Welcome to Part 3 of my ongoing quest to design a full-fledged solo fantasy RPG right here on my blog. I’m not using outside resources or design/test sessions, just sitting on my computer with some dice and writing it down as I go.

We have the bones of a combat system down, which is the first step to figuring out character creation and development. Once we know what a character looks like and what they can do, we can start getting complex with it, creating procedures for adventuring, etc.

We know that our characters will have a Level (determines general combat effectiveness), Armor Class (AC), Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma. We also know that the game will involve checks. In order to resolve those checks, we’re going to need some Skills.

Let’s get Skills out of the way

I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a pickle because I’m resolving out-of-combat checks with 2d6, but in-combat it’s 1d6. This basically means that Stats (ability scores) have double the impact in combat as they do out of combat.

I want some kind of Skill system to mitigate this. I tend to like very fiddly, granular, bonus-based skill systems (Call of Cthulhu is my platonic ideal of an RPG), but I’m not sure how well that’s going to work for this. It is a big chunk of system bloat, so it needs to carry its weight in terms of utility.

A lot of games that accomplish what I’m trying to accomplish do so using only Stats, not Skills. This is how most OSR games do it. But the OSR’s allergy to skill systems is one of my biggest gripes with it, and it also doesn’t make sense for me to be very good at disarming traps just because I have a high natural Dexterity–that’s still a skill that has to be learned.

My first thought was to try to get the best of both worlds by having a “skill” system where characters either “have” a skill, or don’t. So, if your character doesn’t have the Athletics skill, then when you do an Athletics check, you roll 2d6 and add your Strength or Dex, whichever is appropriate. If you do have the Athletics skill, then instead of 2d6, you roll 3d6. (I’ve decided you’ll need 3d6 to play this game, with at least 2 being different colors or sizes.)

Beautiful simplicity to that system, but it also isn’t very interesting. More than that, though, I’m second-guessing myself because at this point, I’m not sure that leveling up will be interesting if only your Level increases. (Which makes you better in fights, but there’s no interesting choice to be made.)

So…with some hesitancy, I’m going to try a simple bonus-based granular skill system. I’m afraid that my general preference for these systems might be getting in the way of a quick-and-dirty system, but I also think I need something non-combat-related to happen when characters level up. I also do want characters to get better at things like lockpicking or seduction or tumbling or whatever.

I had hoped to avoid having the player add more than 2 numbers at a time (dice + Stat), but I think for out-of-combat situations that don’t necessarily have ultra high stakes, we can live with it. So non-combat rolls will be dice + Stat + Skill.

(The combat system has you only adding a single modifier to each die, but you’re basically making two rolls at a time, which is probably an even higher mental load. So, this all feels like an appropriate level of complexity, as long as we don’t go any higher.)

A skill system also helps flesh out our game structures. This section isn’t about game structures, but because they’re so interrelated with the skill system, I’m going to refer back to them. They’re mentioned in the intro article, if you need to go back and refresh.

The primordial and most important game structure is dungeoncrawling, which involves combat and exploration. We’ve got combat semi-figured, so let’s focus on things like stealth, exploration, appraising treasure, negotiating with enemies, arcane and historical knowledge, and a host of other possibilities. Dungeoncrawling is a simple, constrained game structure with nearly endless possibilities, which is one reason why it’s so popular and intuitive.

But we don’t have the time or page-space to break all of that down. This isn’t a dungeoncrawling sim, it’s a solo RPG. I need to cover as much as possible in as few skills as possible.

We’ll start with a Dungeoneering skill. I like the word (it’s evocative) and I think there’s a good deal that can reasonably be intuited from it–it’s the skill of exploring dungeons. Off the top of my head, this can cover:

• Listening at doors
• Finding and disabling traps
• Recognizing architecture, languages, etc.
• Navigating and mapping dungeon complexes
• Searching for hidden objects, treasure, markings, etc
• Knowledge about the types of monsters that might exist in the dungeon

Now there’s a few things that cropped up that I didn’t include–namely stealth skills like prowling and lockpicking, and athletic/acrobatic skills like leaping chasms or climbing surfaces.

