Any table top rpgs with good skill resolution system?

[clash]

Basically what the title says. Dnd and several others have complex combat systems but when it comes to a skill challenge it is typically one roll one and done. Are there any systems that have a little bit more detailed skill resolution system?

[GloatingSwine]

Can you give an example of the sort of steps you think should be involved in skill resolution?

One and done rolls tend to exist where it's hard to make the steps along the way interesting. Combat is usually in depth because it is easy to break it up into lots of discrete steps, each of which have variability in outcome which meaningfully affects the next decisions the players make.

[Rakaydos]

Basically what the title says. Dnd and several others have complex combat systems but when it comes to a skill challenge it is typically one roll one and done. Are there any systems that have a little bit more detailed skill resolution system?

Shoutouts to the FFG Star Wars/Genesys system.

Skills (which include combat skills) use a variation of a dice pool system, including both good dice for your ability and skill and bad dice for the difficulty and risk, with custom symbols on them to reflect both succes/failure AND advantage/complication.

So after the skill check, Luke skywalker might successfully delay pursuit through the death star by blasting door controls, only to realize, as complications, he also blasted the controls to extend the bridge. (but spends a destiny point to declare that all stormtrooper uniforms have a grapple hook, even on a space station...)

[Vahnavoi]

Yes, but they do not generalize well. Which is just as well, because the roll-and-done gameplay is created by using one, simple, abstract general system for virtually all types of skills.

For example, you can resolve deciphering a secret message or code by having players actually decipher a secret message or code - a higher skill gives more hints, particularly bad skill gives red herrings or outright false hints.

You can turn a criminal investigation or other information gathering into a minigame of Twenty Question, a la Commune in D&D. Higher skill gives more questions.

You can use actual maps and math for any skill involving navigation and orienteering. Higher skill allows more tools - as in, real tools at the table such as either type of compass.

You can use Jungle Dash or any other reflex game to model contests of speed - higher skill gives you a headstart.

For resource management, there are various types of card games - either with a special deck of cards or a normal deck. For example, a negotiation can be modeled through a game of Bluff or Poker.

If you want to stick to rolling dice and abstract math, your options are limited. The most obvious way to make such a system more involved is to involve betting and rock-paper-scissors in between rolls, like Noitahovi does. Shortly: each party in a contest rolls; those who fail a roll can spend a resource (such as Hero point) to stay in the game. Whoever wins chooses what ability (such as Strength or Wisdom) is used in the following round - obviously trying to pick an ability that is advantageous to them (hence rock-paper-scissors). Again dice are rolled and those who fail can again spend a resource to either bow out (avoiding or mitigating negative consequences) or to stay in the game. This continues untill a clear victor arises, either because the remaining contestants are unwilling to use more resources or they run out.

[Anonymouswizard]

A big problem in many systems is that noncombat stuff is often set up so that you can fail in one roll, and the more tools you make the more likely you are to fail.

But I think the bigger problem here is that 'skill resolution' is actually more equivalent to 'attack check' than 'combat', so the question is what is rolling your skills trying to accomplish?

Take Burning Wheel, most of it's rules for skill checks boil down to 'make a roll and then continue'. But for a proper debate where two sides are trying to convince a third party or has a system known as Duel of Wits, possibly the best social combat system ever written. But Burning Wheel boils everything down, if your champion fencer gets mugged you don't use Fight but resolve this minor thing with a single roll, just like his you don't break out Duel of Wits for convincing the guards to let you through.

So what do you want a system for? GURPS has a fairly detailed system for inventions, including prototyping and, I believe, even commercialising it. Many games have investigation systems. Chronicles of Darkness includes a system for slowly getting favours out of people. And let's not get into the mess of hacking systems in cyberpunk games (it says a lot that Eclipse Phase 1e is the best I've seen).

So what do you want rules for? Chases? Finding one night stands? Running for mayor? Infiltrating a location? Spreading rumours? It's possible to make systems as deep as D&D combat for any of these, but 'skill resolution' is a bit too generic.

[Martin Greywolf]

I'd recommend FATE Core: whatever it is you are trying to do, be it beat someone in an debate or beat him with a stick, you have three ways to do it: overcome (one dice check, either against a static number or against someone else's roll), contest (a series of rolls to get N victories, usually three, where you can make actions to create bonuses for your allies) and conflict (full monty turns and actions thing).

