Skills aren’t commonly used in Powered by the Apocalypse games, and take different forms when they are:
- Skills as guaranteed hits (partial success, as in World of Dungeon)
- Skills to match moves against tags (weapon skill moves and weapon skill tags in Root)
- Skills to unlock new capabilities of a move (roguish feats, AKA “larcenous skills”, in Root)
- Skills as +1 (power tags in City of Mist).
One of the complaints about PbtA games is the loss of competence for PCs, with characters who should be good at something failing (the same thing happens with d20 systems, but I hear it more often for PbtA games). This perception was something that I wanted to address in my PbtA game Planet of the Week, which is strongly inspired by Star Trek, as Star Trek has been lovingly called “competence porn” [TV Tropes, safe for work!].
Skills provide a guarantee of at least one hit no matter the roll. In PotW, players roll 1 to 5 dice, depending on the stat referenced and on situational bonus dice; each result of 4, 5 or 6 lets them pick an additional choice. If they can narrate how their skill helped them accomplish the task, they can turn one miss (a roll of 3 or less) into a hit—
GM: As you come in for a landing near the rocket, a cryogeyser suddenly erupts, sending a burst of water vapor in the air, coating the shuttle with ice. You’ve lost maneuverability. You’re going to have to make a Hard Landing!
Pilot: I rolled and got 2 hits and a miss, but I’m going to turn my miss into a hit using my piloting skill.
GM: What’s that look like?
Pilot: The flight simulator I first used had an ice volcano scenario. This situation is a lot like that, and my training kicks in!
My initial exposure to this approach was in World of Dungeons, the thought experiment that took on a life of its own: what might Dungeon World have looked like in 1979?
If you have an applicable skill, you can’t miss. A roll of 6 or less counts as a partial success, but with a bigger compromise or complication than a 7-9 result.
Once Wizards of the Coast released the D&D 5e SRD under a Creative Commons license, I created a 5e-style skill system for Dungeon World. It’s become one of my top 10 most downloaded games. So it was only natural that I integrated skills into Planet of the Week.
I developed PotW in an agile way, getting it to the table early and then iterating. But in the initial flush of design, I was obsessed about creating: new moves, new playbooks, new skills. Only later did the design effort shift to streamlining and homing in on what works best.
Somehow I had ended up with a list of 47 skills, which was way too many for a new player to review and choose from (though still a lot fewer than the GURPS skill list!). (Not included in this total are two skill-like systems, specific to playbooks. The Android and the Bioformer each can upgrade themselves, with those upgrades mechanically acting as skill, e.g., the xenolinguistic database for the Android and enhanced adrenal glands for the Bioformer.)
Fortunately, all but one of my campaigns and one-shots had been played online, using Google Sheets character keepers. For the one in-person campaign, I contacted the players for their skill lists. So I was able to go through all the playbooks and review every player’s choices and tally them up. This revealed that only 33 of the skills had been used, so 14 skills no one had ever picked. Obviously I removed those 14.
Was 33 for Planet of the Week still too many? I looked at other games to see what they had:
| Game | # Skills |
|---|---|
| World of Dungeons | 9 |
| WoDu Remix | 16 |
| Dungeons & Dragons 5e | 18 |
| Root | 19 (10 weapons skills + 9 roguish feats) |
| Planet of the Week | |
| Traveller (1977) | 25 |
| GURPS | 398 |
Steve, on the Sci-Fi RPG Collective, shared even more:
Some other games’ skill numbers:
- Pathfinder 2e: 18 skills + Lore (which has an arbitrary number of subcategories, each PC starts with at least one) + Perception (which is kind of skill-like despite progressing differently)
- Fading Suns 2e: 9 Natural skills (that everybody knows a little bit of) and 79-ish learned skills (that you won’t know if you’re not trained, a few need further specialization, like Performance which breaks down into singing, dance, etc., though quite a few are already partially split out in the book and I counted them separately)
- Cyberpunk Red: 63 + Languages (you get some points in one for free, but can speak any number more) + Local Expert (for different local areas) + Martial Arts (each style is it’s own skill)
- Shadowrun 5e: 64 Active skills + Exotic weapon skills (one per weapon) + Knowledge Skills (an arbitrary number of them, including languages, each PC starts with a Native language and some points for other knowledge or language skills)
- AD&D 2e: 28 general Non-weapon Proficiencies + 36 more available only to certain class groups
I compared my design specificall to 5e, which has 18 skills. The skills in both 5e and Planet of the Week are organized by stat (e.g., Athletics under Strength for 5e, Alien Languages under Diplomacy for PotW). While 5e doesn’t go for balance across stats (Strength has 1 skill, Intelligence and Wisdom each have 5), I decided to go for an even 4 skills per stat, for 20 total.
This took some doing, before I ended up with:
| DPL | MED | OPS | SCI | TAC |
| Cultural Anthropology | Emergency Medicine | Applied Engineering | Planetary Science | Close Combat |
| First Contact Protocols | Field Medicine | Computer Programming | Quantum Physics | Piloting |
| Negotiation Tactics | Medical Technology | Maintenance Overhaul | Subspace Theory | Search & Rescue |
| Xenolinguistics | Xenophysiology | Systems Integration | Xenobiology | Weapons Systems |
One thing this system presupposes is that the skills will come in useful in play: while most skills can be used in most adventures, I’ve specifically written situations where specific skills (e.g., subspace theory) could be useful.
This streamlined approach has worked well in subsequent playtesting. It’s easy to get caught up in creating, harder to realize the need to prune back. You could say it’s a skill.
Photos on Unsplash by Zach Lucero for “Athletics”, Anton Danilov for “Stealth”, Aditya Saxena for “Survival”, and Curated Lifestyle for “Leadership.”
You can download related essays in my free ebook, Reflections on PbtA Design.
