I find the procedure for resolving damage effects in GURPS unacceptably slow, and I have had players jack up and refuse to play it any more because of the tedium of resolving a single burst of automatic fire from a Thompson gun against an unarmoured target.
That seems to me to be saying “those rules are unnecessarily complicated, so I don’t use them, so they aren’t complicated.”
Not normally. When I make a PC, the stuff not related to the game system (personality, backstory, etc.) take far longer than any game-related aspects. When making NPCs, I don’t feel obligated to create a “balanced” character so I can just throw stuff together. Trying to wedge a particular concept into the game system can be very complex or very simple depending on how closely the concept matches the game’s design.
It depends on the nature of the mistake. Is it a “you can’t take that ability yet because you don’t have the prereqs,” “you miscalculated your carrying capacity because you took the square of one-tenth your strength instead of the cube” (thank you Villains and Vigilantes) or “you’ve just created a 400 point useless character”? (The last was notorious in the Hero system.)
I see this more as a writing and presentation issue than a system issue. A simple game can be made to appear complex if the rules are not organized well. Some board game rules are very good at this.
Given the amount of prep work a GM has to do before the campaign can begin, the system bits are negligible. This is like the character creation question, except for campaigns.
I make a distinction between complex and fiddly. Power Grid is not a complex game, but damn if the rules aren’t fiddly. In an RPG, picking from a long list of options is fiddly, but not complex.
Okay, now suppose that you encountered a game system that was not normal in that respect, and you found that stuff not related to the game system was no quicker, and that mechanical generation took ten hours longer than you were used to? Would you count that?
What if they were not? What if they involved designing and costing scores or hundreds of racial, cultural, and professional templates, with lenses? What if the game in question made devising stats for sci-fi kit much more involved than it was in some other game?
Taking 10 hours (much less 10 hours longer) on just the mechanical parts of creating a single character is beyond my experience. But then, I learned how to use my PRN calculator cranking out Champions characters, so what do I know?
Complexity is a slicing, subjective scale. For something you find complex, others may say, “yeah, it takes time, but it’s straight-forward and not all that complicated.” And if there are many other aspects of the game system you don’t like, then you won’t look beyond the perceived complexity to see that it might not be as bad as you think it is.
I’ve done a bad job of derailing this topic to “Brett’s gripes with GURPS”, for which I apologise. I’ll try to get back on topic.
I counted the skill lists in five RPGs that I have played enough, recently enough, to have an opinion about.
Spirit of the Century (the initial instance of FATE 3) had 28 “skills” in its skill list, but some of them were more like attributes or social advantages in other games. I have a distinct impression that the list was tweaked to make the number 28 for numerological reasons. The skill list is perhaps pretty much okay for SotC’s purposes, but I think that for a lot of my roleplaying I’d want more detail even in the areas covered, and a bit more scope, especially if I were to take on SF or fantasy. 28 skills seems if anything too few, not too many.
James Bond 007 has 24 skills fleshed out to some extent by 27 “fields of experience”. The skill list is not adequate even for its limited scope, but on the other hand some of the fields are trivial and others redundant. I think you could probably extend JB007 to a wider range of thrillers and action adventures with a list of fifty skills + fields. Fifty skills (including fields) does not seem too many.
Night’s Black Agents has 39 “investigative” abilities and 23 “general” abilities, for a total of 62. Leaving aside that there might be too many methods associated with different sub-sets of those abilities, their coverage and detail seem about right for the limited genre of action thrillers. Sixty-two skills is not too many.
ForeSight (first edition) has 49 skills fleshed out by 78 fields of knowledge, for a total of 127 learnable abilities. That’s not counting the nine psionic skills, which were a bit of a frost. And ForeSight does not deal with magic or mystic disciplines. I don’t remember having a lot of trouble with this skill list, but a number of the fields were rather fussy. My feeling is that this was probably somewhere near the limit for me. That ought to be about enough for realistic genres, though I’d accept a few more if there were a pay-off in widened scope, especially if they were in a separate module that only, say, players playing magicians had to deal with. 127 skills is not in my opinion too many for a versatile game.
HindSight included a master skill list of all the skills in ForeSight plus extras that the designer considered desirable for fantasy and for adventures before automobiles. Including low-tech equivalents and replacements for some skills and fields and some more detailed treatment of mêlée weapons it came to ninety mundanes skills, ten psionic skills, eight mystic disciplines (defined as skills), and 135 mundane fields of knowledge. Besides that there were four magical skills for different ways of invoking effects and 25 fields of magical fundamentals, most of which were available in basic and advanced knowledge. In my experience this was starting to get a bit too much. We had some confusion and mistakes with the skill and fields lists, and with the tech level distinctions, even for characters who were not magicians, psionics, or mystic disciplinarians. I think 225 skill-like things is probably too many, and that I’m pretty confident that 272 is too many.