[Grod_The_Giant]

STaRS has your back! (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/268061/STaRS-The-Simple-Tabletop-Roleplaying-System)

But actually, "skill resolution" is one of the things it's best at. It doesn't technically have a combat engine at all--instead, there's a generic "conflict engine" designed to turn any scene into a dramatic back-and-forth struggle.

Instead of enemies, an environmental conflict has Goals, each with an associated Danger. Players "attack" a Goal, then have to defend themselves from Dangers. Sometimes that means using their normal health tracks, other times you use a single track for the entire team.

Let's say, off the top of my head, you want to turn a murder investigation into an environmental challenge. Your Goals and Dangers might look like:

Find the clues: Search the crime scene for forensic evidence. Until you finish, you've got to fend off the media who want to rush in and trample everything in their hurry to get the story. You need to rack up six successes on investigation checks before you fail three checks to keep the press away--social to fast-talk them away from the doors, perception to catch the guy trying to sneak in with a disguise, and so on.

Track down the witness: The janitor saw everything--but the killer knows it too. You've got to find him before he winds up dead too. You need five successes on social and streetwise checks to find up, and you've only got four rounds to do it before the killer finds him.

Deal with the cops: The police are investigating too, and they're not too happy about you getting in their way. Unless you can redirect their attention, they're going to hinder your every move. You need ten social or stealth successes; until you do, they're going to be taking Complicate actions every turn.

[SimonMoon6]

TORG has an... interesting skill resolution system.

For mundane situations, yeah, it's just one roll and you're done (and that's probably how it should be). But if you're doing something that's important in the middle of a stressful situation (like disarming a bomb during combat), then there's a completely different system for that.

In that sort of situation, there are always four steps that you need to get through, labeled A, B, C, and D. For every task that you want to accomplish, those four things would be different, so they're left abstract. You have to do these four steps in order (you can't cut the red wire until you've opened the bomb casing first, for example). Each turn, you can try to accomplish one of these steps, making a normal skill check... but there's a complication.

In TORG, there is a deck of cards. Every turn, a new card is flipped up. This controls many aspects of combat (or other stressful situations). This is something that therefore doesn't translate to other game systems. However, a card will tell you which of those four steps (A, B, C, or D) you may attempt this turn. For example, a card might say "AD" meaning that you could attempt to do step A or step D. Remember, though, that you have to do them in order. So, if the card says "AD" and you need to do step B, you're out of luck because you've already done step A and you can't try to do step D until after you've done step C.

If you are determined to do a step that the deck doesn't allow you to attempt, you can still try, but with a significant penalty. Also, you can try to do more than one step at a time, again with significant penalties.

And sometimes, the deck of cards may give you a setback, making things even more challenging. "Oh, no, I dropped my screwdriver into a pit. How will I unfasten the screws on the bomb casing now?"

This isn't something that can really be easily ported into another game, but it does show a different outlook on how skills might be used.

[jjordan]

A big problem in many systems is that noncombat stuff is often set up so that you can fail in one roll, and the more tools you make the more likely you are to fail.At the risk of going off on a tangent: THIS. It really bothers me that players can put together a good plan that plays to their strengths and takes advantage of weaknesses and someone rolls a 1 at the wrong time and the entire plan comes crashing to a halt. Don't get me wrong, that can and sometimes should happen, but it's much too common in most games. People should tend to succeed at things they are good at, failures should usually be recoverable, and spectacular failures should be rare, not common place. When failure is common place it makes more sense to simply charge in without a plan because that reduces the number of rolls you have to make AND it was the likely outcome of any plan anyway.

[Anonymouswizard]

At the risk of going off on a tangent: THIS. It really bothers me that players can put together a good plan that plays to their strengths and takes advantage of weaknesses and someone rolls a 1 at the wrong time and the entire plan comes crashing to a halt. Don't get me wrong, that can and sometimes should happen, but it's much too common in most games. People should tend to succeed at things they are good at, failures should usually be recoverable, and spectacular failures should be rare, not common place. When failure is common place it makes more sense to simply charge in without a plan because that reduces the number of rolls you have to make AND it was the likely outcome of any plan anyway.

