This was a subject matter that was covered on my site recently but one I wanted to pitch on this forum because it's quite possible it's a stupid idea.

I've been recently play-testing with my gaming group a game I've been working on that is something of a cross between The Invisible College meets Hunter the Reckoning original, mechanics and of invisible college, but the themes and lore more inspired by Reckoning.

One of the ideas I discussed and which my players thought was kind of cool was, what if every mundane skill worked like Attainment in Invisible College? mainly what if skills had a range of 0-100, the bonus for skill checks being 1/10th the skill score.

And at the end of every session you tally every skill you rolled with success and roll a percentile equal or greater, it goes up by +1.

This to me seems like it'd have a much more natural skill progression than simply assigning skill points every level up for mundane stuff, you get better at using skills, by literally using those skills.

Sounds like a mix of Star Frontiers and RuneQuest.

Collage =/= College

It could work. I would also add two successes for every critical failure rolled. You learn as much, or more from mistakes than you do from success.

I see some problems with this approach.

1) Why does it matter whether you succeeded or not? You can learn just as much from failure. And as a starting character, you'll be failing a lot, and as GM there is good reason to reward failure.

2) Having to roll to see if your skills advance completely sucks. I say this from experience as a former Runequest player. It's hard enough to be a starting character without being unable to spend your xp. Especially when you then lose that xp.

3) By its nature, this will cause some players to advance faster than others, for no reason other than sheer dumb luck. That's not good. And if you say "over time it will all even out," you're wrong. The odds are exactly the same for each roll. The dice have no memory, and someone who pulls ahead because of a streak of lucky rolls is likely to stay ahead. And someone who falls behind is unlikely to catch up.

4) If you think it's bad when people get shafted once on advancement, wait until it happens twice right out of the gate. And it will happen twice to somebody. I wouldn't expect that player to come back.

5) How do you buy up new skills that you don't already have? What if nobody bought Cartography?

6) In Runequest, this encouraged what was called the "golf bag" approach, where players carried around a (figurative) golf bag full of different weapons, each of which they would use exactly once per session, to maximize their chances of getting a successful advancement check.

7) Some find the extra bookkeeping during play to be distracting. And the time spent rolling skill advancement checks comes out of game time.

Basically, this is point buy with extra steps. And those extra steps are problematic.

I wouldn't use it for normal skill progression but there are two ways I think it might be useful.

First is getting a new skill.  IRL, there are several skills that have a first success barrier that can frustrate novices.  A good example is learning to ride a bike.

The second is overcoming a developmental plateau.  In your example of 0-100, what if 70 is the normal max someone can obtain through the usual skill development but you can break through this ceiling through intense training and pushing yourself to the limit until you finally overcome the limit. 

I would also add that even a failure shouldn't result in no positive results.  If a player rolls and fails to achieve attainment, then perhaps a point could be added to attempt counter that accumulates until the success happens.  Maybe this can be a roll modifier that makes the next attempt a little easier or maybe it can give an automatic success once a player has made 10 or so attempts.

This is similar to how Call of Cthulhu does it.  It works but there are some problems.

It encourages players to roll as many checks for as many skills as possible hoping to get a success.  Characters will do things just to get rolls so they can maybe advance. 

Certain skills will go up much faster than others.  It will be whatever skills the GM calls for the most rolls with.  In CoC this is usually spot hidden, listen and library use.  Skills that rarely come into play will rarely if ever advance.   

If you're interested in keeping players at least potentially in sync with each other, the way I came up with was to have one skill advance per session but you got to roll in your choice of order based on skills you meaningfully used (whether successfully or unsuccessfully) in game.   You kept rolling until you ran out or succeeding in upping a skill.   Any sessions where no roll was successful was "banked" for the next session(s) until it succeeded.  For example, if you failed two games in a row, you'd be able to roll potentially three increases on different skills if you got lucky after the third game.  It's not perfect as you'd still only increase an individual skill once in that third session (as opposed to potentially multiple times if repeatedly successful over multiple games) but at least the attempts we're lost completely and characters stayed roughly on par with each other.   This was a d20 system though so for percentile it may be better to have multiple successful rolls allowable per session due to the greater granularity there.

Quote from: yosemitemike on April 28, 2024, 04:46:38 AMThis is similar to how Call of Cthulhu does it.  It works but there are some problems.

It encourages players to roll as many checks for as many skills as possible hoping to get a success.  Characters will do things just to get rolls so they can maybe advance. 

Certain skills will go up much faster than others.  It will be whatever skills the GM calls for the most rolls with.  In CoC this is usually spot hidden, listen and library use.  Skills that rarely come into play will rarely if ever advance.   

Exactly. And as much as we want to claim "rulings over rules" and just explain the Players and tell them to avoid metagame to stack successes, its just going to happen no matter what.

The players will eventually wise up and try to come up with ways to justify rolling for stuff. Its something that makes sense in theory but in practice you get Skyrim characters letting themselves be hit by crabs by the river to raise their Heavy Armor skill.

