What is the best skill list you have ever seen

User Experience

User experience. Ever hear about something having a bad UI, or looking like an engineer designed it? That's the UX designer not doing his or her job.

While we're talking about offloading brainpower, asking questions of people instead of machines is something we're trained to do at an early age.

It takes far longer for you to wait for me to come up with an answer to your question than it would for you to highlight the text, right click and select "search Google." But you're more comfortable doing it this way. So you ask.

> Ride and Handle Animal

Okay, now you need to tell me what a "user experience" politician is, as mentioned in .

Because I'll tell you right now, it sounds to me an awful lot like you're making excuses for people who shouldn't have jobs. pandering to the lowest common denominator is why things turn to shit.

You are really misreading that.

>(UX Designers), (Creatives), (Politicians) and other creative people.

Okay, allow me to reiterate my statement in regards to .

UX "designers", creative people, and politicans pander to the lowest common denominator. In each of these fields, this is a BAD thing.

It's also false because truly creative people specifically do not do that.

Pandering to the lowest common denominator is how things get sold and ideas get expressed. I don't see you writing English at a college graduate level.

I'm trying to get in the habit of using the Oxford comma, but my parents raised me wrong. They're Chicagoan in both economics and style.

Read Kant and then read Marx. Then ask yourself which sold more copies -- Critique of Pure Reason or the Communist Manifesto?

We all make concessions to accessibility when we're trying to communicate ideas and concepts to others. It's only dumbing down when you sacrifice artistry, utility and nuance in the pursuit of accessibility.

>Then ask yourself which sold more copies -- Critique of Pure Reason or the Communist Manifesto?
The latter. As I stated, this is a BAD thing. You're basically proving my point for me, here.

The Communist Manifesto is bad because it advances a horrifying agenda effectively. If it were written in the style of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, no one would have read it. And as evil as Marx's ideas were, they were not significantly less complex than Kant's categorical imperatives or moral universalism. Kant was just a shitty writer, and Marx was a better one.

Accessibility is important. It's all well and good to have an idea -- it's the process of communication that's most important, because without a delivery vector an idea is just a thought without action to back it up.

>In each of these fields, this is a BAD thing.

No? It increases accessibility and the spread of it. You can make the most artistic, high brow advertisement ever but one that plays to a primal emotion will likely do better at your job.

>Kant was just a shitty writer, and Marx was a better one.
Bollocks and haberdashery. Horseradish and bullshit. They were both good writers; the difference is that Marx wrote what people wanted to read, because people are selfish, lazy cunts for the most part who would rather take from others than make for themselves. Marx pandered to basic instinct, while Kant asked better of everyone. That's why one sold better.

Let's compare the two.

Marx:

> The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.

> Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

> In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

Kant:

> That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it.

If you prefer the latter paragraph in terms of style, you are lying to yourself.

Attached is a PDF of Orwell's Politics and the English Language. Read it and see me after class.

>If you prefer the latter paragraph in terms of style, you are lying to yourself.
Fine, user. Since you apparently can't do it yourself, let me translate it for you like I have to constantly translate the wording of the Second Amendment to people who live in California.

>That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt.
Everything we know is based on what we have experienced throughout our lives.
>For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience?
It's most likely that conscious thought and introspection come from outside stimuli which affect us and force us to think.

>In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it.
Knowledge begins with experience.

Make no mistake. You ARE the lowest common denominator.

Yep.

A good skill list covers everything with equal amounts of breadth per skill. I like Fate's for this, because I feel like each skill is relatively equal in breadth to each other, and stunts let you specialize them any way you'd like. Not to mention the extra degree of specialization you get naturally out of your aspects.

I'm making a stylistic argument, not a substantive one. You seem unable to grasp the difference between praising a writer for his clarity and praising a writer for his content. You're so far off base over what I'm describing that I can only assume you're either purposefully misunderstanding me, or you're unable to understand me to begin with. In either case, further discussion is a waste of time.

If a thought is worth expressing, it's worth expressing with clarity and precision. I can't believe this sentiment could possibly be controversial, except to someone who thinks that his ability to untangle a 18th century German philosopher's universally reviled prose style marks him as intellectually superior. It doesn't.