As a side note on this side note I like the Ubiquity solution (assuming it's not something the Space 1889 book added). If the Difficulty is less than half your dice pool you don't roll.

It leads to more failed rolls, but characters are competent because a skilled character just isn't rolling for basic tasks. A gunsmith doesn't have to roll to disassemble a rifle and replace the broken parts, and a Diplomat didn't have to roll to not accidentally offend the host's great-grandmother's memory

When the plan fails is because you were attempting a Difficulty 6 task with a skill of 9, not because your matter thief rolled a 1 on their Open Lock test.

[Telok]

Basically what the title says. Dnd and several others have complex combat systems but when it comes to a skill challenge it is typically one roll one and done. Are there any systems that have a little bit more detailed skill resolution system?

I feel this is the programmers dilemma all over again.

Customer: 'make a program that does <thing>'
Programmer: 'ok what are the expected inputs and results?'
Customer: 'here's a list'
<time passes>
Programmer: 'done, here you go'
Customer: 'but its not right! It...'
(choose one or more)
* doesn't do this other thing (not on the list)
* doesn't do it the way i want it to (even though result is correct)
* i have to enter too much information (but i need all the info for the results to be right)
* the results are wrong because you can't enter this other info (not on the list)
* the results are wrong because it doesn't include info i didn't enter (note to self: do not punch customer)
* it looks different from a different program (that's 15 years old and does half as much work)
* it produces different results than a different program (see previous)
* it doesn't make decisions like a human subject matter expert (a machine learning expert ai with a 1000 hour training by a s.m.e. wasn't your request)
* the buttons are the wrong color (ok, we can fix that)

So A) define "skill system", B) define "good", C) it's probably more effort than you want anyway, D) GURPS, aka: build your own game to your desired level of detail.

[NichG]

These days I tend to prefer writing skill systems where investment proactively gives you moves you can make related to the subject of the skill in a non-generic way. So a certain investment in Negotiation or Social lets you ask N times 'how would they react if I did X?'. That level of investment in Appraise lets you search for (add) a minor additional enchantment on found historical magic items. That level of investment in Stealth gives you a certain number of 'run through an area where you would be detected without being seen' freebies per session/location. A certain level of Teaching lets you allow a single pupil to borrow one of your skill abilities temporarily. Rolls may or may not be involved.

So that tends to lend itself a bit more towards positioning for success and building solutions rather than checking for success.

[Grod_The_Giant]

These days I tend to prefer writing skill systems where investment proactively gives you moves you can make related to the subject of the skill in a non-generic way. So a certain investment in Negotiation or Social lets you ask N times 'how would they react if I did X?'. That level of investment in Appraise lets you search for (add) a minor additional enchantment on found historical magic items. That level of investment in Stealth gives you a certain number of 'run through an area where you would be detected without being seen' freebies per session/location. A certain level of Teaching lets you allow a single pupil to borrow one of your skill abilities temporarily. Rolls may or may not be involved.

So that tends to lend itself a bit more towards positioning for success and building solutions rather than checking for success.
I quite like that, actually. Do you have any finished systems I could check out?

[RedMage125]

But I think the bigger problem here is that 'skill resolution' is actually more equivalent to 'attack check' than 'combat', so the question is what is rolling your skills trying to accomplish?
This is a solid point, and it leads to the my next response...



So what do you want rules for? Chases? Finding one night stands? Running for mayor? Infiltrating a location? Spreading rumours? It's possible to make systems as deep as D&D combat for any of these, but 'skill resolution' is a bit too generic.

I know it's often derided, but 4e's Skill Challenges did this quite well.

By breaking down tasks into multiple-step processes, you can involve the entire party and turn something like "disable this trap", "navigate these woods", or "operate this boat to your destination", into something that gets more people involved, is as robust as a combat encounter, and still has a margin for failure. Note that failing a Skill Challenege does not necessarily mean the party cannot progress, but may lead to additional complications.

These principles can be ported into other systems as well, including 3.5e and 5e.

[Anonymouswizard]

Oh no, somebody did the Forbidden Thing and complimented 4e's Skill Challenges. I'll see you on two weeks after we've been told why they're bad in precise detail.

For what it's worth, Skill Challenges worked really well when used for adventuring tasks (catch this person before they escape, climb out of the pit slowly filling with water) but they needed to be put through another couple of iterations. They're not what I use for every noncombat system, but I'll use a similar system when it fits.

