Cross-Reference: the cRPG

"Specialization is for insects."
Robert A. Heinlein


My recent jaunt through Shadowrun Re:DragHong brought the old issue of skill checks back into focus. All three campaigns throw the occasional skill check at you (which is more than other RPGs bother to do, admittedly) but due to
1) the discrepancy between Shadowrun's all-encompassing kitchen sink of counterculture fiction and the rather limited gamut of content Harebrained Schemes could provide for each campaign
and
2) the emphasis on maintaining combat viability strongly encouraging min-maxing --
it ends up as a strictly hit-or-miss system. You might raise some secondary skills just high enough by cheating and looking up skill requirements on strategy guides (like I did now and anon, I'll admit) but generally either the skill check falls into your specialty or you won't have a chance in hell of meeting it. And, given point 1 above, you won't be meeting any requirements if you don't tailor your character to the campaign's focus, meaning all your skills check successes/failures are more or less predetermined from class selection onwards.. I think I hit exactly two Will checks during the entire Dragonfall campaign, at least one of which was for flavor text.

Much of the problem comes with the idea of checking a single skill against a single requirement. If we're talking about a simplified Fighter / Mage / Thief class setup with requisite preordained STR / INT / AGI min-maxing, then that's about as good as it gets. Anything more complex, though, and the number of options and combinations rise so rapidly as to make predicting the use of, and investing in any one particular skill a completely unrealistic proposition - just as, when faced with seventeen different status effects, the only rational option is to bank on a "resist all" panacea. Players, justifiably, will end up ignoring the endless work-hours and funding you've spent developing those dialogue skills and feats in favor of cure-all combat optimization. Waste of time. Waste of money. Waste of your reputation when your customers catch up to the previous two realizations.

So how might the system be improved?

Sadly, the first, easiest and most impactful answer involves throwing more money at it. Ensuring more playstyles are represented largely means more passes through level design and scripts as a game world or campaign develops, at which point a shoestring budget quickly twists into a noose anchored to one deadline or another. See the otherwise inspired and ambitious Tyranny's blatantly truncated third act. Many issues of quality (difficulty, artistic flair, ethical sobriety or imagination) can be addressed better by small-time developers beholden to fewer financial interests. Deliberate, meaningful redundancy? Not so much. Takes cash.

On a related note, though limiting skill checks to cosmetic choices or flavor text can grate, never underestimate the impact of adding flavor to an otherwise functional skill system. Or its sometimes glaring lack. As noted vis-a-vis Pathfinder:Kingmaker's frequently slapdash filer texts, an item that looks like a "weird, magic thing" to a Barbarian with 8 INT and 'huh?' WIS just should not hold the same mystery to my Mystic Theurge with maxed out Knowledge: Arcana and Lore: Nature. The world should look different to different characters depending on their mental aptitudes, as exemplified by a playthrough of V:tM - Bloodlines as a Malkavian. While this may still count as feature creep, a cosmetic rewrite will require less integration with the rest of the team, so if you've been a keeping a spare writer stuffed in your office's rafters, have at it!

However, the best illustration I can find for how a skill evaluation should look comes from Europa Universalis' province taxes.

My "province tax" skill depends on two flat values (call them attributes) and fourteen different modifiers. Some of these pertain to the province in question, others are empire-wide, some are permanent and others temporary, some are downsides of other actions I knowingly undertook (liek, y'know, megalomaniacal invasion.) Sure, it's not as though the notion of multiple factors is unheard-of in RPGs. That brilliant yet half-finished mess Bloodlines stood out from its contemporary competition, among other reasons, for deriving usable feats each from two primary attributes.

It wasn't much, but it certainly stood out from maxing your fighter's STR in Neverwinter Nights or winning a drinking contest based solely on your CON. And, as far as pen and paper RPGs go "combined skill checks" are common enough to fuel endless forum threads about their relative merits and utility. Their relative lack in cRPGs is amazing from both angles. A GM in a pen and paper game can only force so many dice rolls and algebra impacting every single mundane decision on his players before they all walk out. Computers' great advantage in the field is automating that drudgery. That is after all how you get "action" so-called RPGs with their fifty swashes buckled per second. Why should the same automation used to streamline attacks not allow for greater complexity in noncombat skill checks?

My character's success in a particular task should depend on his physical health and ability, his education, his current affinity with various deities or forces of nature, the reagents in his pocketses, the season, the weather, the current phase of the moon, previous arguments made in conversation... really, whatever you can cook up. To some extent, the better cRPGs take this approach with dialogue choices, keeping track of the player's various prior decisions to allow arguments yielding varying degrees of NPC favor, but when it comes to skill checks the same games still limit themselves to simplistic one-to-one propositions. Struggling to disbelieve the devil's power over me should not merely carry a flat requirement of 9 willpower. Why not a combined will/intel score of 13, with a two-point bonus if my character's magic amulet comes in the form of a crucifix? Or a willpower check, modified by +1 if INT>=5 and another +1 for having upheld materialist values at some point in the campaign? While this would be a drag (literally, as in dragging along a whole notebook instead of a character sheet) for tabletop games, computers excel at such cross-referencing.

Just as importantly: show me the itemized breakdown of all such influences in mouse-over tooltips or the combat log. Most of the time I'll only care how much tax my province brings in. Occasionally I might want to inform myself toward my next stat increase... and that's how it should be. Eliminate the drudgery of constant dice roll crunching, sure, great... but complexity of decision-making should if anything increase. I should buy stat points not thinking "I am a STR character" but wondering how bulging muscles will improve my odds of intimidating a goblin or decrease my constitution/fatigue penalty from swimming across a castle moat in armor. Just as importantly, giving each cause multiple effects is less likely to put players to the impossible task of predicting the single correct answer out of seventeen status effects. It helps to make more options viable at some point. As I mentioned before, it's long past time we remembered that RPGs started as strategy wargames. Why shouldn't your skill checks receive the same attention as your weapon attacks with their base weapon damage, stat modifiers, buffs, armor penetration, resistances, flaming oils vs. oiled-up flamers?

It could be done, and much more easily and with less cost, I'll wager, than implementing the latest NVidiForce vertexemplary shade-mappinging. So why isn't it? Though I don't play pen and paper games, it does seem like most of them have been gradually addressing such issues since their first surge in popularity during the 1970s and '80s. So why do cRPG developers insist on continuing to tailor their products' complexity to the tastes of tween arcade-jockeys from the 1980s?