My first character was a thief & I was a player before I ever ran a game. I had my friend's copy of the red box & I was looking over the classes- Elf was cool - Dwarf & Fighter were not. Boring. The Magic-User was kind of interesting but when I realized that half the book was spell-descriptions they were right out- too much work - too much study. Ditto the cleric, and its weird freighting with religious overtones. The Thief though -Thieves had skills. No other characters had skills. I locked in on that & was a committed player of thieves until well after they lost their way and got turned into rogues.
Growing up in a household founded & run by professionals, there wasn't a lot of visible skill on display. My old pop, he could hash out a business deal with the best of them, but I didn't see that as a skill exactly. At the time I just thought he was magical. Now, I think it's more of a social game - business - with a fair quantity of bloodlust & killer instinct. Not a skill - by the standards of my youthful thinking. A skill was something you'd do with your hands - something you could master & become great at. Something that couldn't be taken away from you. That last part spoke to me, confusingly - because I didn't really get the weighty meaning of it then. But it's true. You lose your house & car & job in the same week (happened to me, twice actually) and then what are you? Free? but hopeless - destitute - but then- if you've got skills? You've got a way forward - no-no they can't take that away from me...
But back then - I still had the middle-class fantasy of a gifted & skilled working-man, valorised & romantical - someone who could make a thing from parts, or from nothing. Skills. I wanted them, and failing at having any way to get them - well, I played a Thief. Because she - Darkness - had skills. I played that character for a bunch of years - we played through the red & the blue & the black boxes. Almost went to gold. It got weird there though & college was coming on so- no more, for a while. But I liked being the skills character. In other games it came up often. Shadowrun had its priority system. I liked that too - the Skill-Monkey is what we called it, unaware of any provenance for the term. By then I'd come around & realized that being able to fix computers & fashion a pithy sentence or decipher a few scripts constituted pretty valid skills. Useful ones too. The thing is - you can be good at these things & there's always someone better. You can be the best, maybe, for a single day in your life, the best at a thing for only a moment & not even realize it - because skill is a strange beast. The coincidence of specific requirements, specific tools & specific know-how is a peculiar confluence - it comes oftener than you'd think - but also, for virtually any task requiring specialized ability - it doesn't matter if you're the best, or even if you're exceptional - it just matters that you know something about it. You can fix things, pick a lock, decipher a scroll, hell - scale a wall. If you've got the right equipment, some time to spare & a will to keep on trying. Something that I didn't get as a kid but that as an adult I am kind of overcome by. That anyone can do anything.
Which is a tough nut to crack in game design.
This is going to be a long post, I can tell.
When I started out with the Game of the North I was well caught up in nostalgia & landed on the old skills from the old-old game. Scale-Walls, Pick-Pockets, Open-Locks, Hide-in-Shadows, Hear-Noise, Move-Quietly, Find-Traps - the hyphenated darlings. They make a lot of sense, in a certain context. Basement fights against chthonic underdwellers will tend to have a lot of these specific elements. I work with those because they're handy - they're focused & specific. The OSR theme is to have anything else - any broader activity defined by narration or statistical checks. That is sensible. That is... Right. It's right to do it that way. But then.
Then there are the really demanding skills. You go to the doctor & you don't imagine that the doctor is making INT checks to diagnose you - no -there's a whole raft of training & expertise. Not just anyone can diagnose you - you need tools. Among those tools is extensive training. So I've been thinking of it like that. With the right tools anyone can do anything. With medical training anyone can diagnose you. With the right statistics, anyone can tell you're sick of course - they can observe you're not well. But they need specialist training, among other tools, to get things done.
So I'm coming around on skills - a more even-handed vision of what they mean in a game. I started out thinking - this is what can't be taken from you but which I can't imagine being able to do. I went toward - this is something anyone can do - if they've got the right toolbox. Now I've come to this - Skills are the toolbox that can't be lost, and they're used to perform tasks no one can perform without them.
So I'm looking at changing the lists. Broadening the scope & narrowing it all the same. Can't anyone hear a noise? Can just anyone hide in a shadow? What about... What about really specific abilities that not just anyone can do? I've got it down to about 26 items I think that are worth considering.
