Skill, Twenty Percent
There is one aspect of RuneScape that is critical to its gameplay, central to its identity, and which I have studiously avoided addressing in this series: skills. I’m not going to develop a full skill system from scratch because that’s something I’d hope to steal from a base game, but I’d like to systematically consider how skills work, what they do for games in general, and how they work in RuneScape specifically.
The Hunter skill release login screen.
What is a Skill?
Before diving in, let’s construct a definition, a lighthouse so we don’t get lost.
Skills are character attributes that mechanically represent learned competency in an area.
- Belonging to the character, skills function the same regardless of player skill.1
- As attributes they are non-transferable and generally immutable. “Swordsmanship” is a skill, “sword ownership” is not.
- Mechanical means that it has an effect on gameplay that is outlined in the rules. “Gruff” is probably just a flavorful adjective, not a skill.
- A representation maps to some coherent (and maybe resonant) real or fictional concept. A high score in a minigame is too abstract to be a skill (even if it had a mechanical effect). Metafictional abilities are also excluded.
- By learned I mean that, for our purposes, a skill can be acquired or improved through play. “Height” is probably not a skill.
- Competency refers to a character’s success or failure in an endeavor. The existence of a skill implies the possibility of failure (or the possibility of success), usually through chance or insufficiency.2
- An area is a collection or class of tasks. This excludes feats, spells, and other extraordinary abilities (even if skill mechanics are used in their resolution). This also excludes traditional skills that are hopelessly narrow, like “lock picking” (but not “sleight of hand”).
This definition is functional, not descriptive. In Troika!, “Skill” is an unchanging attribute, but this definition could apply to “Advanced Skills.” Similarly, the base attack bonus in D&D is not usually considered a “skill,” but for our purposes behaves like one.
Painting ornaments for a holiday event.
Skill / Not Skill
To stress-test this definition, let’s play a game with it.
Lockpicking. Not skill. As mentioned above, lockpicking may behave like a skill mechanically, but it is too narrow. There is no possible other activity which “lockpicking” could be applied to but its namesake. (We could contrive an example, perhaps, but then the name would be too narrow, and thus inaccurate.)
Thieving. Skill. Thieving incorporates lockpicking, but also pickpocketing, palming, misdirection, and other similar activities. (Although I mentioned sleight of hand earlier, in 5e, lockpicking is a plain Dex check.)
Strength (OD&D). Not skill. Ability scores in OD&D represent innate things that you can’t change or learn.
Strength (5e). Skill. Once you can increase your ability scores, the representation changes, the fiction is different, and it meets all our requirements.
Fireball. Not skill. In Troika! spells use skill mechanics. Even in other games, it’s possible to consider the idea that you could get better at Fireball with practice. But Fireball doesn’t represent an “area.” No matter how good you are at Fireball it still won’t ever apply to Firecube.
Pyromancy. Skill. If we wanted Fireball to be a skill, this is the answer.
Combat Level (RuneScape). Not skill. In RuneScape, combat level acts as a skill, but it’s purely abstract, a linear combination of other numbers, a secondary, descriptive statistic.
Quest Points (RuneScape). Skill. Originally introduced as the “influence” skill, quest points represent your reputation and are used to gate content for “more famous” characters.
Batting Average. Not Skill. A batting average is purely descriptive and after-the-fact. A player isn’t more likely to hit the ball because they have a high batting average, they have a high batting average because they are likely to hit the ball. It has no mechanical effect on the game.
Elvish Language (5e). Skill. Characters can learn new languages if their Int score increases. Being a Boolean value does not prevent it being a skill: “failure” is still possible by not knowing the language.
Alignment Languages (B/X). Not skill. Characters can “learn” alignment languages by switching alignment, but not through effort (barring the pathological case of a chaotic linguist who turns lawful only to learn the language, which we can safely exclude this from consideration). In general this is not how alignment languages behave, so it would be incorrect to call them skills.
Save vs. Petrification (OD&D). Not Skill. At least, not as written. As D&D grew, the initial hyper-specific save system accreted a set of “similar” actions that got folded into existing categories. By AD&D a complex hierarchy of applicable saves had been made, but RAW, OD&D Save vs. Petrification does only that one thing.
Reflex Save (3.X). Skill. This one meets all the requirements, the “area” in question being all manner of dodging, catching, blocking, and so on.
The Pest Control minigame.
Why Have Skills?
I think games return to skill mechanics largely for reasons implied by the definition. Skills:
- Describe and differentiate characters.
- Provide a platform for other game mechanics to build on.
- Connect the game to interpretable phenomena.
- Reward player engagement and provide paths for advancement.
