Some Alternate Skill Systems (Part 2)

Last time, I talked about dice pool systems in games like Vampire: the Masquerade and Animon Story.

Today, I'm gonna talk Skill Modifier systems.

D&D is the most famous example of a game that uses flat modifiers to dice rolls for Skills, but before I get into that, I wanna talk about Break!!

Let's! Talk! About! BREAK!!

In Break!!, the core resolution mechanic looks something like this:

You have an "Aptitude", the base value of which is chosen by your class (a "Calling" in this system). Aptitudes are the equivalent of Attributes, and include Might, Deft, Grit, Insight, and Aura. As you level up, your base value in these Aptitudes will increase by set amounts.

So, for example, a Battle Princess starts the game with a Might score of 8, while a Sage has a Might of 6. This can then be increased or decreased by various sources, including Quirks (typically a +1 or -1) and Traits.

Bonuses and Penalties are larger modifiers, granting +2, +4, -2, or -4. If you have a particular "Purview", which is the equivalent of a Skill, you always gain a +2 Bonus from that source.

So, these modifiers give you your target number for a dice roll. Let's say we're doing a Might Check. Our Battle Princess has a +1 from her Quirks, a +2 from her Purview, and a +4 from another Bonus, for a total of +7, giving her a total of 13 Might at the start of the game.

• In a Might Check, the Battle Princess needs to equal or roll below her target number on a d20.
• Thanks to her modifiers, the Battle Princess has a target number of 13.
• The Battle Princess has a 65% chance of success, cuz she STRONK.
• If she has an Edge in this check, she can roll twice, taking the best result, granting her an 87.75% chance of success! Think of Advantage in D&D, that's what this is.
• A Snag is the opposite of an Edge; you roll twice, taking the worst result.

The Dragon Game

In Dungeons & Dragons, Skills have evolved over the editions, somewhat. In 3.5 edition, Skill checks were handled by:

• Roll 1d20, and add your Skill modifier.
• Skill modifiers are made up of a Skill rank plus an Ability modifier (typically ranging from -5 to +5, depending on your Ability score, which can range from 1 to about 30 for monsters, but usually ranging from 3 to 20 for player characters)
• Skill ranks range from 0 to 3 plus your level.
• Racial traits (e.g., from being a dwarf, an elf, a halfling, etc) can add or subtract from both Ability modifiers and Skill modifiers.
• Compare the result to the difficulty class (DC).
• A success is a result that meets or exceeds the DC.

Very granular! So, in theory, a level 1 character could have a Skill modifier of +8, or even as high as +10 or +12 with the right Racial traits. For an easy Skill check, say a DC 12, you would always succeed on that, but even a harder DC, say, an 18, would only require you to roll a 6 or higher (of which you have a 75% chance!)

In 5th edition, they slimmed this down a great deal. Now, instead of Skill modifiers, you have Proficiency Bonuses.

• At level 1, a Proficiency Bonus (PB) is +2.
• You add your PB (if trained in a Skill) to your Ability modifier (unchanged from 3.5e) to calculate your total bonus.
• So, the maximum (assuming an Attribute of 20) that you can achieve is +7 (or +9 if you have "Expertise" in a Skill*).
• Any other modifiers are instead "Advantage" (roll twice on the d20 and take the highest result) and "Disadvantage" (roll twice and take the lowest result)

*Expertise is entirely possible at early levels; you can take the "Skill Expert" feat from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, or you can gain it from the Rogue class (either 2014 or 2024 versions).

Effectively, Expertise has you double your PB. Handy stuff! But let's say you don't have Expertise, but you've angled for a +5 to an Ability score, and you've got yourself a +7 bonus. On a DC of 18, you need to roll at least an 11 (or a 9 for Expertise). Rolling at or above 11 has roughly a 50/50 chance of happening (very balanced, I must say!), while Expertise and your 9 has a 60% chance. Not as much of a sure thing as it was in 3.5e, but still fairly likely!

An example of what an array of Skill modifiers looks like in 5e:

I'd wager most RPG fans know how to play 5e, but the long and the short of it is: my character's PB (+4) is added for skills I'm proficient in (the filled-in boxes in the "Skills" list), and the Ability modifier (the big +X under "Intelligence", "Wisdom", etc) is added to every roll, as every Skill has an associated Attribute.

Both versions of D&D (at least, that I own) act as a kind of inverse of Break!!. Instead of rolling below the target number, you're rolling above. Older editions went with a "roll under" system (anybody remember THAC0?), though I'm not sure why they chose "roll over" for 3rd edition. Maybe bigger numbers feel more heroic?

Can I Use A Modifier System?

Some interesting things about modifiers:

• A single dice controls everything.
• Factors which improve or hinder your chances of success come in small amounts, leading to high granularity.
• Encourages min-maxing, as you accumulate modifiers from a wide range of sources to achieve your ideal Attribute score.

And, arguably the most important for my needs:

• If using a "roll under the target number" system (Break!!), modifiers should add to the TN, not the roll. If you add them to the roll, you're increasing your odds of failure, as the TN is the number you want to be bigger!
• If using a "roll over" system (D&D), add modifiers to the roll, as you're trying to roll a bigger number than the TN.

If I'm using a modifier system, I feel like it's incompatible with a dice pool system. Rolling a pool of, say, 5 or so dice, counting up the result, counting matches or successes, and then adding more numbers on top of that? It's a LOT.

It does however, make for a very crunchy game! I could greatly expand character creation to include all sorts of little quirks and bonuses--perhaps a lifepath system that has +1s and -1s handed out like candy to really drill down into the minutia.

(I want to touch on lifepaths in a later blog in greater detail, but here's an example of how it works in the granddaddy of 'em all, Traveller)

Hessan's County, on Youtube

An example of some of the random events that might occur during character creation in Traveller:

If I rolled a 6 on my 2d6 roll, I can roll my Education "Characteristic" (Characteristics are Traveller's version of Attributes). If I get an 8 or higher, I can take any one Skill of my choice (going from a 0 in that Skill to 1). Not half bad!

Traveller doesn't have free quickstart rules, but you can get a pdf of the core rules for £0.75 (about 1.46 Australian dollarydoos) from the Mongoose Publishing website, which includes all character creation options.

A Life Well Lived, by Cubicle 7, also introduces a lifepath system to D&D 5th edition (I genuinely prefer this approach to character creation over both the 2014 Player's Handbook and the 2024 one). The Glass Cannon Network did a Let's Play (more of a Let's Create in this case) that shows off how this system works in D&D terms:

From the Glass Cannon Network, on Youtube

Sidenote, Glass Cannon are who first got me interested in Vampire: The Masquerade and Star Trek Adventures. Definitely check them out! (The V:tM playlist is here).

But yeah, lifepaths with a crunchy modifier-based system could work! It'll mean losing the "learn by doing" system I've settled on, but maybe a bit of crunch is worth it? It really depends, though, on whether I'm going to include crunch elsewhere. I don't want an overly crunchy game.

I want something that people can sit down and play in a one-shot, but that has enough versatility to become part of a long-running campaign. Rules that are TOO complex kills any chance of regular play for many tables, I feel. Most D&D groups are hesitant to pick up a new system that they have to learn from scratch, and I suspect that's why many indie RPGs have comparatively simpler rules with a core mechanic that can be explained in a single page.