>RPGs usually have classes, or if not classes races
detected the D&D pleb

Rolemaster had 200+ skills and it drove me up the fucking wall.

it's pretty ironic that you lament the lack of original thought when you can't think beyond races and classes yourself. really activates those almonds.
guess what? the lowest common denominator is you.

Man, this thread sucks some dicks.
For anyone that actually wanted useful information, it's all in Don't throw random skills and shit on a list because you have to, put them in because they're going to be used in the game.

>Fine, user. Since you apparently can't do it yourself, let me translate it for you like
It's like you don't even realize you can simultaneously understand what a paragraph means and detest the writing style.

I used to play with this one guy that wouldn't shut up about how his homebrewed fantasy heartbreaker had a massive skill list that allowed you to 'make any character you can think of, really!'.

Nothing I could say convinced him that he would never even use 80% of his list in an actual adventure, essentially making them trap options.

I started disliking predefined skill lists more and more, as time went on. They can work as sort of "secondary stats" (or, if the game doesn't have stats, as stats, I guess) for very focused games, but overall they tend to be constricting in a way that doesn't enhance gameplay (and sometimes bloated/overcomplicated on top of that). This probably coincides with how I started disliking precise simulation for simulation's sake as a goal for an RPG.

For my gaming needs, either player/GM defined skills, or job/background systems seem to work out pretty well.

>English translation of Kant
That shit is already clarified and heavily preinterpreted. He used Latin grammatics while writing German just because he felt like it and was deathly afraid of ever ending a sentence. Fuck, I even prefer Nietzsche's lyrical waxing to this shit. I don't agree with most of his points, but at least it's genuinely funny sometimes.

I've never seen a skill list I really liked. I'm not sure if such a thing is even possible. I guess I like it somewhere between the 40krpgs from Black Crusade on when they condensed the skill list a bit and 5th ed DnD, though that seems kind of broad in scope

good for you. but for new players, they need to skill lists to glance over to sure that they haven't overlooked an important competency that they'd like their char to have.

I like to do them more profession based, so you could have burglary for example, which would allow you to do lockpicking, stealth, acrobatics or anything else you could fit under that umbrella.

>complicated and game-changing shit like Stealth and Diplomacy are resolved in the same manner as as shit like Climb and Profession (farming)

This is only a problem if the game in question handles skills in a way that makes "important competencies" easy to miss in the first place.

As I've grown older I've grown more and more weary of long skill lists. Nowadays I think a good list caps somewhere around five skills - physical skill, sneaky skill, knowledge skill and a couple others in flavor of the setting - and that's about it. Specialization can be bought with some kind of perks, if really necessary.

No one mentioned Cyberpunk ? It covers everything and has an interesting progression mechanic. I usually rule that you have to use it 20 times till next level.

>User Experience
>Should be UE
>Instead UX
>No longer means what it is supposed to mean, and becomes more difficult to guess at a glance what it is supposed to refer to.
>User Xperience hurr durr
My autism is triggered.

TRIGGERED.
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>Handle Animal requires proficiency to use
This is a system for retards, with no sense of how the real world works, right?

Infamously, one of the designers revealed that they came up with a bunch of this shit based on the skills of those in the office.
They even said swinging an item attached to your wrist by a strap into your hand was near impossible because he couldn't reliably do it with a computer mouse.

ffs, that's pathfinder, and it was a fucking joke

First post best post.

You mean Microlite20?

You literally mean FAE approaches / DnD ability checks.

>unironically thinking this is how socialism works

>Communist manifesto (sold) a lot of copies

>sold

There's a message here, but I'm not sure what exactly. Over it those ironies of the universe, maybe.

You have to pay to visit Marx's grave site because they couldn't figure out how to keep it up and running without charging.

r8 my skill list

user, that post said nothing about classes and races. They didn't even imply it.

>graft
>those 3 skills
wut

For reference it's Dieselpunk and Graft in particular pulls upon 1930s slang

>Wiz
could think of it as wisdom, ability to see through cons\con another, sense motive\bluff etc
>jigging
Picking locks, cracking safes, getting something open by means of banging\manipulation\etc.
>Blending
Urban stealth, Assassin's Creed style "hiding in plain sight" as well as skulking about urban places. Fieldcraft covers rural stealth.

Rolemaster had 200 skills and I loved each and every one of them.

