigger than 50.

My Design Choices

Depending on how discussions with my players go, I am leaning towards a skill model using CoC 7E as a foundation, with a few changes:

• Initial skill points: I am looking at closer to 400-430 points at start. I may allocate points equal to the ability scores, using the Mythras base scores to determine where they can be spent (after some modifying for a SOC ability score).
• Fumbles will be a player choice on rolls of 99 and 00, but generate an XP check in that skill for everyone in the party, and the GM will take suggestions for what the fumble complication is from the whole table.
• I am comfortable keeping critical success at 01%, as each PC will have some kind of dice manipulation trick. This also reduces the number of critical hits scored on the PCs.
• Advantage/Disadvantage for situational and environmental modifiers.
• I am thinking about using tiered skills for both combat and magic. More on that in posts on those topics.
• If the setting is magic rich, I may have a specific magic perception skill called Second Sight.
• To help evoke the feel of a Renaissance setting, I will have an Operate Printing Press skill, and a Liberal Arts skill that includes the seven lore fields of Astronomy, Mathematics, Geometry, Music, Rhetoric, Grammar, and Dialectic (or Logic). If we want to muck around in boats, I may add a couple of nautical skills.
• I like the idea of a skill like the Awareness skill above, but perhaps called Illumination (although that term has some specific meaning in the Glorantha setting, my players will not be familiar with it, so it will not cause any dissonance in play). This skill would be earned during play.
• Because I might have “Willpower” points for both magic spells and non-magic stunts, I may rename the Willpower skill to Abyss Gaze.
• Languages, there will be a lot of these in the setting, and no common tongue, so I will have each PC start with three languages, the first at EDU, the second at EDU/2, and the third at EDU/5. All PCs are assumed to be literate. Because part of the game will be about finding ancient lore, every five skill points spent in character creation on a language, gets you two points in a related tongue, and one point in an unrelated tongue.
• Rather than create a lot of culture and professions that the players might not use, I will either use those in one of the above rulebooks, or let the players mix and match to fit their character concept.

d100 House Rules

I am mucking around with a few rule variants for d100 roleplaying games.

You can’t beat the classics.

Fatigue

I have never met a player who enjoyed tracking encumbrance and fatigue, and I do not enjoy it much as a GM either. I had a lightbulb moment today, and started riffing off the morale rules in Moldvay D&D for a Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition hack intended for a Megadungeon crawl.

Test for fatigue when (a) the first PC or foe is eliminated from the combat and (b) when half of the people involved in the combat have been eliminated.

Resolve the test by rolling 1d100 versus CON. Add an advantage die if fresh (first encounter of the day) or unencumbered. Add disadvantage dice for heavy armour, exhaustion and other factors:

1. Success – keep fighting
2. Failure – add a disadvantage die to all skill checks for the rest of the encounter
3. Fumble – add two disadvantage dice to all skill checks for the rest of the encounter.

Pro – low amount of bookkeeping required, Con – does add a process step mid-scene where everyone needs to roll dice and record a result. The table also needs some shared expectations around when the disadvantage dice get added to the CON check – which requires the GM or game system to signal clearly when they think the PCs are tired or trying to carry too much stuff around.

Art from the cover of the Conan 2d20 rules.

Mastery

In Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition you score a critical success on a roll of 01%, and fumble on a roll of 96-00%. Which tells you a lot about that game system. Thinking about the Conan 2d20 momentum system inspired me to try adding a second threshold for critical success, and giving player’s more tempting opportunities to spend Luck Points to adjust d100 rolls (using an optional rule, possibly from Pulp Cthulhu).

A critical success is scored on a roll that exactly matches the skill level, or when a roll is made equal or less than the skill’s mastery level.

For example, if the reckless swordsman Fitz the Harsh has a skill of 92% and a Master of 06%, then Fitz scores a critical success on a roll of 01-06 or 92, a success on a roll of 07-91, a failure on a roll of 93-95, and a fumble on a roll of 96-00.

Using the optional Luck point system, you can spend 10 Luck Points to cancel a fumble, or shift any other die roll by one per Luck Point you spend.

Mastery does not increase the way normal skills do. So far my thoughts are:

1. Start with 01% mastery in the PC’s eight archetype/profession skills.
2. Gain 01% mastery when Skill level reaches 90%.
3. GM discretion to grant a point of mastery for milestone achievements in the campaign.
4. Otherwise mastery improvement requires rolling fumbles equal to the current mastery level to gain +01%. Note: this assumes a table play style where a fumble is adding a complication to the scene (e.g. a dropped weapon), rather than an opportunity for the GM to hammer the character into the afterlife (e.g. an arrow to the eye socket).

Card from the Dungeon Solitaire deck – available from Thegamecrafter

Initiative

As part of PC generation I am thinking of having the players draw three major arcana cards to represent past, present and future. While I originally thought of just using this for inspiration in shaping the character concept, today I thought of using it to help shape initiative.

1. A player draws three major arcana cards (there are 33 in the deck I intend to use). If any of the three cards match PC cards, the party as a whole holds initiative and the PC(s) with matching cards gain a bonus action they can call on at any point during the encounter.
2. If the PCs do not have initiative and there is an NPC nemesis level opponent (Skills at 90%+) the nemesis gains initiative now, otherwise repeat step one.
3. If the PCs do not have initiative and there is an NPC elite level opponent (Skills at 50%+) the elite gains initiative now, otherwise repeat step one.
4. If the PCs do not have initiative after nine card draws, the NPCs have initiative.