It’s tempting to include all of that, but I’m not going to based on the simple principle that one skill shouldn’t make a character master of an entire game structure. (This is also why I’m averse to using classes–class systems work well in party-based games where each player can slot into a role in the party, but for a solo game you want any character to be able to engage with every game system to one degree or another.)

Character-building should be about tradeoffs–do you want to be the best at dungeon exploration, the best at social interaction, or competent in both but masters of neither? Or, if you are really hell-bent on mastering both, how are you going to play the game to make that happen?

Plus, what if I wanted to play a master thief who’d never entered an ancient dungeon before? Some kind of city-based thief or cat burglar? What about a spy or assassin?

So we’re going to section those off. We’ll do a Thievery skill for picking locks and pockets and prowling in shadows, and an Athletics skill for all sorts of athletic feats like jumping, climbing, etc.

(The Athletics/Acrobatics divide is where Stats or ability scores come in handy. What’s the difference between the two? Well, one uses Strength (or similar) and the other Dexterity/Agility (or similar). Without that level of character definition, it requires additional abstraction/immersion-breaking to suppose that any character with a high bench press is also a fast swimmer.)

Right now our skill list is:

• Dungeoneering (traps, searching, recognizing artifacts/architecture/monsters)
• Thievery (Picking locks and pockets, sneaking)
• Athletics (Running, climbing, leaping, swimming, etc)

I really, really don’t want this to turn into a 3.X game with dozens of skills, so let’s proceed with caution. This covers dungeoncrawling, but other game structures we need to cover are wilderness and city/town exploration, and NPC interactions.

So we’ll need some kind of speech skill(s). In trying to keep this list as minimal as possible, we’ll have a single Speechcraft skill that can be used with different Stats (Chr to seduce or charm; Int to persuade or debate, Str to intimidate).

But in keeping with the idea that one skill shouldn’t make a character master of an entire game structure, we will probably want one additional skill that covers socializing and other NPC interaction. One that I like is something like Barter or Mercantilism, but I think it’s too niche for this. Instead, I’m going to use a skill called Lore–this can cover all manner of academic and knowledge things like appraisal, history, politics, mythology, etc.

For wilderness exploration, we’ll do a Survival skill that covers navigation, foraging, animal handling, and medical care (all based on Int; this’ll help discourage dumping Int if you’re a purely combat-focused character. Actually, I think animal handling could be Int or Chr, whichever is higher). You’ll also use Athletics when exploring the wilderness, so that game structure has at least two skills.

Finally, I think we need some kind of skill for magic. Magical lore and knowledge could theoretically be covered by Lore, but I don’t think every educated person should also be a wizard or capable of casting spells, so a separate skill called Arcana will be used for learning (and maybe casting) spells.

That gives us a total of seven skills that I think should cover all of our game structures:

• Dungeoncrawling is covered by primarily by Dungeoncraft and Thievery, but with major potential for literally any skill to play a role.
• Wilderness exploration will use a lot of Survival and Athletics
• Urban environments will make good use of Speechcraft and Lore, and potentially Thievery for rogueish characters
• NPC interaction will also be handled largely by Speechcraft and Lore, with occasional assists from Survival (giving directions, healing a traveler on the side of the road) or Arcana (studying magic under a master wizard)

The skill list is:

• Arcana
• Athletics
• Dungeoneering
• Lore
• Speechcraft
• Survival
• Thievery

Now, this would be a lot to put on every monster stat block, but I don’t think monsters or NPCs actually need skills by default. None of these affect combat resolution on the enemy side, and we can always give a procedure for generating skills for important NPCs if it ever comes up.

Skill Checks

Skill checks are going to use 2d6 + Stat + Skill. Based on the combat system designed in Part 2, I’m thinking that Stats and Skills can rank from 0 to 6 (though for PCs every Stat will be at least 1). This gives us a nice system of bounded accuracy if we’re rolling d6s. In combat, your max bonus is 6 and your max roll is 6. For skill checks, your max for both is 12. You see, it’s like poetry, it rhymes.