Alchemy Forage Instrument Languages Numeracy Scale Walls Trickery
Building Gift Investigate Medicine Open Doors Siege Vocals
Composition Hear Noise Joke Move Quietly Pick Pockets Sorcery
Detect Traps Hide in Shadow Judge Alignment Navigate Poisoning Theurgy
I know - 26! So arbitrary - and how dumb of you not to figure out a way to assign each a letter of the alphabet! Well, I still might, there's time you know & thesauruses.
This jumble of words, seemingly, and really actually unrelated words all in a salad - I think that situation conveys the kind of complexity that really every game designer has to work with. The core attributes - if you go with the classic 6 or work out some variety of more or fewer - they cover a lot of ground - they set the standards for most of what a person can do. A stupid person can't think well, a weak person isn't going to be breaking down doors. But there's got to be nuance. There's got be shades of ability. A strong person is strong & a smart person is smart - a quick person is quick but what kind of physiological attribute does someone have that makes them good at picking pockets? Are they forgettable, charismatic? light-fingered & agile - but also really confident, perceptive - where is the wallet? There's so much to it - it seems like opportunities are being missed if we bind that all up into a single aspect of a person's physiology. So we're compelled - by skills because they're a synergy of multiple raw abilities tempered by experience, training & focused using tools.
Okay -that's well. What are they for?
Here you're into the meta-game thinking - which is where your Referee will tell you not to go, but where you have to kind of live if you're doing game design. So a session breaks out with players. There's a bunch of elements to what happens at the table - but there are essential expectations. There's the social realm - let's talk it up! Let's meet the NPCs and go to their party. There's the Fighting encounters - let's kill these vampires who were posing as NPCs throwing a party! And there's exploration.
This has been described often & well by skilled designers & commentators - exploration - social - combat is almost an idiom for This-Thing-We-Do-Together. Now. I don't exactly agree with that. I think there's more games than just those - but I think - we should think of Skills as being, in their most basic form - the Tools of Exploration.
So let's regard them as such and not think of them as something arbitrary, some kind of excuse for expanding our character sheets, or for digging deep into the thesaurus. Let's look at the skills as explicitly - tools of exploration.
You can pick-pockets - explore the contents of someone's wallet. You can scale-walls - find out what's hidden up high (tall person-spoiler: Nobody cleans the top of their fridge). You can practice Theurgy - explore the relationships between gods & mortals, You can Judge Alignments - explore what evil lurks in people's hearts. You can Practice Numeracy - Learn the riddles of the base 12 system that the ancients used. So let's regard every skill as a milieu for exploration. This basis allows you to design a system with well - 26 frontiers. More or less.
I write these posts to help me design mini-games. In variants of the Game of the North that are currently in development I use these sub-games. There are quite a few & I imagine that I'll end up putting out a book of games you can play while playing the game at some point in the future.
But here, I'm a bit stymied - each of the skills are an avenue of exploration. So they each merit their own discussion. Maybe their own sub-game. So I'm going to start focusing on each of them, just as I focus on the types of game within the game & maybe end up writing down some useful thoughts concerning world-building & cosmology. Who can say?
But! As it is, the skills-game must at some point Exist. I think of this game-within-the-game as The Caper. When it's pulled off - maybe it's pulled off only narratively -
Everyone taking turns speaking out their moves & correcting for failures, fixing mistakes & moving forward. In the end - a game like this - a caper, which I conceive as being the Best & Purest game of skills - well, the PCs are exploring - they're finding the edges & the limits of the settings & the NPCs - they're figuring out where the points of exploitation lie. In this way you can, if you wish, imagine an institution. Think of it as a body - a coherent object in space - and this object has dimensions - let's say that it has up to 26 layers - and each of these must be peeled away in the right sequence - and then, only then is it opened to the players - but when it opens - it succumbs completely - they've subdued all the angles. So my thinking now falls into this pattern - the Skills-Game, the skills game of my dreams - is the planning phase - the exploration phase during which the PCs unfurl the institution's defenses & figure out how to get inside. So that's the format that I'll work with, I think, as I put fingers to keys trying to make more.
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