I really really like Dieselpunk and I wish my group did too. Every time I suggest the setting it's immediately shot down in favor of space adventure or traditional D&D.

Wtf dusu senpai? It's really terrible. Literally unusable/8
Yeah, but, like, everywhere.

In my opinion a good skill list is on the shorter side with some flexibility. The issue I run into in a lot of campaigns is that roles of some kind are heavily heavily used while others are just never touched so that guy who is good at History never gets to flex his chops because we're too busy jumpings gaps and deceiving NPCs.

Most unfortunate, I don't know that my system\setting would schway them but the information you'd need to try is here:
discord.gg/RKRtKD5

I dislike the "literally unusable" meme b\c I've been playtesting it for months now and we literally use it across various games with different players and different DMs and it works.

Rate my skill list.
Generalized backgrounds are inherently superior to specific skills in terms of coherent and engaging storytelling. Fite me.

I feel like it encourages stretching

yers, it is part of what we call unified mechanic. our hobby adopted it after seeing the mess of AD&D. i understand that millenials need to reinvent the wheel though, not fully understanding why things are the way they are. millenials and luddite grognards.

Not really, if you put down some restrictions.
>"Is the action you are attempting directly related to your background? Apply the full background rank."
>"Is the action you are attempting tangentially related to your background? Apply the background rank divided by 2, rounded down."
I mean, yeah, people will still try stretching it, because Rank/2 is better than 0, but, honestly, it's the same as people trying to get minor environmental bonuses and such - as long as they roleplay it properly, I don't mind it.

>As I've grown older I've grown more and more weary of long skill lists. Nowadays I think a good list caps somewhere around five skills
totally disagree. i want the mechanical distinction. each and every PC should be a very specific combination of competencies.

CoC does it better imho

no, it's fine. having ride animal and handle animal different skills again allows for distinction. also, games are not meant to be realistic by all means.

that skill separation predates pathfinder by at least 15 years. hint: rolemaster

depends on the setting

some were a bit much, especially the perception variants. but, yeah, distinction.

i'll fight you: two spies can have very different skill sets. and even if they have the same skill sets, they can be at different competency levels for each. if you want to have that distinction, you end up with skills.

>Is the action you are attempting directly related to your background? Apply the full background rank."
"but i want to play a spy who has specialized in decyphering codes at the expense of other aspects of the profession."

simplicity comes always at a price. whether that price is worth paying is a matter of taste. this is not to my taste.

>if you want to have that distinction, you end up with skills.
That's the thing I don't want to. If I wanted the spies to do different things (for example, it's an intrigue campaign heavy on spying), then I would use one more specific noun for one spy and another more specific noun for another spy.

I mean, I don't fucking write "Human" on my character sheet if it's an all-human campaign, or "Magic User" if everyone is a magic user.
It's just common sense - if you are the GM, it's obvious you have the control over the choice of jobs available to your players' characters and you discuss their character concept beforehand during session zero to get a better feel what they're going for.

I feel like the "good GM" excuse is a logical fallacy on Veeky Forums

Yes a good GM can fix problems, but if you have specific skills you don't have to face those problems.

The issue is how specific of skills you want to have.

The problem is that skill trees are extremely reliant on the theme of your campaign, because:

a) If some particular skills are important to the theme of your campaign, you elaborate on them.
b) If some particular skills are not important to the theme of your campaign, you gloss them over.

In this instance, divorcing fluff from crunch and making an overly complicated and specific skill tree so that you can be ready for any campaign theme leads to most of those skills being never used and confusing people because those skills are there, yet they are never used.

The perfect situation is when you make very specific campaign and tailor the mechanics to the contents of said campaign, but sadly, most people aren't willing to learn a new system every time they start a new campaign.

I feel as though gurps has the perfect answer to this problem.

It has the autistic detail when you need it and the wildcard! skills for when you don't.

Honestly, I feel it is easier to teach people to accept vague ruling and "rule zero" kind of stuff before throwing specific rules at them, than to teach them to obey specific rules and then suddenly whip out "rule zero".
You know how people playing GURPS try to use "all the rules" from multiple rulebooks?
GURPS has this problem that it teaches the rules-lawyer mentality to people (at least, in my experience), as most rules-heavy systems do.

I'd rather have a somewhat vague system that is a solid foundation I can build upon rather than an overly complicated system that I have to hack away multiple things from before I can do anything with it.