This means that natural ability (Stats) has the potential to be exactly as important for success as training and skill. I’m mostly okay with this, but I think as time goes on, training should matter more. So we’ll design in such a way that Skills rise higher or faster (or both) than Stats.

Difficulty Classes or DCs shouldn’t take a lot of brainpower to figure out. We have a total possible range of 3 (snake eyes + Stat-1 + Skill-0) all the way up to 24 (boxcars + Stat-6 + Skill-6).

7 is the top of the bell curve of 2d6, so that’s going to be our standard DC for average tasks. I’m thinking in steps of 3, which is 12.5% of our total range and 25% of the range of dice. It does lead to some weirdness at the top and bottom, though.

4 is too low for a minimum DC, because you only need a single point in a skill to make it an auto-success. 5 makes more sense, but that’s only 2 lower than 7, which makes it an exception to the “steps of 3” rule. I’m not saying designers should never use rule exceptions, but this one feels arbitrary, and it is one more piece of information the player has to remember.

There’s a temptation to step back and ask, “If a task is so easy the player only needs a single skill point to auto-succeed, why are we even rolling the dice?” And there’s value in asking that question, but it does have a simple answer: untrained characters might still attempt to do it, and there are tasks that experts nearly always succeed at, but might occasionally still fail at.

I think we can mitigate that with critical failures and successes. On snake-eyes, you critically fail; on boxcars, you critically succeed. So no matter how easy a task is, you always have a chance of failure or success.

Mathematically, this is all identical to being untrained (and with a 1 in the relevant Stat) and rolling your lowest–you’d need to roll a 2 to fail anyways. But knowing that there’s always a 3% chance of failure (if I’m remembering the 2d6 bell curve probabilities right) makes every skill check a risk.

With that rule in place, we can do away with DC-4 checks and say that 7 is the lowest possible, for Average tasks. Truly easy tasks are things that you don’t need to roll for at all. This requires a mindset change–Average doesn’t mean “difficult,” even for untrained characters. You’ll always have at least +1 to add, so even untrained you have a greater than 50% chance of success.

Here’s our DC table:

• DC-7 (Average) — Almost everyone will succeed at this more than 50% of the time, but without training you do have a significant chance of failure. Pick an poorly-made lock, leap a 7-foot chasm, recall basic facts about history or magic, determine the cardinal directions, gingerly step over a tripwire
• DC-10 (Professional) — Without training or a lot of natural ability, your chances are slim, but you don’t need that much training to handle these with regularity. These are the kinds of tasks that professionals do on a day-to-day business. Pick a normal lock, leap a 10-foot chasm, recall specialist knowledge about a subject, successfully flirt with a stranger, disarm a bear trap, forage for healing herbs.
• DC-13 (Challenging) — Even pros struggle with these tasks unless they are extremely talented. Pick a master lock, sneak past an elven scout, leap a 13-foot chasm, recall obscure knowledge, disarm a complex mechanism.
• DC-16 (Master) — These are the most difficult tasks most people will ever even see performed in their lifetimes. True masters of a skill (5 or 6 in both their Stat and Skill) will succeed at these more often than they fail, but even they still have meaningful chances of failure. Pick a specialized lock, sneak past an oculus monster with 54 eyes, leap a 16-foot chasm, recall forgotten or extremely specialized knowledge.
• DC-19(Legendary) — Very few will ever even witness a feat like this performed. With your Stat and Skill both maxed out and 6, you still have a greater than 50% chance of failure. Pick a lock designed by the God of Locks, sneak past a creature that can see through walls and in the dark, seduce somebody who hates your guts, leap a 20-foot chasm, recall forbidden knowledge, devise a healing salve out of ingredients with no known healing properties.
• DC-22 (Miraculous) — If you pull this off, people will be talking about it for generations to come. Leap a 23-foot chasm with no running start, pick a magic lock with a mundane lockpick, sneak past an omniscient being, seduce a dragon, pick a god’s pocket.

