Working with Skills

[TCArknight]

Howdy! Wish I'd have been able to make it to GenCon, then maybe I could have brought this up there.

Anyway, in the Star Trek system I'm working on, skills can be the following:
(A specialty adds an effective +2 to the rank of the general skill)

1) General Skill - This is a skill with no Specialities. i.e. Mind Control 3 ( I guess there could be GM created specialties for these however.) Language skill is similar to this but each language is considered a different skill

2) Skill with Specialty - Skill such as Athletics where Climbing and Jumping are specialties. This would list on the sheet as Athletics (Climbing,Jumping) 3 (When climbing or jumping the character would have a +5 instead of the +3 from the general skill.) Skils can be purchased without a speciality (i.e. Athletics 3)

3) Group Skill - a Related set of Skills, with or without specialties; i.e. Science - Physics (Particle Physics) 3, Science - Chemistry 2. (listed as: Science - Chemistry 2, Physics (Particle Physics) 3 on the sheet)

I believe Cortex handles this by linking Specialties to a general skill through a < linkage> tag.

How does that work? Would that be the best way to handle this?

I think Mathias mentioned about this in the other thread, but I thought this might be a way to make it more visible for anyone working on similar..

 

[Mathias]

How are specialties for a skill chosen - what do they cost (and does the cost differ during character generation vs. character advancement).

I'm afraid I need to know a bit more about how they're structured before I can recommend the best way to handle them.

Also, would it work to handle group 1 and group 2 as the same thing (General skills and Skills with Specialties are the same thing, but no specialties have been defined for some skills)?

 

[Mathias]

I think you also mentioned something in the previous post that suggested that the group skills were like the Perform or Craft skills in d20 - just a term that encompasses multiple skills which have a similar function, but each skill in that group acts just like any other normal skill in practice (you might also need a total / maximum, like d20's max perform, but that's independant of how the skills are built)

 

[TCArknight]

How are specialties for a skill chosen - what do they cost (and does the cost differ during character generation vs. character advancement).

I'm afraid I need to know a bit more about how they're structured before I can recommend the best way to handle them.

Also, would it work to handle group 1 and group 2 as the same thing (General skills and Skills with Specialties are the same thing, but no specialties have been defined for some skills)?

I agree that General Skills should be treated like Skills with Specialties, but General Skills just have no specialties defined.

I think you also mentioned something in the previous post that suggested that the group skills were like the Perform or Craft skills in d20 - just a term that encompasses multiple skills which have a similar function, but each skill in that group acts just like any other normal skill in practice (you might also need a total / maximum, like d20's max perform, but that's independant of how the skills are built)

Exactly right now that I think about it. Craft is a Group skill for ST as well. For Example:
Craft: Cooking +2, Craft: Sculpture (Ice) +3

How skills are handled:

During character creation, skills are chosen in 3 stages. Each +1 to a skill is 1 'pick'.

Stage 1 is species skills where on average a character has 21 picks for species related skills. Stage 2 is the Personal Development stage where a character has 5 picks (one skill at +2, 3 @ +1). At this point, any skills at all can be bought. A Specialty for a bought skill can be added for a cost of 1 pick. Stage 3 is the 'Professional' stage. Before skills are selected, a Profession/Class is chosen. This Profession labels several skills as 'Professional' skills (like Class skills in 3.5) During character creation, professional skills as well as specialties cost 1 pick each. During later advancement, Professional skills and adding a Specialty costs 1 pick, but a +1 to a 'Nonprofessional' skill is 2 picks. 25 picks are spent at this Professional stage, just on 'Professional' skills. (in addition to the specific skills for the Profession, a species/ability can make a skill a 'Professional' skill)

A skill during character creation cannot start with more than +6.

For both Personal and Professional Development, there are 'Packages' available which pre-spend the points available. For example:
Personal Package:
Academic Upbringing
Pick 1: Computer Use +2, Any One Knowledge Skill +2, Any One Science Skill +2
Pick 3: Any One Craft Skill +1, Any One Entertain Skill +1, Any One Engineering Skill +1, Any One Language Skill +1

Profesional Package: Diplomat
Professional Skills: Administration, Computer Use, Culture, History, Inquire, Language, Law, Negotiate, Persuade, Politics, Social Science, Specific World
Bureaucrat
Skills: Administration +3, Computer Use (Retrieve) +1, Inquire (Interview) +2, Law +3, Negotiate (Mediate) +1, Persuade (Oratory) +2, Politics +4
Pick 5: +1 to any Professional Skill

 

[TCArknight]

Anyone with any ideas that will help?

 

[TCArknight]

Bueller? Bueller?