I think they can be ordered much better. It's hard to find what I'm looking for, and I don't immediately see any categorisation.

you can tailor with a set of skills more closely than just with a job description. plus, as mentioned, even within a narrowly-defined job description you can have people with different degrees of capabilities in individual. think a given position in team sports, for example.

skills are rarely organized in trees.
>skills are there, yet they are never used.
this isn't much of a problem since the players cannot be sure it will ever come up. it's okay to have bought a skill that doesn't come up in a particular campaign - it gives weight to making a good selection in chargen.

a skill list like isn't really complicated. don't pretend as if it's rocket science.

I should have said "Literally unlearnable without guidance, and then still unintuitive." But that wouldn't be a meme.

Honestly it's fine within the context of it's setting, specifically using specially flavored jargon. It just makes it extremely confusing.

That's honestly the fault of the GM. He should be giving everybody a moment to shine and a moment of trial. If a character goes unused than the player is either being too shy or stupid or the GM is failing.

Fair enough, I've just given to enough points of convenience at this point in development that I kind of get defensive cause I don't wanna water down my game into something generic or simply in accord with the preferences of others rather than an objectively better\less confusing version of what I set out to make.

I'm designing a system that's probably comparable to D&D when it comes to the skills. What would be the ramifications of allowing the players the option to specialise in a custom skill unique to their character (like knot tying, or sailing, or calligraphy). Each character would still be skilled in one or more of the generic skills, but must also create a custom one.

Love this

My problem with narrow skill lists is that it makes it hard to do things if you don't have that specific skill.

look at 40K Roleplay: if you don't have a basic skill, you can still roll at half attribute. whereas there are advanced skills you can't roll against if you don't have the skill. works well enough.

>it's okay to have bought a skill that doesn't come up in a particular campaign - it gives weight to making a good selection in chargen.

I want to bash your face in with a brick.

>t. gamist scum
crawl back to your D&D games

>not wanting trap options at character creation makes you gamist

Did I say brick? Lets make that a sack full of irukandji instead.

it's only trap options to a gamist, you dense faggot. character optimization is literally gamist.
a simulationist doesn't care if he has unused skills, as long as they skills he has accurately reflect the character. a narrativist will generally not care either for as long as he has enough other ways to influence the direction of story (spend a fate point to find a key underneath the doormat instead of picking locks).

so, yeah, shoo-shoo, back underneath your rock.

A narrativist absolutely should care if an aspect of his character doesn't come into play despite having spent character building resources on it.

A simulationist absolutely should care that learning a throwaway skill somehow costs the same amount of character resources as important skills (i.e. learning to tie a knot is as hard as learning how to use magic items, or scry on people, or everything related to a profession like being a sailor).

That is putting aside how categorizing people by the GNS theory is double retarded, and that caring about sensible design regardless of which segment it possibly falls into is just good practice.

Probably the paranoia xp skill list. You can use it with just the base 6 (hardware software wetware violence management stealth) or expand it to the full 48 if you really want. Either way, I've yet to think of an action that isn't covered by it.

13th Age backgrounds. Instead of skills like "Climbing" or "Knowledge Alien Culture" you have backgrounds points based on your character's past, like "Captain of the Fool's Luck" or "Insane Scientist or Mad Genius". Then when you need to roll a skill, you can say "As a (Insane Scientist or Mad Genius), I have dealt with many potions and posions, and this is [roll dice and add background points] that this is a Potion of Dragon Breath!"

It's honestly the best way of doing things.

>A narrativist absolutely should care if an aspect of his character doesn't come into play despite having spent character building resources on it.
because narrativist keep raging all the time about character optimization, right? the nature of narratvist games is more dynamic and emergent than other types of games, therefore it is to be expected that play might develop into an unforeseeable direction with doesn't involve their particular assets.

a simulationist just cares if the numbers accurately reflect the character he has in mind, nothing else. if his skills don't come up and he is a bit left aside, he'll either blame it on inaccurate outline of the setting/campaign or on his own poor choice of character type given that campaign outline.
a simulationist adjust his character concept to the available building resources for a starting character. once he has done that, there are no important skills, that's fucking gamist mentality. he literally does not care that cooking will never get used in his campaign: if his concept is a ranger who has learned to make delicious meals from game he has hunted and herbs he has gathered, then this is what he'll pour his points into cooking, no matter what. he'll be happy knowing he could roll high on kooking if he had to; it'll be part of his immersion.