[DwarfFighter]

Basically what the title says. Dnd and several others have complex combat systems but when it comes to a skill challenge it is typically one roll one and done. Are there any systems that have a little bit more detailed skill resolution system?

I don't know if this completely matches your expectations, but Star Trek Adventures has put a lot of work into skill challenges for the purpose of resolving "Extended Tasks". It has mechanics for accumulating progress towards the goal, and mechanics for succeeding outright through critical inspiration. The mechanics are a bit crunchy, but the core issue is that the GM sets the parameter for the task and adjudicates, the players describe how their character acts to complete a part of the task.

The system for extended can be used for social, theoretical and physical challenges. From repairing shuttlecraft, to researching alien cultures, to negotiating cease-fires between hostile factions, the players are encouraged to draw inspiration from their characters and the setting to come up with actions that justify rolling to advance the extended task.

-DF

[clash]

Lots of great answers and examples I will dig into. Going to be looking at stars, dnd 4e and the star wars one for sure. As well some of the ideas listed in the chat are useful.



So A) define "skill system", B) define "good", C) it's probably more effort than you want anyway, D) GURPS, aka: build your own game to your desired level of detail.

To provide a little more detail:

A) By system I mean something that encourages skill based encounters to involve the whole team, can apply creativity and can't win or lose in a single roll.

B) I actually don't care about good. At this point I just want to look at alternatives. I've played multiple editions of d&d, call of cthulhu, deadlands and perused a few others that will seem to have skill checks figured out but nothing for skill encounters which puts everything on the dm to run creative extended encounters or not.

It also doesn't need to be portable. I will be making my own anyways as it's for a ttrpg of my own creation. I'm just looking for ideas to get started.

[RedMage125]

Oh no, somebody did the Forbidden Thing and complimented 4e's Skill Challenges. I'll see you on two weeks after we've been told why they're bad in precise detail.

For what it's worth, Skill Challenges worked really well when used for adventuring tasks (catch this person before they escape, climb out of the pit slowly filling with water) but they needed to be put through another couple of iterations. They're not what I use for every noncombat system, but I'll use a similar system when it fits.

Lol.

I quite agree that they are not for every non combat system, because sometimes, one or two checks is all that one needs.

But they worked great for making travel more involved and dynamic. My 3 favorite Skill Challenges that I personally devised during the 4e Era were:
-Navigate the Sylvan Woods to find the Goblin Lair (used a combination of Athletics to climb trees, Perception to notice monster territory, Stealth to avoid it, and had low-DC Endurance check for everyone each round, which cost a healing surge if failed (but could be offset with a Heal check).
-Operate a ship (done in a different game, used the Endurance check again, in fact a lot was similar, but also used History to read maps, which granted a bonus on the next Nature or Perception to navigate).
-Find a path through the undead-haunted ruins (Streetwise could be used to have a sense of how the city should be laid out, or History to remember old maps of the city, Stealth to bypass groups of undead, Thievery to pick a lock and hide in an abandoned building, and Athletics to climb a roof and try to get one's bearings and see the temple they were headed for).

Those were all 3 I came up with during various games I ran during this time.

[Kraynic]

To provide a little more detail:

A) By system I mean something that encourages skill based encounters to involve the whole team, can apply creativity and can't win or lose in a single roll.

B) I actually don't care about good. At this point I just want to look at alternatives. I've played multiple editions of d&d, call of cthulhu, deadlands and perused a few others that will seem to have skill checks figured out but nothing for skill encounters which puts everything on the dm to run creative extended encounters or not.

I don't know if this rambling will be of any use to you, but it is something that has come to my mind while reading your question and the suggestions people have put forward.

