Hacking 2e: Skills and the Nonweapon Proficiency System – Part 7 (Coda)

Surprise. The write-up on alignment is taking a bit longer than I anticipated, life is being life, and I really like the idea of having 7 parts (a la Rod) over just 6. So, consider this a coda to the preceding series.

The rules laid out in the prior post detail a division of use: passive and active. Active is boilerplate and unsurprising; if a skill would come into play, and the task has a chance of failure for one so trained, then an Ability check occurs without penalty or restriction. Passive is seemingly simpler, in that it gives the character auto-success features, but I think it’s the more interesting function of these skills. Whereas active use may be more exciting and even dramatic, the passive use guarantees a more open and reactive world, while cementing a given character’s identity.

Let me explain through two other games.

 

1. Fallout: New Vegas

One of my favorite video games, and arguably one of the best RPGs of all time, Fallout: New Vegas follows the convention of its earlier titles by offering skills. In a break from its antecedents, it innovates on this feature by replacing the probability-based check with a score-based check. Rather than having a chance of succeeding on the skill, with higher scores offering better probabilities, you succeed automatically on the skill if the score is high enough (and also get a very funny option if it’s not).

This implementation is brilliant, and not only for eliminating the incentive for save scumming. Players who have invested in a particular skill are immediately rewarded for their choices, and based on the choices made in a particular run, players will see unique options that wouldn’t have been available in other playthroughs. The game reacts to skill investment made hours earlier, tying the player’s avatar closer to the world of Fallout, instead of adding a bonus to a random chance for the chosen strengths to have their intended effects.

I love this. If I throw everything I’ve got into Medicine, then my Courier should be able to complete the medical procedure without the chance that it just goes belly-up. I clearly tried to build the Medicine Guy, so just let me be the Medicine Guy. Fallout: New Vegas does exactly that.

 

2. Disco Elysium

While writing these past couple months, I’ve also been playing Disco Elysium for the first time. I’m confident that had I not done this, these entries on skills would have been twice as long and only constituted three parts. However, I have no regrets. The game is fantastic; I can see why everyone recommended it to me when I told them I was a fan of Planescape: Torment. Also, had I not played it, I wouldn’t have experienced one of the best features of any skill-based interactive game: hidden skill checks.

Throughout the game, the system is making skill checks in the background, constantly determining what information is unlocked to the player as they interact with the world. Like Fallout: New Vegas, the player will have vastly different experiences based on the choices they make during skill selection and as a result of upgrades. Unlike that game, this is accomplished without any choice by the player; it just happens. Information that was freely provided by the narration in one run-through will be totally absent in another. Options will appear that wouldn’t have been available had the player not invested into particular skills. The game is constantly, and secretly, giving the player a cookie for having made a specific type of character.

I’d prefer that it didn’t rely on a random roll, but instead used score-based checks to deliver the narrative payload reliably. Still, the game essentially accomplishes this through a plethora of ‘trivial’ checks, so the end result is close enough for me.

 

3. Passive Skills as Tool and Reward

Both these games do something which I find very useful: they allow the character’s skills to consistently unlock gameplay that wouldn’t normally have been available. I believe the passive aspects of my redesigned skills can accomplish the same feat.

For the DM, it’s a tool, and for the player, it’s a reward. The player with the Knowledge or Religion skill is going to constantly encounter information that is accessible only to them, freely given as part of possessing the skill, while the DM is given a direct mechanism for lore dumps and worldbuilding. The player with the Tracking skill will be able to hunt down that enemy who fled town, and the DM can be assured that they can provide that scenario without the fear that a player is going to whiff the roll and derail the whole thing. The player with Deception can blend into the crowd, and the DM can offer covert tasks that won’t threaten to devolve into chaos.

Implied in this benefit is the responsibility of the DM to actually use these skills in the design of their sessions. If the player has taken Riding and Survival, it’s incumbent upon the DM to make sure there are options to ride animals or overcome the wilderness. Acrobatic characters should find narrow beams, deceptive characters should find fakes, and religious characters should find churchy stuff.

This is something I find quite difficult to do in 2e, with its 65 very specific choices. Many of my players’ picks tend to get ignored, as there’s only so many times you can find an avenue to implement Set Snares. This is a more feasible task with a smaller set. Obviously, you can’t always fit every skill into every scene and session, but you can certainly do it over a few sessions when the list is both smaller in size and broader in scope.

 

4. The Point

In short, my point is this: not only should skills have effects that don’t rely on active skill checks, but those skills should also shape the world that’s presented to the player in a way that rewards them for building a specific type of character, while simultaneously giving the DM a simple way to do so.

That’s it. This has just been a small addendum to the prior entries, but I thought I’d finish with this final argument in support of passive skill features, and the accompanying explanation of where my mind has wandered as I wrote. Also, I just needed to write something that didn’t require a lot of research.

Next time: alignment. For sure.