I’m Colin, and I’m a professional video game designer. This is Drolleries, where I write about d&d, ttrpgs, and game design. Thoughtful articles in your inbox weekly, every Monday.

Why does Skyrealms of Jorune have a skill for “slap hands”? What about ventriloquism? Public speaking?

The game has skills like public speaking, city contacts, lore of heraldry/symbols, science, philosophy, singing, dancing, math, teaching, calligraphy, and two skills for each race’s culture and etiquette, respectively.

As I’ve written about before, this game is overly complicated in a very 80s way, back when game design was all about how your charts were different from AD&D’s charts.

Combat and Input Randomness in Skyrealms of Jorune

Colin Spiridonov

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Apr 27

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But the inclusion of these skills was something new & unique.

The creators imagined a complex game of politics, discovery, and high society social interaction that these skills tried to capture - totally different from the combat- and dungeon-focused experiences we associate with games from the early 80s.1

Skills Encourage Player Behavior

Skyrealms of Jorune stumbled upon this important fact about ttrpg design.

When players have something they’re good at, they’ll want to do it.

If it’s a skill, they’ll want to attempt it. If it’s a combat ability, they’ll be excited to use it. If it’s a piece of equipment, they’ll find a way to use it. When solving problems, players are inspired by their character sheet (for good or for ill).

By merely having a skill for ventriloquism, some players will be inspired to use it. Even if it may sound dumb, players will try to apply their skills to the situation at hand. And even if Skyrealms of Jorune may have gone a bit too far (how are you supposed to use slap hands? I still don’t know), it was an important innovation in the history of ttrpgs.

By having a skill called “fast talk/trickery,” players will be encouraged to fast talk the guards to let them into the city without paying the tax. Even having a skill for “heraldry/symbols” will encourage players to ask “does this guy have any symbols on his uniform? maybe I know what they mean?” The inclusion of these skills defines what type of story is created at the table. Meanwhile, if everything on the players’ character sheets was combat-related, they’d be more likely to just fight the guards instead of fast-talking them.

This fact creates some weird player behavior in 5e.

“I Roll Perception”

GM (me): You open the door and see a destroyed bedroom. The bed frame is smashed into pieces, the mattress ripped up. A broken cabinet is leaning against the wall, and a trunk is upside-down at the foot of the bed. What do you do?

Ranger (my player): I want to roll Perception. I’ve got a +8.

GM: What are you trying to look at?

Ranger: Just everything, like a sweep of the room.

GM: Okay, you see what I just described. If you want to search anything specific, you can let me know.

Ranger: Can I still roll Perception, though?

GM: Sure, whatever.

Ranger: 21.

GM: You don’t see anything else.

Ranger: Oh, okay.

As a new GM, this is how I used to run Perception checks in my 5e games. Because of the skill system in 5e, players with high perception bonuses really wanted to use their skill, so kept asking to roll Perception checks instead of describing their actions. As the GM, denying their attempts felt like I was denying them the opportunity to showcase their character’s strengths. But allowing them to roll made the process of exploring a room into something quite boring.

I don’t think this experience is unique. Because I think this behavior is a product of the system.

Yes, this problem could be alleviated by an experienced GM who says “no” when players ask for needless Perception checks. But I don’t think GMs should have this responsibility to “fix” the game system. Why does the game have a skill called “perception” in the first place when the act of perceiving things should be mostly handled without rolls? If perception should only be rolled when the players are in danger or under time pressure, that makes the skill way rarer than the other skills available to players, and will disappoint the player who chose that skill at character creation.2

I’ve also been a player in many 5e games where the GM has flattened exploration into a series of Perception rolls. When I ask to search the desk for any documents, my GM asks me for a Perception or Investigation roll. But why? Would failure be interesting? Is it dramatic if there’s an important plot-related clue in the desk, and I don’t find it? I don’t think so. If I rolled a 6, then the other players also try to roll Perception on the desk until someone rolls satisfyingly high, so we’re confident we didn’t miss anything. That grinds the scene to a halt, and invalidates my character’s decision to search the desk.

Again, I don’t think this is solely the GM’s fault. There is a better way to run this for everyone involved, but the game system encourages the GM to call for Perception checks to satisfy the players who indexed into that skill. GMs want to call for rolls to validate their players’ choices in character creation, and players want to roll to use their strengths. It’s an incentive structure that steps on one of the most interesting parts of D&D.

But it doesn’t have to be like this…

No Stealth Skill in Mothership

Mothership is an award-winning sci-fi horror ttrpg, known for its fantastic layout & visual design and its OSR-inspired design philosophy (deadliness included). My favorite part is how the stress, panic, and wound system sparks imagination and prompts your players to roleplay their war-hardened space marine as a teenage girl screaming and running at the first sight of danger. It’s magical to see your players read their panic result with glee, then happily steer their character (and others) into danger and a brutal, horrific death.