I have found that I don't really care if the general rules are single resolution, or some sort of string of rolls. What I care about is whether the game system treats your character as competent at skills they have. I'm going to pick on Pathfinder for a bit, because this is a gripe I have with the system. It treats your character as competent for stuff that doesn't matter (which doesn't require a roll), but incompetent for anything that requires a roll. If you are required to roll for something, even if the DC is low, you fail to recall information or complete a task with a roll below the DC. Especially at low levels, this can result in a character that specializes in a certain skill being outdone in some skill due to dice being random. I was in a game where the rat familiar of the wizard was repeatedly a better secret door finder than the group rogue, but this was only because of dice luck and the system treating you as incompetent if you don't meet/exceed the DC of a task. And this doesn't matter if it is crafting, influencing npcs, recalling knowledge... The only exceptions I can bring to mind are attempting to jump over a pit, swimming (where you make no progress or sink on a fail, but can roll again until you drown), or climbing where you can make a second roll to catch yourself and save yourself from the full consequences of the first roll.

I still run games using the old (pre-'94) Palladium Fantasy system (skills are percentage instead of d20, but the philosophy behind them is quite different). That game expects the GM to treat a PC as if they were competent. If you know how to swim, it doesn't matter if your swim skill is 25% or 65% until the rope bridge that you were using to cross over the raging torrent of a river during the spring thaw in the mountains. Now, both characters know how to swim, but one will be able to keep from being bashed against rocks or maybe be able to make it to some low hanging branch sooner and be swept down the river for a shorter distance before getting out. The GM can make adjustments (positive or negative) based on circumstances, and it is in the end the same system that Zweihander uses minus the flip to fail or succeed mechanic. This leaves the GM open to treating a failure not necessarily as full on failure, but as if success or partial success will just take longer (or whatever). That increase in needed time for a task may open the situation up to complications (if it will make the game interesting). On knowledge, I tend to remind players of something their character would know that pertains to the situation, just not as precisely useful info they would have on a success. I am currently running a Pathfinder game as a favor to a couple of the players that usually GM and haven't ever been able to actually play in a game together, and I am (as much as I can) applying this sort of philosophy to Pathfinder rolls.

I fully acknowledge that still leaves all that stuff up to the GM as far as what a failed roll means, so I'm not saying the system I use is what you are looking for. But I much prefer a system that treats (and expects the GM to treat) the characters as if they are competent at things they are trained to do. I don't know if this is something mixed up in what you are looking for, but thought I would throw that out there as something that might feed into what you desire in a system.

[NichG]

I quite like that, actually. Do you have any finished systems I could check out?

There's one which has gone through a few campaign-specific iterations by now. The most recent incarnation is something called Homestead, designed for a city building/frontier exploration in the planes type of campaign. It has a hard 'a skill literally only lets you do a thing and doesn't inform a roll' kind of mechanic, in part because it's designed to support having scads of townspeople NPCs filling roles in the settlement and its more important to know 'how many people have Rank 3 farmer and can handle mystic herbs?' than 'how well does this one guy do on his farming this season?': https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zt-dxm5Rv2yrPdf7f87mL8RvVpl6AycZ/view?usp=sharing

There was also Dynasty which was similarly a kind of empire-building campaign. I think this is where I introduced a 'stealth pips' system for stealth that I like - basically rather than rolling versus perception, guards' perception determines a cost in 'stealth pips' for moving across their line of sight without being detected, and you have a total budget of pips determined by your stealth skill. It lends itself more to heist-like things when you can plan ahead and say 'I'm sure I can get past these guards, but after that I'll be in a tough spot if they change the rotation' for example. Having things where stealthy characters could pay extra pips to usher less stealthy characters through also helps avoid the 'stealth is only used if everyone is equally sneaky' dilemma: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rQVwwi6-rCKGIOA5aV3GlEWTWVQTBrye/view?usp=sharing

The predecessor to both of these was something called Memoir, which was more party-based (and had a whole hidden supernatural powers subsystem not included in the document), but it should give you some ideas with the 'skill waza': https://drive.google.com/file/d/19wGJjcq2QjqFUmJVGf-kmyX74Z0lJF_k/view?usp=sharing

The thing I'm currently running is heavily modded D&D, and so you still have D&D style skill checks, but there are extra explicit things that can be done by hitting certain DCs, so that might be of interest for something that would be easier to combine with existing game systems: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-Jb-bbEfNNvFsKCroV1ONaJ4umTOTTQ_/view?usp=sharing

Anyhow, that's a lot of content, so just look at the skills sections :)

[GloatingSwine]

A) By system I mean something that encourages skill based encounters to involve the whole team, can apply creativity and can't win or lose in a single roll.

I think one of the important things that multi-stage skill systems need is for the players to be able to react and adapt.

