Design & Inspiration: Skills

Continuing the introduction to game mechanics, today I'll talk about skills!

Skills are abilities that your character uses to overcome obstacles. Most of these obstacles show up via encounters (which I'll talk about a little later), and of course the enemies that I've already mentioned. Currently there are 5 skills - for the sake of simplicity, I've tried to keep the number as low as possible while simultaneously covering a really broad array of abilities.

• Combat: your ability to fight. Augmented with weapons and by exploiting enemy weaknesses (ie coldbringers are vulnerable to heat).
• Evasion: your ability to escape or dodge. Examples of use include avoiding avalanches or running from a fight.
• Perception: your ability to spot or search. Perception will sometimes let you spot danger and allow you to avoid it - for example, you hear a bandit coming, and can choose to avoid using your combat skill. Perception will also help you find items.
• Stealth: your ability to hide. Like perception, stealth lets you avoid certain fights or encounters by sneaking past or away from the threat.
• Survival: your ability to live in the outdoors. Survival helps you find food, identify hazards like thin ice, and move through difficult terrain.

Mechanically, skills are based most strongly on Dungeons & Dragons, but with some influence pulled from Arkham Horror. When you perform a skill check, you roll a 20-sided die (d20), add your skill modifier, and compare the result to the difficulty of the skill check. If you meet or exceed the difficulty, you succeed on the check. Your modifier is determined by the items you're using and sometimes by encounters (and later, when I work out the mechanics, probably character bonuses and weather and stuff).

The difficulty of skill checks is mostly standardized by zone, increasing in difficulty as you go north. Some encounters might call for a specific difficulty, but for the most part it'll just be "do a skill check". The numbers I'm using for my first playtest are difficulties of 10 in the green zone, 15 in the blue zone, and 20 in the black zone. The 10 in the green zone is to give players who are just starting out a 50% chance of passing the skill check without modifiers (well technically 55%, but using 11 would feel too arbitrary). As players move north they'll need to collect items to increase their survivability and continue passing skill checks - if you somehow make your way to the black zone without any gear, you'll have only a 5% chance of passing skill checks there.

Skill check difficulty is one of the things I'm going to have to watch carefully. It's closely linked to the item system, so I anticipate that those will be difficult to balance - I want to have a wide variety of items and bonuses without trivializing skill checks, or going too far and making black zone checks require a very specific set of the items with the highest bonuses.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, going on about items when I haven't shown them in detail yet. Items will be featured soon!