I like the SotC skill list and I like doing away with the stat/skill divide. I first encountered it in Castle Falkenstein and I like that list as well.
Savage World (SWAdE) has 31 skills, but 4 of those are the different skills used with different Arcane Backgrounds. It handles science fiction and fantasy very well, but it is more focused on cinematic action and stories where anything athletic (“climbing, jumping, balancing, wrestling, skiing, swimming, throwing, or catching”) is covered under a single Athletics skill. I would have put wresting under the umbrella of Fighting, but it doesn’t annoy me. Piloting is for any vehicle that operates “in three dimensions, such as airplanes, helicopters, spaceships, etc.” There simply isn’t a need to break these out into individual skills because it simply doesn’t matter to the type of stories the game is designed for.
D&D 5e has 18, which is trimmed down from the 3e list. It works well and I never felt it was missing something. Buffy/Angel (Cinematic Unisystem) had 17 plus one Wildcard (player-defined) skill, but then it also used the skill “Getting Medieval” for fighting that wasn’t Kung Fu.
One of the turn-offs of Call of Cthulhu is the long list of skills that rarely (if ever) come into play during a game about cosmic, existential horror and the investigators who stumble upon it.
On the other hand, strictly speaking, Martial Arts only adds perhaps half a dozen pages, tops, of conceptually new rules material. (The definition of a “style” and the associated idea of a Style Familiarity perk, plus half-a-dozen or so weird new cinematic skills.) The rest is, strictly speaking, just worked examples and historical fluff. Intimidating worked examples and overwhelming fluff, perhaps, but a legitimate example of “we have a simple, infinitely extensible rules kernel; everything else that looks like complexity is just extensions of that”.
A game can also add new rules, even complex new rules, without becoming more complex from a practical point of view. For example, as I recall, GURPS Space has a moderately complex stellar system generation system. That looks like rules, and has lots of numbers, but so what? Nobody could ever use it in character generation or play. It’s just there as an interesting GM preparation tool. Ditto many SF games’ starship construction rules. On the other hand, a detailed explanation of a society’s system of etiquette might contain no game rules whatsoever, in some games, and yet vastly increase the complexity and difficulty of play.
No, it’s saying “those rules are used to define fully realised characters; third thug from the left is not a fully realised character”.
Well put. There’s a huge practical difference between “oops, I forgot to take that skill, I’ll have to persuade the GM to let me move a couple of points around” and “oops, I don’t have the prerequisites for this Talent I urgently want, how can I go back five levels to rebuild my prerequisite tree from the ground up?”
Doctor Who Adventures in Time & Space: 12 skills, but you’re expected to take Areas of Expertise as well (for a single skill point, which normally gives you +1 to the skill, you can get +2 in a specialised area, so your Subterfuge skill can be specialised in Sneaking). You can have more than one in a skill, but why would you?
Genesys: 20 general skills, 3 magic skills, 8 combat skills, 5 social skills, 1 knowledge skill. It’s a bit more complicated than that because at least two of those combat skills won’t exist in any given game: one of the things the GM has to do when setting stuff up (and giving credit to the book, there’s a lot of really good material on how to customise the system, both necessary stuff like this and distinctly optional stuff like creating new Talents and making sure they’re fairly priced) is to decide whether Ranged combat (crossbows, guns, etc.) should be split into Light and Heavy skills (if the distinction is important in the genre) or not. Ditto Melee combat. (But Gunnery and Brawl are always separate.) The GM is also encouraged to add more setting-relevant Knowledge skills. But “about 35” seems right for most settings.
Modern AGE: 89 “focuses”, but they’re mostly binary - if you have Piloting or Seduction or whatever, it adds +2 to the 3d6 stat-based roll against Dexterity or Communication or whatever, and at higher levels increases the quality of success. (Advanced characters can take a focus a second time to get +3 total.)
Well, if we’re doing this…
I’d prefer to start with a definition of “skill”, really. Many games seem to have a “Profession Skill” item, which is either one skill or an infinite number of poorly-defined skills, depending how you look at it. And a lot of modern games seem to leave skill definition to the players and GM, and don’t have actual skill lists at all. But, that said, I’ll look at the game I’ve run most recently.
Unknown Armies has nothing called “skills” at all. However, okay, it has the equivalent, sort of. It has five Stress Gauges, each of which governs a pair of Abilities, which are something like attributes or broad default-level skills. So, there are ten of those, which everybody has at some level. (And yes, how good you are at things is determined by how your character has responded to emotional trauma.) Then, each character has one or more (usually 2-3) Identities. These are player/GM defined, so there may be an indefinite number, but the book lists 26 examples. Each grants abilities to be negotiated in play (“I’m a Judo instructor, of course I can geek out over Ronda Rousey movies”), plus three specific Features, which can be standing in for an Ability in a specific use (so Shyster Lawyer might stand in for Lie), providing skills that aren’t covered by an Ability (such as Gun Combat or Medicine), or something else.