Like in the OP you contrasted skills with combat, and the big difference is that in combat the players will change what they are doing when things are going well or badly for them.

Multi-roll skill checks, to be interesting in something like the same way as combat, need the players to be able to adapt to the outcomes of each set of rolls by changing the way they are approaching the task, either because an unexpectedly rapid success in one area has enabled a new approach or an unexpectedly bad outcome has necessitated it. (Because those are generally the two emergent situations in combat, something goes unexpectedly well or unexpectedly poorly).

And a lot of tasks that are generally represented as skill rolls are sufficiently simple and binary that you kinda do want them to resolve with a single roll. Picking a lock is the basic example. Only one person can be trying to do it at a time, and if they can succeed at all it's only a matter of time until they do. You want that to be a snappy process that doesn't get in the way.

[rosimobi]

Too Many Bones ? :smallsmile:

[Grod_The_Giant]

I think one of the important things that multi-stage skill systems need is for the players to be able to react and adapt.
Agreed. There needs to be an element of surprise and back-and-forth, otherwise you're just rolling dice until you get bored.

[Pauly]

One thing to look at is the math.
You can have a system that breaks a skill check into 4 steps. Three 50-50 steps then a 12+ on a d20 check at the end. The final cumulative total gives you a 5% chance of success.
Or, you can roll 1 d20 and succeed on a 20. giving a 5% chance of success.

Now the 1 step system seems more capricious, and the 4 step systems seems to give more agency to the players, but all it does is tell you what particular step of the task you failed in.

For some tasks it may be important to know exactly where you failed, but for the majority of skill checks in a game a binary outcome of succeed/fail is perfectly fine.
And if you do need to know exactly what part of the chain the failure happened it’s no problem for a DM to create a suitable chain of checks.

[Cluedrew]

I quite like that, actually. Do you have any finished systems I could check out?Not any of my homebrew but quite a few Powered by the Apocalypse systems use this sort of pattern.

A different example is Blades in the Dark with an incredibly dense generic system, which covers all "action rolls" (roughly anything proactive outside of downtime) and also forms the basic structure used for most other situations. Anyways it has four different tiers of success, its actually missing a traditional difficulty slider, but instead can measure the consequences for failure, you have a limited resource to reduce the cost of failure and it has rules for single roll group check along with "clocks" which measure progress across multiple checks. It is one of the most complex resolution systems I have ever seen (although I think it would actually go pretty fast once you figured it out) so it might be worth a look.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Not any of my homebrew but quite a few Powered by the Apocalypse systems use this sort of pattern.

A different example is Blades in the Dark with an incredibly dense generic system, which covers all "action rolls" (roughly anything proactive outside of downtime) and also forms the basic structure used for most other situations. Anyways it has four different tiers of success, its actually missing a traditional difficulty slider, but instead can measure the consequences for failure, you have a limited resource to reduce the cost of failure and it has rules for single roll group check along with "clocks" which measure progress across multiple checks. It is one of the most complex resolution systems I have ever seen (although I think it would actually go pretty fast once you figured it out) so it might be worth a look.
I'm not a fan of any of the PbtA systems I've played, but Blades in the Dark looks nifty.

[GloatingSwine]

One thing to look at is the math.
You can have a system that breaks a skill check into 4 steps. Three 50-50 steps then a 12+ on a d20 check at the end. The final cumulative total gives you a 5% chance of success.

That would be true if a failure at any step failed the whole task irrevocably.

But that would be a really bad way of doing skills.

A good multi-step skill check system, as I've said previously in the thread, is where the outcome of one check causes the players to make different choices regarding the subsequent ones.

If you start the process and you're just locked in until the whole thing succeeds or fails, with no ability to change what you're doing in response to what happens along the way, then you might as well just roll once and get it over with.

[Pauly]

That would be true if a failure at any step failed the whole task irrevocably.

But that would be a really bad way of doing skills.

A good multi-step skill check system, as I've said previously in the thread, is where the outcome of one check causes the players to make different choices regarding the subsequent ones.

If you start the process and you're just locked in until the whole thing succeeds or fails, with no ability to change what you're doing in response to what happens along the way, then you might as well just roll once and get it over with.

Which is what I said in the part of my post you edited out of your reply.