I keep looking for spells and skills to merge in DF Felltower. Not willy-nilly - I'm not just going to merge things to merge things. But where I think the overlap is so strong that there isn't a purpose for my current game in having more than one skill or spell, I'll merge them.
But I have given thought to a few and decided it was too much. Here are three of them.
Merging Observation and Search
This one isn't going to happen. Observation is basically passive spotting based on a skilled understanding of how to do that. Search is actively looking for things on a person (or in a place, at least in my games.) Combining the two seems a little much - at that point, am I just creating a 4-point verion of the 5-point trait Perception? Seems like it. So no, I rejected that one.
Merging Animal Handling by removing specialties
Another one I gave some thought. Do we really need multiple specialties? The skill doesn't come up that often; shoudn't I consider making it all one skill to roll against?
So I did consider it. But then I decided it would be a little too much. I'd have players wanting to use this on every animal - mundane, giant, dire, mutant, or even animal-kinda-looking ("Dragons are animals, right?") Having a lack of a restrictive niche, I decided, was opening it too widely to possible over-use.
Merging Cure Disease and Neutralize Poison
Neither of these spells comes up all too often. They do very similar things in overall effect - they essentially get rid of a cyclic effect on the PCs centered on metabolic damage. But basically for that reason, I left them seperate. They don't come up that often. You can easily get by with 1 point in each. Making them one spell (Cure Metabolic Hazard?) would be all of saving one point and some extra bookkeeping and rulings to make it happen. Not worth the trouble.
Any skills or spells you had considered merging and then decided against?
My group merged Psychology and Physiology because they almost never came up anyway. Also merged most of the Thief skills: Filch, Pickpocket, and Sleight of Hand were merged to just Pickpocket, Shadowing was rolled into Stealth, and Smuggling was rolled into Holdout. We even outright removed Counterfeiting, Forgery, and Lip Reading.
ReplyDeleteWe also got rid of Animal Handling specialties and it wasn't really a problem for us, but I get your reasons for not doing so.
Couple of points here: one abstract and one specific.
ReplyDeleteSay you're designing a game, and you want to have some sort of mechanical
representation of power. The simplest possible game has one stat: "power", and
that stat gets applied to everything related to probability. The higher "power"
you have, the higher the chance that you climb a wall, charm a guard, steal a
purse, strike an opponent, dodge a hit, etc.
The downside is that fictionally different characters will be mechanically
equivalent: a Power-10 wizard and a Power-10 fighter have the same mechanical
chance to do all of those things. This can work in same games (FATE Accelerated
is really close to this), but feel unsatisfying in others, where we want to
represent some characters having specialization. The fighter ought to be better
at climbing rocks and the wizard better at deciphering arcane glyphs; not just
fictionally[1] but also mechanically.
If we want differentiation, we start partitioning our stats: maybe some checks
are related to body and some are related to mind. Then, our fighter can have
Body:7 Mind:3 and our wizard has Body:3 Mind:7. Now, the fighter and the wizard
are mechanically different, but there's still a lot of nuance on the table.
Should everyone with the same Body score be equally good at climbing rocks as
they are at picking pockets?
Maybe you split up Body into might, finesse, and hardiness, and maybe you split
up mind into memory, calculation, and emotion.
Now, you can mechanically represent characters that are good weight lifters
(high might) but bad pick pockets (low finesse), or characters that are gifted
mathematicians (high calculation) but poor at geography (low memory).
Most games go further, making more and more proficiency splits. Every time you
do this, you increase the unique number of mechanical representations. If you
only have finesse, you're equally good at picking pockets are you are balancing
on a tightrope. If you make a thievery skill, you're equally good at picking
pockets as you are at sleight of hand.
So that's the upside. You gain more and more unique mechanical representations.
It also feels closer to reality.[2]
A downside is that if there's an opportunity cost to allocating this
proficiency (limited points to spend in gurps, point buy in d&d, allocating
rolled stats, limited skill points, limited upgrades when you level up, etc)
then the more you split proficiency, the less likely that particular
proficiency will come up, and thus the weaker it is. Intuitively, being able to
spend 4 points on Thievery will make your character "better" than having to
spend 4 points on Pick Pocket, 4 points on Sleight of Hand, and 4 points on
Lock Pick. You spend 12 points for the same previous effect as 4, and so you
"lose" 8 points that you could have spent elsewhere.
