Skills: Competent PC's, Competent Players

 At some point I was discussing a unified monster hunter class with someone on the GLoG discord, and I suggested having a specific rules system for rodeoing that you could unlock with a skill. Cut to now, having just read the ruleset for Oblid's driving game, and having scavenged an initiative ruleset for gunfighting from Squigboss on the GLoG discord, I thought it might be cool to take a stab at a new way of doing skills.

The goal of this system is to interlace player and character expertise mechanically. The idea is this: if a player is unskilled at something, they can perform extremely basic functions in that domain with a check. Examples with the skills I'm adapting include:

• Driving: making a tight turn, decelerating rapidly.
• Languages: figuring out the emotional content of what someone's saying with some sort of empathy/sensemaking check.
• Hacking: entering passcodes under pressure, following scripted prompts to a desired digital outcome.
• Gunfighting: shooting at someone.
• Monster rodeoing: physically climbing onto the beast, or making a check to stay on. 

Now, on top of these, you build a custom ruleset, and break expertise into logical chunks.

Examples:

Driving (using Oblid's driving system, which I didn't read extremely thoroughly):

• you know the stats of a car you drive for a day. You can handle it according to Oblid's basic rules. Your handling skill is 8.
• You can perform maneuvers, as per Oblid's rules. Your handling skill is 10. You know local guys who organize drag races and modify cars. You know the stats of a car you take for a test drive.
• Your handling skill is 12. You're famous enough that people will approach you to requisition your driving expertise. You know the stats of a car at a glance.

Gunfighting:

• While wielding a familiar weapon, you can perform maneuvers: Steady aim, covering fire, called shots, etc. A weapon is familiar to you if you've wielded it for two combats, or had two days of practice.
• You know the initiative order of gunfights (listed below, from Squigboss on the GLoG Discord). Weapons are familiar to you if you've wielded them for a gunfights.

go in order, using the next step to resolve ties of the step above:

1. eyes on target > blind — if you see them before they see you, you go first

2. weapons drawn > stowed — if your weapon is out, you’re faster than someone who has to draw

3. standing still > walking > running — the slower you’re moving, the faster you shoot 

4. small guns > big guns — a pistol is faster than a shotgun is faster than a rifle

5. if all of these are equal, you shoot simultaneously

• Weapons are familiar to you at a glance, unless they're strange, magical, etc. While wielding a familiar weapon, you count as one step up on the initiative order (from 5 to 4, or 1 to 0).

Languages (assuming a setting where Common doesn't exist, because the point of this is to revamp languages in your setting).

• If you spend a month around language speakers, you can speak that language if you can make its sounds. In a conversation, you can identify d3 of the most important words someone speaks (this could be d3 words of the most important phrase in that sentence too; GM's discretion).
• If you spend a week around language speakers, you can speak that language if you can make its sounds; otherwise, you have partial mastery, depending on how key the linguistic difference is. In a conversation, you can identify d4 of the most important words someone speaks, d4 words from the most important phrase in the sentence, or a key feature of the language that prevents you from speaking it (your choice).
• If you spend a day around language speakers, you can speak that language if you can make its sounds. In a conversation, you can translate the most important sentence they speak, or d6 of the most important words (your choice). You automatically notice linguistic features that prevent you from speaking it, and can learn to make them with a week of conversation.

(Note: the Languages skill tree isn't associated with a distinct ruleset for learning languages. It just provides rules for options that PC's otherwise wouldn't have. I don't know if that's a meaningful distinction.)

Monster Rodeoing

• With a round of observation, you can identify Weak Spots and Scrabble Spots on titanic monsters.
• Every round, a monster has a (level/4) chance to telegraph its next move to you if that move is an anti-rodeo move. If it does, you may react with any Rodeo move.
• You identify Weak Spots and Scrabble Spots immediately. You may rodeo any monster two sizes larger than you, though smaller ones have fewer Scrabble spots and probably fewer Weak Spots.

Hacking

• I definitely don't have the time nor the energy nor the expertise to write up a hacking ruleset, but you can imagine writing one up, breaking it into chunks, and giving players access to those chunks as they got more skilled.

Has this been done by people already? Probably, but not to the scope I'm envisioning. I've been thinking a lot recently about how to give players more freedom to define the setting, besides broad strokes, and one way to give the player some of the agency is to let them choose what they want to be and write rules for it afterwards. If they want to be a climbing expert in your dungeoncrawl, write up some climbing rules and change the direction of some of your dungeon hallways from horizontal to vertical. If they want to be an MMA fighter but prefer that bombastic Jackie-Chan aesthetic, take this handy-dandy ruleset I wrote up and break it into pieces, probably leaving out leveling.

The other advantage of this is that if you create the opportunity for meaningful choices in your rulesets (which I barely did in the languages section but potato potato) then your player might feel like they're doing something closer to skillful activity when using a skill. You can sort of achieve this with GUMSHOE or with rolls, but that's just a function of your ability to describe skillful behavior; this adds another factor or two, with higher potential for yield.