Because of the sheer deadliness and the fear of rolling a panic check, the players spend a lot of time hiding from the monster. Sneaking around abandoned spaceships, trying to stay quiet, and generally trying to not attract the monster.

So why doesn’t Mothership have a stat for stealth?

Coming from D&D, players might be surprised that there’s nothing they can roll to hide. There’s stats for Strength, Speed, Intellect, and Combat, and a number of skills you can add to your rolls, such as Linguistics, First Aid, Driving, Hacking, Engineering, or Explosives. But no stat or skill for sneaking or hiding. Why not?

Well, the designer of the game, Sean McCoy, has spoken about this. (I can’t find the original tweet, but it was quoted in this Questing Beast video)

A big thing that we didn’t design for in Mothership was stealth mechanics. But the game is also about running and hiding. We don’t have fleeing rules either. Here’s why….

What I mean is that it was the one part of the game I didn’t want you to be able to skip over with a roll. I wanted this moment:

“I want to hide".
“Okay where are you hiding?”
“Shit what’s around me?”
“Gear lockers, surgical bed, ventilation shaft.”
”Shit.”
”It’s coming”

“Okay the lockers”
”Okay you won’t fit with your vacsuit on. Do you want to take it off?”
”No. I need the armor. The ventilation shaft.”
”Alright you’ll have to unscrew it.”
”Is there time?”
”You can make a speed check.”
”No fuck it. I’m hiding under the bed.”

Hiding is important. So important that I want all that tension. All those question and answer sessions that make these games so fun to me. Think about where you’re hiding. No, “my stealth is good so I find a place.” Really think.

He lays out a similar argument to the issue of Perception checks in 5e. Having a stealth skill means that players and GMs will both want to roll for stealth, which flattens this exchange into a single die roll.

Without a stealth skill, the outcome of hiding is never certain. The result of a die roll is an objective truth: either you succeed or you fail. If you roll a critical success, then the GM cannot say the alien finds you. Without a roll, the outcome of the player’s action (whether they hide in the ventilation shaft or under the bed) is determined by the GM.

Because it is entirely up to GM fiat, this means the players have to convince the GM that their hiding spot is safe, which means they describe their actions more accurately and engage with the fiction more deeply. This also means that the outcome is unknown, which causes tension and fear. Even the GM describing the alien sniffing the air can be a huge moment of fear. But if a stealth skill was rolled, and the outcome was known to everyone, this moment wouldn’t have the same meaning.

The Fruitful Void

This is what ttrpg designer Vincent Baker called “the fruitful void” in 2005 (original post here, and an explanation of the term here).

In my own words, the fruitful void is a part of a game that is not explicitly defined by the rules (the void), but intentionally designed such that the rules for other parts of the game create a certain experience inside the rules-less part.

The void in Mothership is that there are no rules for hiding. But the other systems in the game — the deadliness of combat, the snowball effect of the stress & panic system, and the overwhelming power of the monster — gives that void meaning. When players ask their GM “is there a hiding spot in this room,” they are desperately begging for a release of the tension, because they know the consequences if they engage with the combat rules or the panic rules if they fight the monster. In this case, the fruitful void is the player’s only safe option, their temporary refuge from the brutality of the rules. But the GM has the ability to yank it away at any time, without a die roll, by just saying “the monster meets your gaze and turns towards you, what do you do?”

That’s the power of the fruitful void. When designed with intention, the absence of a skill can be just as, if not more, impactful than the presence of one.

A dungeon-crawling game about surviving and navigating a dungeon environment might be better without rolling for detecting or disarming traps. Forcing the GM to describe each trap specifically, and forcing the players to describe how they disable the tripwire or block the ceiling-scythe, might create a more nail-biting experience where players pick up on subtle tells, and the outcome of the player’s actions is never certain. In this game, the presence of a trap would always be telegraphed, even if it’s not obvious how it’s triggered or what happens when it is.

The systems for slowly depleting hit points, time pressure, and wandering monsters would work together to give this void meaning - you can’t spend too much time testing and disarming a trap, but you can’t be too reckless either.

These create questions for designers and GMs alike. What behavior should players be encouraged to do? What actions should be left for player-GM negotiation? When should the outcome of an action be uncertain or left for GM fiat?

But skill systems are also important for differentiating characters and enforcing niche protection. What are the strengths and weaknesses of different characters? And how does the skill system create and enforce these niches?

Next time on Drolleries, I’ll compare how Draw Steel and Daggerheart come up with different answers to these questions, and the consequences of each approach.