These kinds of things are fun to write, and a big part of why I like game design. Writing out the examples for each step gave me so many ideas of stories I’d like to experience and situations I’d love to facilitate. I’m so excited to get this system to a place where it’s playable.

Increasing Skills

So, I want Skills to increase faster than Stats (there’s more of them, after all). While the theoretical limit for each is 6, I’m thinking that it’ll be uncommon for a character to have a 6 in more than one Stat, even by max level, but more likely to have 6 in a Skill.

Skill Points is the most obvious way to do it. At level-up, you gain a number of Skill Points (it could be flat, you could roll for it, it could be based on Int, etc) and then just assign them wherever you want. You could put a limit to make it impossible to just pump a single skill up to 6 by 2nd level (e.g., no Skill can be at a rank higher than your Level).

Here’s the thing, though: while I love Skill Systems, I’ve always found it a little annoying in practice to assign a bunch of Skill Points. It’s okay in video games where you can click a little button and see numbers go up and down, but erasing and rewriting numbers isn’t fun, and there’s some kind of disconnect between seeing my pool of points and actually placing them.

I also have an alternative idea that has the added benefits of being more fun (you get to roll dice!) and slightly more realistic (not the most important, but nice to have). We’re going to roll at each level for skill increases, based on what skills you’ve used.

So, each skill will have a box next to it. When PCs actually use that Skill for something, they’ll Mark that box. Whenever you level up, you’ll roll 1d6 for every Marked skill on your character sheet. If you roll higher than your current skill value, you increase it by one.

Say we cap the player’s level at 10 (not firm in this yet, but we’ll take it as a baseline), this gives you 9 chances to raise each skill. Maybe some actions, like studying or training, could give you Advantage on these rolls. Maybe you could collect Marks, and roll once for each Mark. (Ooh, I like that. I might go with that.) The point is that you have to actually use skills for them to go up, and it’s tied to the Level system.

Revising

I can already think of a few problems with this system.

1.) XP and leveling will be weird.

• There’s no GM to dynamically give out XP when it makes sense, or for “roleplaying,” or for “quest completion.” So we need to have rules for when and how much XP is given.
• If we give XP for only combat, then you need to fight and kill things for your Lore skill to go up. That sucks.
• If we give XP only for skill checks, then you can get better at fighting and killing things by hanging out in town and carousing. That also sucks.
• If we give XP for everything, then players can still just pick whatever they’re good at and get better at Skills and combat by doing one or the other. Bleh.

Actually, as I’m typing this out, I’m reconsidering what I just wrote about giving XP for “quest completion.” That’s really just a form of milestone leveling without a GM to set the milestones, and I think I might be able to pull that off procedurally, without allowing the player (who is the only one at the table) to just metagame themselves into attaining 10th-level in half an hour.

The problem with giving XP for discrete actions is that it inherently incentivizes those actions. The OSR makes much hay about XP-for-gold, implying that it’s somehow better than XP-for-combat (which OD&D also had by the way) because it disincentivizes killing every monster you see, which is true…but it also incentivizes stealing gold and treasure.

If I give XP for passing skill checks, then players will go out and attempt skill checks just so they can level up. Go leap the chasm 20 times so you can increase your Speechcraft skill. Yeah, no.

Milestone leveling will require a system for setting milestones. However, I actually think that’s a plus here, not a negative–we’re going to need a robust system or set of systems for generating adventures in this game, and this will aid in that.

So, milestone leveling it is.

2.) Learning from Success and Failure

PCs should be able to learn from failure; that’s how it works in real life, after all. But the way this system is currently sketched out, you Mark skills when you attempt checks, meaning success helps too.

There need to be some guidelines around this, otherwise you can advance to Mastery of a skill by succeeding at Average checks. No bueno.

I’ve dithered on this for a few minutes here. I thought of granting Marks only for failure, or having Marks come from success or failure depending on the level of the DC. In the end, however, I was overthinking it. I can solve this problem relatively easily:

PCs can have two Marks per skill–one from Success, and one from Failure. You cannot gain a Success Mark from any skill check that you would auto-succeed at, discounting critical successes and failures.