One way to go about it is that advancement requires GM approval, but by that point you can just cut the middleman and then have your players get GM approval to just buy skill ups with XP.

As Lurkndog said, this is just point buy with extra steps and opens up the door for a lot of metagaming/powergaming for very little added value.

I agree with some of the objections, but they seem easy to address: you skill spend XP as you want, but you can only spend them if you successfully roll over a skill you used.

If you use multiple skills, you get to choose which you want to try to advance first. If you fail in all your rolls, you can start again etc.

Quote from: Lurkndog on April 27, 2024, 09:28:32 PMI see some problems with this approach.

1) Why does it matter whether you succeeded or not? You can learn just as much from failure. And as a starting character, you'll be failing a lot, and as GM there is good reason to reward failure.

2) Having to roll to see if your skills advance completely sucks. I say this from experience as a former Runequest player. It's hard enough to be a starting character without being unable to spend your xp. Especially when you then lose that xp.

3) By its nature, this will cause some players to advance faster than others, for no reason other than sheer dumb luck. That's not good. And if you say "over time it will all even out," you're wrong. The odds are exactly the same for each roll. The dice have no memory, and someone who pulls ahead because of a streak of lucky rolls is likely to stay ahead. And someone who falls behind is unlikely to catch up.

4) If you think it's bad when people get shafted once on advancement, wait until it happens twice right out of the gate. And it will happen twice to somebody. I wouldn't expect that player to come back.

5) How do you buy up new skills that you don't already have? What if nobody bought Cartography?

6) In Runequest, this encouraged what was called the "golf bag" approach, where players carried around a (figurative) golf bag full of different weapons, each of which they would use exactly once per session, to maximize their chances of getting a successful advancement check.

7) Some find the extra bookkeeping during play to be distracting. And the time spent rolling skill advancement checks comes out of game time.

Basically, this is point buy with extra steps. And those extra steps are problematic.

Well I disagree with that final statement, nor did you offer an alternative.

But to put it simply skills also progress on level up, or have a chance to, as I'm taking the RPGpundit approach of random level benefits, sometimes its extra HP, a boost to an attribute or 1d6+1 to a skill of choice. still random but it even's out. and you tally multiple skills, all skills you had success with or crit failed with have a chance of improving after the session, so it's very unlikely you get zero improvement.

And as well my system is pretty lethal in that OSR style tradition, the expectation is character may not live very long, so any one character plowing ahead of the others is not a very big issue.

Having played a few d100/BRP games, I don't like this form of advancement. Others have pointed out several problems, chief among which, IMO, players will find any excuse to use certain skills just so they can advance. And if the GM isn't aware of the problem, the whole game devolves into the same 5 skills being used all the time because that's what the players are good at.

I much prefer simple point buy. A character could have been studying, practicing, or learning from another character, and we don't need to role play those activities, so just assume it happened and move on with the actual game.

I don't hate the RQ version of this, but I prefer some of the later spins on it.  Can't remember which parts of this are in later RQ versus MRQ versus Legend.

- You can only improve 3 things, no matter how many things you tried. 
- You still need to try things to improve them, but it's just a check mark. 
- The difference between failing and succeeding at improvement is +1% versus a random, modestly higher bosot (like 2-4%).
- The skills are more limited in number and more carefully curated to be useful--still a wide range but nothing so niche you can't try it.
- Skills start a little higher than early RQ--so trying something isn't a killer.

The effect is that most of the negatives others have mentioned above go away or are so muted that the only people who would object are those who hate the whole idea or really do want to control and balance every detail (in which case, point buy would be better).  It does even out over time.  In fact, the biggest effect is that people with starting scores can get them into competent range without too much trouble, and then advancement slows down--which is part of the point.

I don't like how any of these games handle percentage near/over 100, but that's a different critique, and often a side effect of doing a d100 roll under game of any stripe.
 

Quote from: Eric Diaz on April 28, 2024, 08:29:00 PMI agree with some of the objections, but they seem easy to address: you skill spend XP as you want, but you can only spend them if you successfully roll over a skill you used.

That still gives players an incentive to find any excuse they can to make to make checks so they can succeed at one and advance that skill.  I had a player who wanted to go to a start a fight at a random bar in every scenario so he could make brawl checks to advance his brawl skill.  I had to say no because otherwise a chunk of every session would have been taken up by a pointless bar brawl.  That's just one example of players using whatever excuse they could come up with to make checks to advance their skills.  If the system gives players an incentive to do something, they are going to do it.

I like this idea, it's something I've been toying with (again with a VTT system), but as others as posted it is not without it's problems.  Player abuse being one, maybe the most, significant issue.

Part of that can be handled by the GM.  A simple "No, you don't get a skill point for letting the kid hit your armor" would suffice in most circumstances I think.  At worst, a talk with the problem player may be necessary, and perhaps a swift boot off the table.

@yosemitemike

Case in point, my approach to that player would have been.  "Well, now that you've started the fight, your butt is in jail.  Oh, by the way, you can add a skill point to the 'pick up the soap' skill."