[D&D] Skills

I always go back and forth on skill lists. They are an undeniably useful game tool. But I also find they can be a crutch for many players.

In all things in life, we want to travel the path of least resistance. So a list of common game interactions with an associated rating is nice. I can, at a glance, see my character is very good at picking locks. There are a lot of locks to pick in RPGs.

But then the law of the hammer sets in. The cognitive bias where if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. If all you have is this list of a dozen skills, then you try and solve every obstacle in the game with a skill and a dice roll.

If you didn't have the list at all, you'd just use your imagination. You'd talk in natural, descriptive language about what your character wants to do. But to those brought up on skill lists, the idea of throwing out the skill list is insanity.

You must have a way to measure the skill of your character. My character is good at picking locks, not because they are a Rogue, but because being a Rogue gives you +5 to lockpicking.

You must have choice and agency as a player and as a character. My character is good at picking locks because I decided to take the lockpicking proficiency. If I don't get that choice, I will not be playing the character I wish to play. I had no hand in crafting them.

These arguments are fallacies, imo. The presumption is that the game was built around the use of these skills. It would be like telling someone to play Super Mario Bros. with a Rock Band guitar. An unnecessary and awkward interface for the game.

I strongly disagree. The core mechanic (roll 1d20 vs a DC. Roll high to succeed) is the only tool necessary to resolve these situations. The skill system is an extra layer of granularity to tip the scales more in your favour, but they aren't necessary to play or even enjoy the game.

I won't deny there is pleasure to be had in character building and modifier hunting. It's a satisfying mental exercise to play with the lego blocks of character customisation to build your avatar brick-by-brick. It's also satisfying to get big bonus number make dice go brrrrrrrr. But I see those as a kind of mental junk food. Yes, it gives you pleasure, but the quality of that pleasure is thin and fleeting.

I was in my late teens and early 20's when 3rd and 4th editions were big, and I got really invested in them. I was on the Character Optimisation forums and poring over hundreds of pages of splat books to hand craft all sorts of mechanically interesting builds. I loved it. Then I'd get to the table with these characters and immediately get bored with them, whether the build was successful or not. I realised years later that I got more out of the mental exercise of building a character than I did playing it. And years after that, I learned about how dopamine responses and anticipation are linked to form habits. Healthy and unhealthy ones. 

Game designers use this in a benevolent way. It's a simple method to enhance fun. You get all these big numbers that go up on your character sheet. Modifiers, experience, levels, big pools of hit points and spells that do 4d6+18 damage. Loads and loads of special abilities that tell you all the cool stuff your character can do. The excitement builds, you throw the dice, count all the big numbers and explode in orgasmic delight. That's the sugar rush part of the game. The noise and flashing lights of the poker machine.

The rest of the game is where I believe the better quality - nourishing - fun is to be had. The role-playing. The problem solving. Immersing yourself in a story and an imagined universe. Shooting the shit with your friends, having a laugh. Those are the endorphin and serotonin companions to dice rolling dopamine. That's the exhilaration of a good workout, or the thrill of pulling off a bluff in poker.

I'm not saying the mechanical stuff is bad for you. I'm saying we're addicted to it. We place a higher importance on it, because our brains are wired to do that. It's an easy feelgood response. A better effort-to-payoff ratio than the other stuff, so it gets higher priority. But it's a small and temporary payoff compared to the other stuff. 

I made a little questionnaire not long ago and solicited responses from my circles. Questions about what aspects of tabletop RPGs you enjoy the most. An overwhelming number of the responses (24 respondents total. A small and admittedly biased data set) said that story and role-playing were the absolute most important aspects of the game, far above anything else. Game mechanics, strategy and other mechanics-heavy aspects were only moderately important in comparison.

This is interesting to me, because it's the opposite of what I hear when I talk to people. Whenever I advocate for reducing mechanical complexity in favour of greater creative freedom, I meet heavy resistance. It seems to be that in the moment - a conversation - people react strongly when the easy dopamine reward option is threatened. But when asked to sit down and think about it - a questionnaire - people recognise that the real value of the game lies in the social and imaginative aspects.

We know we're addicted to snack food (mechanics), but the addiction makes us resist giving it up.

Any game designer will tell you that the more complex you make the mechanics, the slower the game gets. Can you remember any epic 3 hour long combat encounters that were exciting and tense the entire time, with a rewarding payoff at the end? I'd wager not. It's more likely that those combats were a slog. A death march and the only relief anyone felt at the end was because it was over. Was the time and mental energy you expended to build your character an advantageous trade-off in that situation? A couple of good dice rolls, maybe. But the net takeaway is that you were bored most of the time and exhausted by the end. That's what you'll remember for years to come. The time and energy that was robbed from you.

Snack foods (mechanics) are fine, in moderation.

One way to break unhealthy habits is to substitute healthy habits in their place. We cut down on sugar and eat more nuts instead. We shed unnecessary mechanical complexity, and replace it with more role-play and mental exercise.

Ditch the skill list. Instead of picking the happy meal menu item, we engage our imagination and describe what we're doing. And instead of referencing a rulebook to tell us what the outcome of a situation is, the DM makes it up on the spot (using common sense, of course). You know. Role-playing.

You don't need a character sheet to tell you that your level 5 Rogue is extremely skilled at picking locks. That's just common sense. Everyone at the table can agree your level 5 Rogue should be good at that. Instead of adding a bunch of bonuses together (and making everyone else wait), the DM can just lower the DC to whatever everyone agrees sounds reasonable. Your level is a pretty good number to use. Lower the DC by that amount. Or if you're playing 5th Edition the Proficiency Bonus is the only modifier you need. And you don't need to choose and track what you're proficient at. It's inferred by your class, background and the fiction itself.

Did you really lose any agency when building that character? You got to decide they were good at picking locks just the same as if the rulebook said you could. That's more agency, not less. You still get the satisfaction of rolling high on a d20. You've lost nothing, saved time (and energy), exercised your brain, and been more engaged in the (highly important) fiction than you otherwise would have been. That's a pretty good deal.

But but but if it isn't in the rules I have to ask for permission from the DM! They shouldn't have such arbitrary power over my fun!

If your DM is as unreasonable and unfair as you seem to think they are, then I don't know what to tell you. Your DM sucks. They need to adjust their attitude, or step aside and let a more mature person run the game.