Thus, when your skill rank reaches 5 (and often much sooner, depending on your Stats), you will never be able to gain a Mark from an Average task. Once the total of your Skill and Stat reaches 8, you will never gain a Mark from a Professional task. Once the total of both reaches 11, you will never improve your skill from Challenging tasks–you’ll have to try some Master ones.

You still might fail those tasks; nat-2s auto-fail, after all. But you don’t learn from criticals. They represent flukes, things you couldn’t recreate if you wanted to.

3.) Skills and Combat

Skills and combat fundamentally work differently in this game. You could think of “Level” as being a “Combat” skill, and actually I thought of renaming it to Combat Level, but then I’d have to figure out another way to determine when to level up Skills (if you rolled every time you did a Mark it’d be way too fast). Plus, I like and want that visceral feeling of “Leveling up,” of getting stronger.

So we’re keeping “Level” as a general determinant of a character’s prowess and abilities, and keeping it as a Stat that gets plugged into the combat system. But we’ve got to square this circle somehow.

See, while milestone XP solves the “XP incentivizes weird behavior” problem, it still means that you can get better at combat by doing non-combat things (solving quests peacefully, for example), and vice-versa. Unless the milestones are goals are designed to always include combat and non-combat, this will happen.

The disconnect, aside from the systems working differently on a mathematical level, is that you fundamentally need to use Skills to improve them, but the only way to make you need to fight to level up is to A.) give XP for combat only; or B.) make Combat a skill like all the others. Neither is desirable.

Another option, which I already discareded but may have been hasty in doing so, would be to de-couple your “Level” (combat level) from Skills. This solves the dissociation of the system as it exists (which is the only thing I don’t like about it) and the cost of making leveling up feel less impactful.

I do think, however, that at this point it’s my best option. This game is becoming a hybrid of skill-based and level-based, and while my instinct is to recoil from that, I don’t know that it’s actually the biggest problem in the world. All I’ve really done is heavily abstract and simplify the combat system found in most RPGs to the point that it more closely resembles the skill check system, but put them parallel to each other rather than resolving combat through the skill system.

So “Level” will refer to “Combat Level” and will increase through XP gained from killing monsters. It’s tempting to create a separate “Skill Level” or something like that to give the skill system its own milestones, but I don’t think that makes the system easier or more intuitive. Instead, I think we’ll just have players roll for skill increases any time they fail (but not critically) a Skill Check. A simple, straightforward learn-from-failure system. (I slightly worry that this may make skill increases happen too quickly, but I’ll just have to wait and see.)

With that, I think my skill system (or a rough draft of it) is done. To recap:

• The skill system is separate from the combat system. The only time they directly interact is with skill checks granting Advantage or Disadvantage on combat rolls, where appropriate.
• There’s a list of 7 Skills (Arcana, Athletics, Dungeoneering, Lore, Speechcraft, Survival, Thievery) that rank from 0 to 6.
• Skill checks are 2d6 + Stat + Skill.
• When you fail a Skill Check, you roll 1d6. If you roll higher than your current rank, you increase that rank by 1.
• DCs start at 7 and increase in steps of 3 until 23. Most checks will be at the 7, 10, and 13 level, though to get your skill up to rank 6, you’ll need to at least attempt a DC 16 check.

I like it. Seems like a fun system. Can’t wait to try it out.

Next will be character creation (and advancement, though this is mostly figured out). Then magic. After that, I’ll have to start figuring out procedures for generating monsters and dungeons and NPCs and adventures. Then possibly an Advanced Combat/Encounter article, and another on items and equipment. Then I think I’ll wrap with an article containing monster stat blocks, equipment lists, etc., along with design notes on them. By that time I should have a playable game, and I’ll post all the rules in a single document.

Finally, I will playtest the monster I’ll have created, trying to take a character all the way to 10th level (or whatever the level cap ends up being). I’ll write a campaign journal and post the results, and revise any rules that I feel are totally broken or unplayable.

See you next time for character creation!

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