The Bazaar #98: Core Rules System (Addendum)

(Skills Table)

GENERAL

The changes made in Chapter 4 – Skill Selection were largely a housekeeping exercise to clean up some of the language differences over the various RPGs, bringing the core mechanics of the Skills aspect of the various Palladium RPGs to a singular, baselined concept. The skills work exactly the same from one RPG line as they do in the next; not similar enough to get by, I mean they work EXACTLY the same. No worry about interpretation, or whether a skill has a certain percentage or skill description in one game and changes in another. You may have to tweak to work the skill from one Technology age to another, but largely things remain relevant in order to promote a smooth, free-flow of the game.

One of the things that wasn’t quite ready for inclusion in the The Bazaar #95: CRS Chapter 4 (Skill Selection) was the actual Skill Table. This was a question of time and space, and things just squeezed this one to the right in my calendar. That said, I’ve had the chance to circle back and develop the tables for the Skills and thought it time to demonstrate the updated CRS Skill Tables (both truncated and expanded) to provide a behind the scenes for what the CRS Project is doing and eventually proposing to Palladium Books as a Rifter submission.

DISCUSSION

General. As mentioned in The Bazaar #95: CRS Chapter 4 (Skill Selection), the compiled number of Skills and Skill Categories over the decades has likely gotten away from Kevin/Palladium Books’ total scope of the games. Some of these games develop in silo, and the thought to manage these with a ‘master,’ overarching system to integrate all the RPGs either never occurred or wasn’t fully realized. And honestly, given the number of RPGs we’re speaking about, over the time period we’re discussing, and the number of staff at Palladium Books, it’s no particular surprise, this is how things have developed. It sometimes takes someone ‘outside looking in’ to identify the issues, like having someone proofread a report you’ve read 25 times; no matter how many times you re-read it, you’re going to miss the obvious errors. It also helps that I’m leveraging a ‘systems approach’ that we use in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Skill Categories. Carved from across all the Palladium Books RPGs, the number comes in at a staggering total of 26 Skill Categories. For most GMs and Players, this really doesn’t make sense, and you’d be correct. The following table below demonstrates the problem space, as well as which Skill Categories are getting dropped. For those that balk at the idea of dropping these categories somehow ‘breaks’ the base game, you would be sorely mistaken. For the most part, the skills therein are simply re-rolled into other Skill Categories that remain extant. The solution is simply adjusting the Class’s skill selection criteria in Conversion Notes, and more times than not, it is a surprisingly and utterly benign process.

Number of Skills. There are 857 Skills. That is just an absolutely mind-boggling amount of skills. I knew it was a lot, but when I let Excel do the math for me, I had to go back and scan-estimate the numbers. Wouldn’t you know it? The math ‘maths’ just fine! And guess what, this doesn't account for ALL of them. If you go back and start selecting all the variations of Language Skills, Lore Skills, Mecha/Power Armor/Robot Combat Elite skills are available out there, things get silly, real fast. To say this was a daunting process would be a slight understatement. But, as mentioned before, we’re leveraging an approach I am very comfortable with, and found that it applies very well to this sort of “governance exercise” to validate the block of skills in front of us. In for penny, in for a pound, right?

Skill Rationalization. The justification process for these many skills was not something that happened in a single pass, nor did it happen in a bubble without considering the Character Creation processes of the various RPGs. For just about every Skill that was given a critical eye with a view to deletion (that wasn’t obviously covered by another identical skill elsewhere), I went back to the RPG in question and validated whether this broke the Class or the Skill Selection process. Generally, this was the process:

• First Pass (Duplication). This easily chopped around 100 skills from the block. There was a mountain of skills that were double-banked (e.g. Languages in Communications or Technical, Computer Operations in Computer or Technical).

• Second Pass (Skill Twins). Basically, two or more skills that describe something very similar but are named differently in two or more RPGs. In this case the duplicates were either deleted, or merged to create a more discrete skill that better provides for the GM/PC in order to conduct the Skill Checks in question without getting bogged down in the minutiae.

• Third Pass (Tradecraft Professional). Something long-since part of the game, I went back and identified which of the skills comes with the ability to select the skill another time to develop a ‘semi-professional’ capability, or even once more after that to develop a ‘professional’ expertise. For the most part, none of these changed.

• Fourth Pass (Specialization Skills). Once all the skills were placed in the appropriate Skill Categories, it became very evident that certain ‘skill trees’ developed. These are primarily based around Skill Prerequisites, whereby a PC must has Skill A before they are eligible to even consider Skill B, which really is a complement of Skill A. Unlike Tradecraft Professional, where dedication to a skill brings about greater capability, Specialization is in-depth theoretical/practical study of a field that reinforces the ‘parent skill.’

Single Table (One Table to Rule Them All). The baseline idea for this was to create a single table, something a GM/Player can look at on a single sheet of paper. The baseline table provides for a very rationalized set of skills, topping out just over 200 (207), which includes all the common Ancient and Modern Weapon Proficiencies. That provides roughly a 75% shave from the current Palladium Books library, and still provides the GM and Players with a wide variety to choose from. In addition, it also clearly identifies which are Secondary Skills without having to flip to a page within the rule book – like, ever. Secondly, the Baseline Skills Table also identifies Skills with either a Specialization or a Tradecraft Professional option. As we can see from the Expanded Skills Table examples below, it lists all the currently ‘saved’ Skills that were designated as Specializations, as well as those with Tradecraft Professional denoted beneath them. This table conveniently fits on two pages, so it could either be placed face-to-face in a book or printed double-sided as a hand-out.

