Last time I’m going to apologize for not posting in a while, even though nobody probably reads this, life got busy.

The Problem

Anyway, one of the things I think about a lot is how much skill systems kind of stink, and one of the reasons I think they do is they either overly complicate things or abstract them away too easily. They are quick and dirty ways of handling things the game system or setting is not interested in focusing on.

This is fine, even necessary, in game design, but there are ways of doing it right and ways of doing it wrong. One of the ways I want to address in doing it right is skill progression.

While I’d love to write on why I think most skill systems are just sort of arbitrarily constructed or needless when a d6 roll would suffice, I think progression and improving skills is a worse blister that needs to be addressed and the chief woe of many bellyaching about skill systems.

In most OSR systems that have skills, when skills improve, they typically go up with level. This has been the traditional way of things, having a set amount of points to be divided among an arbitrary set of skills. This leads, in my mind, to two issues.

  1. Characters do not improve between levels except through acquiring loot, so characters only suddenly get better at mundane tasks at the same time as everything else.
  2. This can lead to munchkin behavior, where players plot out the course of their character’s progression, engaging in exploitation or trying to optimize a character.

Systems with point-buy or point-based XP get around issue 1 by having development be more incremental. The issue is this merely amplifies problem 2 by making the players more aware and involved with how their character improves.

The Solution

Reading through the Invisible College, a game about an occult war between groups of interest, something stood out to me about the magical skill system—it had a very good way of progressing.

In the Invisible College, casting any successful spell in a session leads to a chance to improve something called Attainment (the main stat for casting magical effects). At the end of a session, you’d roll over your current Attainment score; if you succeed, you’d gain +1 to Attainment.

Attainment runs from 0 to 100, and the bonuses for casting are 1/10th of your Attainment score. So, an attainment of 30 means you have a +3 to casting.

This system is brilliant, and I’m shocked it wasn’t used for EVERY SKILL, not just the magic skill. To me, it has this perfect feedback loop and sense of progression: the skills you use as a character/player are the ones that get better. If you want to be good at something, you have to practice at the table as the character and actually get better at it.

It’s a system that incentivizes risk and reward, as well as naturally introducing diminishing returns for trying to stay specialized in one skill. Likewise, it makes characters who are specialized and good at a single skill really impressive.

Some Adjustments

First and foremost, I think skills should still have level caps. For example, most characters cannot have a skill over +4 if they are level one, to prevent grinding these things out. Though, of course, that’s up to GM taste.

You could even scale the skills based on level, so an INT 18 character has a much higher cap on intellectual skills than an INT 12 character, who tops out at 1/3rd the skill bonus.

The other thing I’d use, and it’s something Attainment has in Invisible College, is ways of training a skill externally outside of the main core improvement loop, such as having teachers or going through certain trials which can improve a skill, even rewarding failure for spending the time. Use this type of stuff as downtime activities. Perhaps it’s a requirement to break certain thresholds, like in the Invisible College, where Attainment is capped at a certain percent until you undergo a great ritual to transition into being a master. Likewise, for mundane skills, perhaps they cap somewhere around 40 or 50 percent until you start practicing under a formal master.