Quote:
Originally Posted by ChalkLine
This is pretty much my thinking
I used to have a vast list of these on a character sheet and recently I have ruthlessly cut them all out and replaced them with generic skill "areas".
The problem I found is that they're all linked and I was unwilling (and due to the peculiar system I'm using unable) to create nested skill trees like Traveller, or better yet 1st edition Paranoia.
The problem arose that players would have a high skill in one tiny thing like "weaving" but couldn't make a rope because they had no "ropemaking" skill. That's a poor analogy but you know what I mean. I tried to introduce a one task difficulty skill level penalty for associated skills but in some cases the players were better off using the base statistic or we'd have extended sessions in-game where a player and I had differences in what we considered "associated". It also made skill allocation difficult for CharGen.
A classic case for this is "armouring", creating armour, and "cutlery", making swords. I can do both, but really I'm an armourer first and foremost. However I can't make textile armours for the life of me, I wouldn't even know how to start.
So now a lot of it is simply broadly-drawn skill areas and I ask for detailed backstories so I can work out what a PC knows with input from the player.
However this works for me, I'm not going to assume it's a universal truth or anything.
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GURPS introduced the bang! skills for their action supplements for the same reason. Particularly for GURPS it works.