\1
Another downside is that it's higher overhead at the table. Having to remember
ReplyDeletethat Sleight of Hand, Filch, Smuggling, Holdout, and Pickpocket are all splits
of Stealing is harder than if there was just a Blanket Stealing skill. Having a
Stealing skill is harder than just calling for a Finesse or Emotion roll, which
is harder than calling for a Body or Mind roll, which is harder than just
calling for a Power roll all the time.
Another downside is that when characters have points, they expect those points
to be meaningful. For example, if a character invests into Hiking, then they're
attempting to mechanically differentiate based on how quickly they can march
over long distances: in a game that has hiking implies that some characters
should be able to travel more quickly or for longer than others. You might get
down into the minutiae of calculating travel velocity and hours travelled per
day, in order to make the investment into/existence of Hiking worthwhile. Is
this fun? Or would it be better at the table to just say "ya'll can move X
hexes per day"?
Martial characters in GURPS often have high skill in one weapon group[3]
(Two-Handed Axe/Mace, for example). Choosing to do this *decreases* the amount
of fun loot (they'll be more likely to be disappointed that they got a magic
*sword*, and not a useful magic *axe*) and improvisational play that happens.
For my campaign, so far, I have
+ gotten rid of all of the searching skills except Perception[4]
+ gotten rid of hiking, skiing, connoisseur, fishing, and traps[5]
+ combined boating and seafaring
+ combined the types of animal handling, survival, mimicry, and armory
+ combined performance, singing, poetry, writing, ventriloquism, musical
instrument, musical composition, dancing, and public speaking
+ combined forgery and counterfeiting
+ combined stealth, shadowing, and camouflage
+ combined smuggling, sleight of hand, pickpocket, lockpicking, and holdout
+ combined psychology and physiology
+ combined surgery, pharmacy, first aid, diagnosis, and veterinary
+ combined hazardous materials and thaumatology
+ combined religious ritual, exorcism, and theology
[1]: We can make a really simple system work by changing the impact based on
the fiction. Maybe a success for a Power-10 wizard at leaping over a cliff is
that they barely grab the edge of the pit and need help getting up, while
failure for the Power-10 fighter is the same as success for the wizard. See
https://dreamingdragonslayer.com/2020/03/28/advantage-and-impact/
[2]: Personally, I care little about modeling reality. Reality matters less
than internal consistency, and *way* less than making sure the game is fun at
the table. If someone is annoyed in a dungeon fantasy game that a character is
equally good at mimicing bird sounds as they are at animal sounds because that
isn't "realistic"... where does it end?
[3]: A character with DX-13 and 16 Two-Handed Axe mace attacking another
character with 9 dodge takes ~3.3 attacks to hit twice. If that character picks
up a broadsword and attacks the same opponent, it takes ~12.4 attacks to hit
twice, which is a 3.75x increase in number of attacks.
[4]: I just give players info, see
https://www.bastionland.com/2018/09/the-ici-doctrine-information-choice.html
[5]: I think traps are better as puzzles: see
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RY_IRqx5dtI
Observation and Search
ReplyDeleteObservation and Search, Mental Strength and Exorcism, as well as the other Per and Will based skills are among the reasons I've very strongly considered doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the cost of Attributes (and then expanding how many points Players get to make Characters).
But I do agree, those two specific skills do very different things.. but then do your PCs ever buy them up past the 2 point level? Mine do not. And indeed, if they have Survival, I rarely see them buy them past the 1 point level unless a Template requires it at outset, and even then they always ask if they can start with Perception skills at 1 point and put those points elsewhere.
Merging Animal Handling
For this I can see doing Mundane, Dire, Mythical, Magical, etc; basically every animal Type that isn't covered by a Hidden Lore. I might just do that for Animal Handling, Vetrinary, Physiology, etc... but then I'd also have to have distinct categories, and I've never really gotten around to distinguishing them beyond archetypes like Fae, Elder Thing, Undead, etc.