>sensible design
what is sensible to a gamist dambass doesn't necessarily make sense to someone with different goals.

it is devoid of specializations though. background is fine for stuff that you have the same baseline competency in. as soon as you want to be a mad genious that specializes in making dragon breath potions it breaks down and you have to introduce individual skill levels. such a background then becomes something akin to a skill group a la shadowrun 5e.

If you don't keep in mind what skills your pc have when coming up with encounters/situations you're a pretty shit DM desu.

>because narrativist keep raging all the time about character optimization, right?

No, you fucking idiot, a narrativist cares that the character options he picked affect the narrative.

If the character options he picked never affect the narrative, why the fuck does he have them?

>a simulationist just cares if the numbers accurately reflect the character he has in mind, nothing else.

He should absolutely fucking care that learning to tie a knot somehow takes as much time as learning how to use magic items if he cares about the consistency of the world/the skill points as simulation of his characters prior experiences that lead to him having the skills he possesses.

>what is sensible to a gamist dambass doesn't necessarily make sense to someone with different goals.

I have explained how it DOES make sense for different goals though. The problem isn't me being gamist, but you being some sort of anti-gamist that spergs out at the idea that something he perceives as gamist could have benefits for everyone.

Agreed, but shitty skill lists (like ones where you can take skills that never come up the whole campaign) make it pretty hard. Besides, my problem is with the guy who thinks that a player having a skill that never comes up _is a good thing_.

You do realize people enjoy taking things for no benefit right?

My wizard knew how to play guitar. It didn't help him, but he could do it.

>that a player having a skill that never comes up _is a good thing_.

And not just a good thing, but a good thing because

>it gives weight to making a good selection in chargen

All in all, I hope he snorts fire ants.

>My wizard knew how to play guitar. It didn't help him, but he could do it.

Awesome. What benefit, on a systematic level, did having to take "can play guitar" grant you as opposed to something that you could have written in your back-story?

not a counterargument. i'll stick to what i said, your impotent rage fantasies notwithstanding.

Same as with any other skill: not only do I know that he can play guitar but also HOW WELL.

which means if I want to play eric clapton, i will probably have to spent a number of chargen resources on it. and i will probably be encouraged by the GM to buy advantages/feats/edges that bestow on my char some amount of wealth and notorierity. that these advantages make my shadowrunner/edgerunner/whatever character shoot with less precision (less skill points left) is just fine for a simulationist.

not that i expect the D&D crowd to get this. because to them it's making your character deliberately suboptimal, a "dumb decision". they're truly hopeless.

>not a counterargument. i'll stick to what i said, your impotent rage fantasies notwithstanding.

Of course it's not a counterargument. There's fucking nothing to argue about with that sentence. "X is good because *thing that fucking Monte Cook was embarrassed about 15 years ago*".

>Same as with any other skill: not only do I know that he can play guitar but also HOW WELL.

Which is irrelevant on a systematic level if you never mechanically interact with it. You could put "world class guitarist" in your backstory just as easily as "can kinda play smoke on the water intro", since the only thing it'll affect is your perception of your own character. You don't have to spend points on "fucked the hottest chick in college!" either. "but then how do I know how hot she was?"

>which means if I want to play eric clapton...

Sure, THEN it's important because you will be rolling it. But isn't Eric Clapton.

> that these advantages make my shadowrunner/edgerunner/whatever character shoot with less precision (less skill points left) is just fine for a simulationist.

Great for him! Combat isn't the only thing in Shadowrun so this is a fair trade, so of course you'd be left with less points for other things. Being a rock star will probably let you get into places you wouldn't otherwise be able to, not to mention being able to smuggle gear and shit like that. He's also probably really good at being a face, or a distraction. It'd be ideal if there was some sort of synergy bonus here maybe. There's no clash of gamism vs simulationism here, assuming the point costs are relatively balanced.

>not that i expect the D&D crowd to get this. because to them it's making your character deliberately suboptimal, a "dumb decision". they're truly hopeless.

The D&D crowd had been moving away from "you need to spend points to be able to tie your shoes well" for two editions now