- Outline the subjects and likely activities of a game.
Skills are such a common design pattern that there are many tempting distractions here. What about skill trees? How do we groups skills: mechanically, functionally, or some other way? Skill lists are not as universal as skills, what does a skill list accomplish independently? These questions are all interesting to me, but for now, beside the point.
Cleaning old swords with Tindel Marchant.
What Do Skills Do for RuneScape?
In contrast to D&D, RuneScape was created wholly after the invention of skills, so they are a first-class game feature. Apart from equipment, a character is almost completely a product of their skills. But what does RuneScape do differently with them?
First, skills are all increased independently of each other and of a character’s “level.” (Combat level, mentioned above, is actually calculated from skills, after the fact). Some other TTRPGs also do this, but it’s a direct inversion of D&D.
Unlike most other games with skill lists, RuneScape’s long list of skills not only circumscribe the player’s actions, but describe the game world. Whole areas are built around the idea of a single skill. Sometimes this gives us coherent ideas like “city of thieves” or “hills of game-hunting,” but sometimes it also gives us “forests of agility” and “deserts of crafting.” This idiosyncratic definition of the world through its activities (not limited to skills) extends to NPCs, quests, monsters, treasure, and everything else. If something in RuneScape can’t be tied to an activity, it stands out as an oddity.
This strategy has a few benefits. By limiting the possibilities of the world, not only the characters, it makes sure that every piece of content has at least one possible path to mechanical relevance. By limiting the fiction as well, it becomes very unusual that there is anything in the game you can see but not ever attain. It also means that turnaround is fair play: if you can employ strong combat prayers, eventually so can your enemies.
It also has some drawbacks. With no “common sense” fallback mechanics, RuneScape can be frustratingly inflexible. There is rarely an option to do something anyway and risk being worse, or to try another angle of attack. If someone needs an ingredient to make a weapon to fight a monster, that’s the only way to do it. If someone makes up their mind about something (and you’ve exhausted the dialog tree) then that’s it, they won’t change it. It can feel a bit like solving a chain of XY problems, except that there’s no in-game way to circumvent them. This problem should be trivial to avoid in a tabletop game, but it’s worth mentioning.
Which only leaves the grind. When you are grinding, the skills don’t just inform your character or describe the world, they become the whole game. You never “encounter” a goblin in RuneScape, you go to where goblins are and you kill them for hours until they drop what you want, or you’ve killed enough to satisfy your slayer master, or you decide that you’ve gained enough experience. It should be obvious why I haven’t addressed this. It’s boring. It’s passive and solitary, a single eternal combat with no tactical variance and no end in sight. It’s great for turning off your brain, maybe watching a movie or reading a book. I can imagine nothing worse than pitching this as a tabletop game to play with friends.
The grind is partly a result of skills being leveled independently of each other: in order to raise a skill, you need to practice it, and you need to raise your skills to do fun things. I think we can still avoid this, even if skills are independent in our chosen system, by simply allowing players to do fun things at the start, and allowing different fun things at higher levels. We can also take some inspiration from RuneScape itself here. (I’ll only touch on these lightly, as I think they’re useful tools, but exhausting to think about this abstractly.)
- Evoking skills indirectly or aesthetically. We’re fighting a monster, but in a fishing village, with nautical paraphernalia scattered about, so it feels related to a high “Fishing” or “Mariner” skill.
- Allowing cross-skill synergies. Allowing “Surgery” to be used in place of or to help with “Butchery” means that players don’t have to improve their “Butchery” skills to participate. If it rewards “Butchery” experience even though “Medicine” was used, so much the better.
- Similarly, ways to boost or increase stats in general can obviate the need for grinding, or shore up weaknesses in a party, providing one more alternative path to accomplishing a task.
- Providing non-skill “activities” that still benefit and require a skill. Fighting the Wintertodt rewards Firemaking; you need Agility to use a certain shortcut; the Tangleroot takes more damage from better gardeners.
Running around before a pending system update.
Illustrations
The illustrations in this post are dithered, a legacy technique for shrinking file sizes. It had a resurgence in 2018 when Low-Tech Magazine detailed their low-energy web design. This has proponents and detractors, but it’s good enough for my purposes either way. The command I used was:
$ mogrify -ordered-dither o8x8,2 -format png *.bmpThe screenshots used as are my own, recovered from deep in my hard drive.
Chilling in my empty house.
The onus is on the GM to communicate when player skill is required, if, for example, the player needs to be more specific about what they want to accomplish.↩︎
This can have strange implications if we extrapolate game rules to the rest of the world, or allow too high or low a chance of success, or don’t apply common sense. For now, we simply won’t do that.↩︎