Improving Skills in Percentile Systems

Every now and again I will read a percentile based system and find out that skills increase in this way:

>If a player uses a skill during the session/mission/etc, at the end they roll against that skill and if they roll over then the skill improves.

how well does this work, because It seems to me that players would spend their missions trying to use every skill they have so they make more of those improvement checks at the end. It also seems to me that there is little method to increase skills unless the GM makes sure even the obscure skills show up.

for those who run Percentile games that the RAW of the ruleset uses this method, what do you do? any specific houserules for this, or is Rules as written not as bad?

This system works for one main reason. It allows the characters to adapt to the existing campaign. Skills that are repeatedly relevant will increase more often, while skills that get sidelined weren't much use anyway.

If you take two identical CoC groups and one becomes museum robbers/historians and the other goes around shooting up cultist hideouts, at the end, the two groups will be very different skill-wise. That's the point.

Of course, there is the
>i try to pick the lock on the vending machine so i can roll to upgrade later haha i'm beating the system
problem. I propose a two part solution.

1) Don't play with those people.
2) Don't play with a GM that allows that.

I've run games that use that advancement system before and it worked fine, but I'm a relatively improvisational GM and I (and my players) never put too much stress on the mechanics, and so we never experienced the issue of folks trying to use every skill possible in order to game the system. You could always put a cap on the number of skills somebody could advance (whether that's something like "any six you used" or "the six you relied on most crucially" as decided by the GM) and/or only allow advancement on skills that received legitimate usage.

Great post, thanks

>It seems to me that players would spend their missions trying to use every skill they have so they make more of those improvement checks at the end.
Nah, it's not that bad. You only get a handful of skill rolls more than you'd have otherwise and you just roll with it. Players are generally not retarded enough to fully game the system.

Also, the way we play it you only get an advancement roll when you score a critical success which further discourages trying.

>If a player uses a skill during the session/mission/etc, at the end they roll against that skill and if they roll over then the skill improves.
During all those years I've played percentile systems with progression systems like this, I've encountered three problems:

>The Above Mentioned
Even a good group will have this to some degree. It's natural, you want your character to be stronger, so you think a bit more in terms of "How can I use this and that skill just for the hell of it?" It's a lot worse with Systems where repeated use nets you additional gains. I can't remember which game it was, but one gave you a roll for every rolly you did that session. It ended with characters leaving every room by backflipping and spending every downtime shooting cans or throwing shit at each other to dodge it.
In a regular game, with a regular group it's usually not that bad. You can live with it, honestly.

>Players not getting to skill what they want
Now that's a bit of a bigger pickle. I've often found that players are pretty much confined to what happens in the story and the GM's whims to a certain degree, without going out of their way to find some excuse to roll on it. This is especially bad in systems that have no preset rules for training, so a character can't even use any significant downtime to try and get better. Having no way to let your character get better at what you want him too feels kinda crappy.

>Slow progression feels shitty
This is something I've encountered in nearly all games. The fact that you can increase your skills and several of them every single game necessitates that they increase slowly. Thing is, anything below 5% feels nonexistant in a percentile system. Even if, in reality, you gain about 6 or 7% within two sessions in several skills, so you have a factual significant increase across several skills, it just feels worse to the human brain.

So I've been toying with an idea. How about having both some sort of direct input "XP" mechanic, and a cap on how many skill-ups you get per session?
Say, for example, you can only roll to increase three of the skills you used this session, no matter how many you rolled on. And in addition to that, you can skill up two additional ones you can pick freely.

>Players not getting to skill what they want
>Slow progression feels shitty
Games like Harnmaster supplement these progression rules with rules for training in downtime.

> feels worse to the human brain.
Can't agree more. Even if a skill used increase by 1% at the end of the session (meaning after 10 sessions the skill increases 10%), that 1% FEEL like nothing.

What if at certain intervals the characters unlocks a perk/feat relevant to the skill?

And, of course, a downtime training.

>Players not getting to skill what they want
this is the biggest issue to me, and it especially feels like it could be a bummer in situations where you fail BECAUSE you haven't had the opportunity to train the skill you wanted to train

it also makes 'edge case' skills more or less irrelevant - if you choose one of the things you're good at to be something that might not come up often, and you can only level it by doing that thing often..
well, it just won't scale well enough to be useful when it does come up. it'd be completely wasted.
the alternative to that is of course going out of your way to force that skill into whatever situations you can just to train it and make it reliable, but that can lead to

I like the Mythras rules:
>Players gain 2-4 XP rolls per session
>They can use those to attempt to improve skills by 1d4+1 (or more) when they roll above, or they increase by 1 if they roll below.
>Any fumbled skills automatically go up by 1%
>3 XP rolls teaches a new skill
>Players can pay for training to increase skills without XP rolls (which can be dramatic increases), though the improvement doesn't take effect until they use an XP roll on the skill.

It solves a lot of the weak points, especially if the players are need a crash course on an unforeseen important skill.

I haven't heard of a skill system like that, but it sounds bad to me, and might lead to a rich-get-richer syndrome, because for each good roll, all subsequent rolls will be easier.

I'd do it the other way, where if the roll is failed, then it gets levelled up, which would create increasing difficulty at boosting a given stat as you progress in the game.

However, not checking for every stat, but a limited number, would encourage them to check for attributes that are useful to their character, but maybe not completely let the others atrophy.

or make them find a different vending machine every time
or make the cops address their activities

The "roll on a crit" rule is literally the rule from CoC that this all originates from.

It should also be noted that as you're rolling over rather than under, the chance of improving your score with the improvement roll diminishes as your skill improves, so what happens over time is that everyone gets competent (~50% chance of success) at tasks that come up most often, with characters who specialised in common tasks at CHARGEN getting only a little rather than a lot ahead of other characters, so their specialisation is still useful (because the difference between a 10% higher skill than the rest of the group isn't nothing)

Or just say you don't learn anything from doing something that didn't challenge you in any way.

>might lead to a rich-get-richer syndrome, because for each good roll, all subsequent rolls will be easier.
Read closely what OP wrote:
>at the end they roll against that skill and if they roll over then the skill improves.
That means you improve only when you FAIL an unmodified test after scenario.

>However, not checking for every stat, but a limited number, would encourage them to check for attributes that are useful to their character, but maybe not completely let the others atrophy.
Again, all problems are fixed if you can pick and train specific skills between sessions.

but then shouldn't more challenging things improve you more?

If you actually chime in during planning in games its usually possible to set up a situation where you get to use some weird skills.

That's generally how it works in RAW for BRP, if you're a petty thief who's terrible at lockpicks getting some snacks from a vending machine will help, but if you're deft with it you just do it automatically and it doesn't mean anything. You don't level up at driving for traveling down the local interstate basically.

Since it looks like this got answered thoroughly, what is everyones fav percentile systems?

I really can't decide between CoC/Runequest, Harnmaster and Dark Heresy/WFRP.

>how well does this work, because It seems to me that players would spend their missions trying to use every skill they have

That's totally okay and pretty much only improves gameplay. Players handling situations in a variety of ways makes for more interesting games than them doing everything one way.