So, how many skills? Search me. Cubed. But in one sense, you don’t have to worry about forgetting to buy a skill that fits your character, because the Identities you take are the fundamental definition of your character, and minor “skills” at least can be defined on the fly. On the other hand, acquiring a new Identity at a useful level is intentionally hard, so acquiring a new skill in play that doesn’t fit your current Identities is annoyingly difficult. No going on short first aid courses or taking a couple of fencing classes in this game.
Which I’d rate as on the lighter side of medium complexity, by the way.
A bit more than that. There are also the rules for inventing and establishing skill modifiers for new techniques. I did a good bit of that for GURPS Furries, and there were definitely rules to be mastered there. And there’s the section on how the rules apply to things like biting and constricting, which I also consulted.
I’ve run a fair bit of Big Eyes Small Mouth (2nd edition, which I consider the best). It has 52 skills, few enough so that a table of skill costs in different genres can fit onto a single page. It offers eight different genre settings, from Modern Military to Teenage Romance; and of course a GM can make up their own custom settings if they have an unusual genre in mind.
As my comparison of GURPS with BESM may have suggested, I consider this system a convenient size for easy use.
Fair enough. Any games such as GURPS or ForeSight that have a systematic method of default values for skills that the player hasn’t bought confuses the distinction that attributes or characteristics are things that every character has and skills are things that a character has to learn. And fields of familiarity in JB007 or fields of knowledge in ForeSight undermine the definition that a skill has an improvable level rather than a binary “you got it or you don’t”. And then SotC’s skill list includes “skills” (such as “Athletics” and “Might”) that might be attributes in another game, and others (such as “Leadership” and “Resources”) that might be social advantages.
I gave counts of FoE and FoK separately for JB007 and ForeSight / HindSight respectively for just that reason, and thought of including a count of stunts from SotC.
(I seem to have left this sitting as an unsent draft.)
In thinking about the causes of complexity and TL skills, it occurs to me that there is now a third option between setting-specific system and universal system with full character portability between worlds: a mostly-universal system that doesn’t try to offer character portability. Such a system can have some world-specific customisation of the rules, but the basic mechanics are familiar if you’ve played another version of it. An obvious example is Gumshoe, where the skill list differs from one version to another but the basic idea of spending investigative points to learn extra stuff is still there; another is Genesys.
Giving up character portability has some advantages: you don’t need tech level skills unless your setting absolutely requires them. And you retain the “don’t have to learn new mechanics” that was one of the main reasons for a generic system in the first place.
It really depends on the campaign. A modern special ops game is going to have forced entry as a regular thing, and one that an encounter can turn on. Many others it will never come up.
As for knots, my experience is that people who do things with knots know a small number of knots for their particular skill (fishing, sewing, climbing, underwater basket weaving), but not a good idea of what the reasons they tie a hook on with a Davy instead of a San Diego jam or a trilene or a clinch, and most of them probably don’t know all those knots. (There are reasons to use those in different places or different lines, but most people could use any of them. ). I have always allowed a roll against a professional skill or knot using skill if it’s important, usually at a substantial penalty. If it’s not important, I hanwave a “sure you can do something adequate “. I’ve done that with lots of other skills , too.
Yes, I think this is one of the cases where the GURPS attempts to rein in skill explosion hasn’t quite worked.
As far as Forced Entry goes, the obvious ones to me would be burglars, tomb-robbers, construction workers and so on. People who either want to jemmy open a door or coffin,* or need to break objects, but don’t necessarily get into fights.
*let’s add vampire hunters to that list, I suppose
Perhaps one way of handling this would have been to expand on Professional Skills a bit. The skill boost to damage is used in several skills, and that could have been made a general rule where the skill is used to damage something. So Professional Skill (Forced Entry) helps with breaking in, Professional Skill (Carpentry) helps with breaking wooden things, Professional Skill (Road Construction) lets you damage tarmac more effectively, and so on. And Knot-Tying could easily be a Professional Skill for a handful of professions who really need that expertise.
In GURPS Underground Adventures, I allowed Forced Entry to give a bonus to ST for the part of digging or tunneling that involved breaking up hard material with a pick or penetrating it with a muscle-powered drill.
I knew I’d got that idea from somewhere. Thanks Bill!
I’ve been playing quite a bit of Genesys recently, which perhaps goes too far the other way. There’s no Navigation skill (there is Astrocartography, showing the system’s roots as a Star Wars game, but mostly navigation is subsumed under Piloting or Driving, and there’s no mechanism if you’re walking somewhere); or Demolitions/Explosives (this seems to fit Skulduggery best, though that’s mostly a sleight of hand skill). But it does cover the basics reasonably well, and it uses its very limited skill allotment on things like the difference between Vigilance (I casually notice stuff) and Perception (I am actively looking for stuff).