 

[rob]

In your post, you outline how everything works in the game, so now we've got a reasonable idea of what you need to do. However, you don't really ask any specific questions here. So it feels like you're just asking a blanket "what should I do?"

When you ask questions like that, we really don't have a clue how best to answer them, because they are way too general. It also requires a *significantly* greater amount of work (and time) for us to respond, because now we have to try to either figure out what you want us to answer or we have to provide an extensive answer that delves into all sorts of details - which you might not need. If we see a post we can answer in 5 minutes and another one that will take us an hour or more to answer, guess what happens to latter one? It gets deferred until we have a big chunk of spare time in which to think through the situation and provide helpful guidance. Unfortunately, we don't have any spare time these days, so the post just keeps getting deferred. :-(

So please try to be as focused as possible with your questions in the future and you'll get both faster and more useful answers.

I'm going to throw out some basic suggestions, but we're swamped right now. So I'm not going to delve into details unless you ask a more specific question about something.

Based on the way that skills work, I would use a mechanism very similar to one used for Savage Worlds. Skills being added costs a point. Skills being increased costs a point.

To keep things organized best, I would break things into three distinct steps that follow the game rules, possibly having a separate tab for each. Skills added on one tab show on the other tabs as non-deletable. All the user can do on each tab is add skills and increase the number of points applied to a skill, up to the maximum of +6.

Specialties would be treated as separate skills, just like for Cortex. The specialty skills would not appear for selection until the group skill was first added. Adding a new specialty would cost the appropriate points.

If a user selects a personal and/or professional package, then the standard behavior would be replaced by new behaviors. The various skills would be bootstrapped to the character, which would charge for them appropriately. And either choosers or a table would be used to select each of the remaining skill choices.

I recommend ignoring the implications of packages at first. Just get the basics working for each of the three stages. You can then add the logic for handling packages later. It will likely entail some tweaks to the way you setup skills, but it's most important to do things in a step-wise fashion or you'll become overwhelmed. So start with just the handling of skills and get that working frist.

 

[TCArknight]

Hey Rob, thanks for the response. I hadn't realized the questions I had got buried that much. I'll state them I hope a bit clearer.

1) how to you set up the linkage tag so that selection of skills work similar to the Cortex skills? I haven't been able to find a clear example of that.

2) If I've thought of the things right, I need three resource pools, one for Species, one for Background, and one for Profession. right? How would I limit the list of skills that can be chosen from for the Species?

That's all I can think of this early in the morning...

Thanks!
Thomas

 

[rob]

1) how to you set up the linkage tag so that selection of skills work similar to the Cortex skills? I haven't been able to find a clear example of that.

There is an excellent example of using linkages within the Savage Worlds data files. All skills in SW are linked to the corresponding attribute they apply to. The definition of the linkage is in traits.str, as well as a few references to it. Every skill assigns its linkage in thing_skills.dat.

In your situation, you would use an optional linkage, since only specialty skills need to be linked to the base skills. You would also need to utilize a tag to identify specialties. Then you would need to utilize the "needtag" mechanism to only show specialties for which the base skill was selected. You'll find a discussion of "needtag" in the thread discussing the L5R files that "SAbel" is working on.

If you want a more detailed explanation of how to set things up like Cortex, Mathias will need to chime in, since he's more familiar with the nuances of exactly how he handled it. That being said, I would probably wait on handling this until after I got the basic handling of the three different stages into place.

 

[rob]

2) If I've thought of the things right, I need three resource pools, one for Species, one for Background, and one for Profession. right? How would I limit the list of skills that can be chosen from for the Species?

Correct on the three resource pools. You would have a separate table to add each grouping of skills (species, background, and profession). Each table would utilize an "autotag" that would be assigned to each selection made via that table. Then you would be able to track which table each skill was added through when tallying points.

However, that won't allow you to track the increases for each skill, and those can be applied from each separate table. So you'll also need three separate "user" fields for each skill. One is the number of increases for species, plus another each for background and profession. You would show a different field in each of the tables. Then you could readily track how many increases were applied for each of the three different pools.

You would limit the skills for each species by using the "needtag" mechanism. Each species would list the skills that it encompasses via their tags (you would use an identity tag for this). Then you would forward those tags to the hero for the selected species. Once that's done, you would use "needtags" to readily filter the list of skills.

For an indepth discussion of "needtag", please see the thread where I outline this for "SAbel". You should be able to do a search for "needtag" or "denytag" here on the forums.

 

[rob]

Actually, it sounds like you're going to need many similar techniques to L5R. So *please* take a look at all the suggestions I gave to SAbel to assist him in working on the L5R files. Those explanations ought to answer many of your questions before you ask them. Then you can focus here on the ones that aren't answered there.