Notes on Skills 2

Exactly two years and a day ago [from when this article was originally posted], I posted my Notes on Skills [reposted here], and quite coincidentally I have been thinking about skills in Fudge again. The most important thing to remember about skills is that they need to be self-explanatory, especially if you desire to comply with one of the major design principles of Fudge, which is not having to look things up during the game. This coincides with another design principle: not being required to translate the information on one's character sheet into one's native language in order to comprehend it. A skill ought to be instantly recognizable for what it is and generally what capabilities it confers.

Some may balk at the notion of skills taken at face value. They want precise rules governing the use of any skill. They want rules about range, duration, frequency, extent, effort, efficiency, etc. They want to know precisely how well a skill is executed upon a Fair result, or a Good result, or any other result. They want to know exactly what their characters can and cannot do when they use that skill. It all misses the point.

What is the point of trying to pin down the "objective" nature of a Great result when one doesn't even possess that skill in reality? What game designer can claim to be an expert on every skill or area of knowledge? With the exception of very few games (early The Morrow Project is the only one that comes to mind), no player is expected to know a character's skill well enough that he or she can describe every action accurately and in detail. (One of my favorite Call of Cthulhu experiences certainly would not have been possible. I played a motion picture director/producer, one friend played my character's doctor and longtime chum, and another friend played a jazz trumpet player from New Orleans. I'm not a filmmaker, my first friend isn't a doctor, and my second friend plays piano, not trumpet — and he isn't from New Orleans.) If we all had to be qualified in reality to play the characters we portray in a game, then role-playing would have died swiftly and quietly in the night a long time ago.

This, then, is my defense of a list of skills with real world definitions that the casual reader can understand, rather than an itemization of bonuses, penalties, timetables, restrictions, and prerequisites. If the skill is listed on a character sheet, the player should know instantly what it means unless the player doesn't know what the word means in the real world. That is why my skill list has brief definitions. (And the Big Chart has no definitions.) There are a few exceptions, but they are infrequent and brief enough to be easily memorized, and they are entirely logical.

That being said, I still haven't defined the martial arts skills, but rest assured they will be easy to understand, easy to remember, and they will make sense — as soon as I can get around to it...

[Originally posted in Fudgery.net/fudgerylog on 18 February 2009.]