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Skill Development Theory. In terms of use of skills, the game design theory behind the CRS Project is pretty simple. You’ll notice some of the percentages may have been changed, in particular where there is a Secondary Skill in a Skill Category that has an inherently higher Skill Base Percentage. This is based on two factors:

• Skill Checks. Generally, Skill Checks have been based on a sixth-level (6th) PC having anywhere between a 67% to 75% base chance for skill checks for their particular specialty. Before the GM imposes Skill Penalties or provides Skill Bonuses, this allows for a reasonably proficient PC to accomplish the majority of their tasks. Failure of these rolls also provides the GM a certain license to really amp the intensity and risk associated with the mission. For lower-level PCs (first to fourth level), there should not be any expectation that they are definitively going to succeed at their Skill Checks; the heroes of your favorite TV show or movie are typically not presented as beginning level characters. Alternatively, higher level PCs are likely under greater pressure or stress, meaning GM-imposed Skill Penalties may make near-impossible to fail situations less of a sure thing, making the roll a more dramatic effect. This is ultimately what you want, drama and intrigue, with some risk to make the PCs earn the rewards.

• Secondary Skills. If you recall from The Bazaar #95: CRS Chapter 4 (Skill Selection), Secondary Skills are proposed to be something any Player Character can roll against, regardless if they chose the skill or not. The PC that chose the Secondary Skills will continue to develop proficiency in that skill compared to the vast populace, but any PC/NPC theoretically could roll against the Base Skill percentage of any Secondary Skill. This could be as a discrete Skill Check, or during a Skill Challenge; recall that in most Skill Challenges there are likely Skill Penalties applied as well.

Wait, What About Setting Differences? The fact I’m presenting a singular Skills Table does nothing to remove the vast technological differences between the various settings of the Palladium books RPGs. The fact that a Rifts RPG (Technology Setting: High) PC with Computer Operations gets rifted into a Ninjas & Superspies setting (Technology Setting: Modern) has absolutely nothing to do with his baseline skill. The PC knows what they know, but are now dealing with utterly unknown technology (essentially alien) and should be penalized as such.

Case in Point: I genuinely laugh when I explain to Gen-Z soldiers/officers why the “Save As” button is shaped like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. Give them a modern cell phone with apps and watch them rule their universe; stick them in front of a Pentium computer running Windows 95 to access a FORTAN database and watch their world collapse around them.

GM/Player Group Flexibility. Ultimately this process was used to develop a flexible, yet robust framework from which any GM of Players can negotiate adding additional skills into the list as they see fit. If for some reason, there is a discrete skill to Helicopter you wish to apply (e.g. Helicopter is the baseline civilian model; the PC is specifically trained in the AH-64 Apache), then by all means add it! The aim of this exercise though, was to present a leaner, cleaner Skills Table that better presents Palladium Books a baseline to develop electronic tools in the future. It is infinitely easier to program an app for a smaller list of discrete fields such as Skills.

FINALIZED SKILL TABLE

The following is a screen capture of the single-page Skills List table, with Specialization and Tradecraft Professional options minimized. As you can see, a simple, single sheet of paper give both GMs and Players a quick and easy reference to the Skills List, annotating Secondary Skills and where to look for any of the likely Specializations and Tradecraft Professional Options.

Note: Apologies for the slightly blurry photo when you zoom in. I can only get so close to get a full page screen-capture.

CONCLUSION

So, there we have the finalization of the Tables that should have been initially presented back when The Bazaar #95: CRS Chapter 4 (Skill Selection) was published; apologies for the delay. The initial table was a bit chaotic, and instead of throwing up a piece of garbage, I deferred to a later blog post. Hopefully the return was worth the wait. Ultimately though, we’ve gone from over 800 Skills to just over 200; if we go back and include all the Specializations and Tradecraft Professional options, that adds back in another 200 options. The idea that the Palladium Books RPGs work on a functional 400 skill options is a pretty daunting figure to grasp. Most other RPGs have fairly limited skill sets, or certainly ones that pale in comparison. That said, I feel this is one of the gems of the Palladium books games; the personalization a Player can develop their PC through the Skill Selection process is a very engaging process.

Hopefully this fairly visual representation provides a better idea of what I’ve done while rationalizing the Skills Selection portion of the CRS Project. The majority of the Skills you know of from across most of the Palladium Books RPGs remain extant, perhaps just removed from their ‘normal’ position and placed elsewhere. The clean-up and removal of duplicates, skills that overlapped with each other or simply didn’t really below where they were and suddenly found themselves as low-hanging fruit ready to be chopped away was a surprisingly easy process once I started the analysis phases. After the fourth round, things had pretty much coalesced into the finalized tables as they’ve been presented.

And yet, this single page of skills, presented as it is, provides the GM and Players with enough information to get the ball rolling. It also gives the GM with a solid framework to develop any further skills they see fit within the overall scaffolding. You want to introduce some weird science skills from your campaign? There's likely already a skill you can nest it within. This was really the challenge for Chapter 4 - Skills. How to 'trim thefat,' so to speak, without breaking any of the game mechanics, but also leaving something that a GM could leverage within any of the other games. I'm not saying it's the 'Caramilk Secret' of solution space, but I believe it certainly gets us moving in that direction.

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