Initiative is then run using the “popcorn initiative” rule, where the last person to act in the scene chooses who acts next. The last person to act in a round gets to choose who acts first in the next round. Note: there are obvious ways of manipulating this system, lets call it “tactics” and not worry about people setting things up to get two attacks in a row.

An obvious tweak to represent surprise or preparation is adjust the number of cards the party gets to draw.

 

Gaming Kickstarters/crowdsourcing I have backed

I’m watching the last few hours of the 13th Age in Glorantha Kickstarter. I was not familiar with the 13th Age system until last week, but I found a comprehensive review of many of its mechanics (Icons and the One Unique Thing look really cool), and it sounded well suited to Glorantha’s mythic level of power, and better for my own old school style of gaming than Heroquest.

It met most of my criteria for backing something:

1. Already something I am a fan of (Glorantha, especially that rework of the classic RQ 2 map)
2. A product I am reasonably sure will finish (from a company that already has published stuff)
3. Involves someone I respect from previous work (Jonathan Tweet et. al.)
4. Looks like it will be fun!
5. Nothing too risky (which is pretty much every computer game I have looked at). Shipping seems to be an area where things go horribly wrong and costs exceed the initial budget.
6. Affordable (just, the shipping to New Zealand for a couple of books increases the cost by around 40%).
7. Learning about it before the Kickstarter ended (curse you Pathfinder miniatures!)

I do sometimes wonder, if I am backing something to reach stretch goals for content that should have been included in the standard product. More money for more artwork seems reasonable. Money for vanity stuff, like having your name or myth included, sure, if its optional its not my money. Money for extra monsters or enemy organisations … I’m not so sure about that. Money for extra gaming products to go with it, sure that sounds good.  This is something I think about, as its possible I will try and crowdsource funding for a boardgame design, so collecting a few ideas for cool stretch goals could be handy.

I backed Sprawl. Not that I really need a cyberpunk system right now, but it is fun to back something your friends have started, and the Dungeon World style is good for paring things down to the basic tropes.  This makes it good for convention games … where the sheer complexity of the options in something like Runequest just drowns the story out.

I backed Call of Cthulhu 7^th edition. In part this was due to the sheer nostalgia for the epic campaign Shane Murphy run almost 25 years ago, which had a major influence on my life at the time. Its almost complete, and I should have my hands on the leather bound hardcover books before Christmas. I only glanced at the PDF proof of the rules that came through (buying various Bundles of Holding has given me a long backlog of RPG books to read through), but it all seems on track for delivery.  I used the quick play version of the rules for Asterix and the Deep Ones, but it was almost too complicated for a 3-4 hour convention game.

Call of Cthulhu has built up a lot of mythos related stuff over the years, so the Kickstarter was able to offer reskins of classic RPG products, t-shirts, hats, fake coins, coffee mugs, pins, cards, dice … having a vast plethora of addons from stretch goals certainly gives people something to watch as the Kickstarter progresses.

The Old Ones got even more money pledged from me for Cthulhu Wars. From the fun game point of view, this was powerfully attractive for the promise of insanely asymmetric faction powers, something I loved in the classic Dune boardgame. I am hoping to have the main game in my hands before Christmas and I intend to bring it to Big Gaming week in Christchurch. It looks like all the supplements will come through in the new year sometime. Probably good for my customs bill that it gets split up like this.  I like the look of the rules and have borrowed from them for the next iteration of Housewar.  One reason for backing it at a “get one of everything” level was the sheer number of miniatures on offer. I will always have something to pull out for a crawling chaos horror at the FRPG gaming tables.

HeroForge – is now in beta and I had a play with the alpha, building an elf in musketeer style clothing. My feedback was that it needed an “undo” button. Its fine if you have a limited menu of choices, but once you have a large list trying to reselect back to what you just changed out of will be a pain.  An option to easily share the images you generate to social media would also be nice.

By way of comparison I took a quick look at Figureprints which has been making World of Warcraft figurines for a while. The price there is US$130 plus shipping for one painted miniature, with a limited menu of options (items earned in game, and still stored on the account, or from a small list of classic weapons and armour).  So for HeroForge I am getting six unpainted miniatures for $160, or around $27 each, but I have free range to design what each miniature looks like. HeroForge is something I backed because in part I thought, this is a service the gaming world needs.

One thought I had about 3-D printing of game miniatures. When the price drops, and printers become more available, where does the market for Games Workshop’s expensive propriety miniatures go?

I also backed the Runequest 6 Collectors Edition through crowdsourcing. This was pretty straightforward, no extra kitsch to worry about, just good artwork and packaging. I’m such a fan I got multiple copies, for fear of disasters with cups of coffee.

I have not backed everything I have seen appear on crowdsourcing platforms.

• Cthulhu Invictus modules – I was not actually all that impressed at the quality of the other Cthulhu Invictus modules/scenarios – far too much physical combat, and calling for reinforcements from the local Legion fortress
• Boardgames that just had themes which didn’t appeal to me
• Glorantha world maps at a 5k per hex detail, and Glorantha coffee table books, at the time I was interested in other things and had less spare cash to take a punt with
• OGRE, from Steve Jackson Games, what was on offer was a game that was goldplated and full of a thousand addons that would have broken me for shipping and customs – it simply grew too far away from the simple ten minute game I used to play with friends in the high school library.

I will have to do more research on how these things work, both what helps a project succeed, and what can lead to them failing. I suspect trying to get a boardgame with big plastic space dreadnought miniatures off the ground, without an established reputation, will be a hard slog.