Question about Skills before I buy

question
#1

Hi all! I just heard about C&S from Paladin Prose and House DM and it took all of 20 minutes to get me hooked. I’ve read through the free guide multiple times and know I want to run this ASAP. I just want to make sure I understand a few things before I commit to the full book.

My big question is around using skills, odds of success/failure, and how those play out. In most games I’ve played, the more or less “base” success rate is something like 55%. If you’re trained, you’ll succeed a little more than half the time “out of the box”.

It seems that starting characters in C&S are pretty hard pressed for those kinds of odds. The more skills you have, the hardier you are, but the less often you actually succeed at things. I imagine this creates some weird rolls and resolutions where parties are rolling multiple failures in a row.

How does the game recommend handling strings of whiffs like that, where players have maybe at max a 30% chance of succeeding at things there supposedly good at/trained in? Have these kinds of odds ever stonewalled a session for anyone in actual play? Have players been frustrated by low chances of success when using their skills? Or do the full rules give ways of walking GMs and players through that and keeping the action moving?

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing people’s stories!

#2

I wouldn’t look at skill rolls the way they are used in a lot of other systems.

Skills are more for when a character is trained to a point that that few people ever will be. So a lot of things would just be flat rolls to see if it succeeds, and you can set that difficulty such that it will come to a 50% success rate.

Where the skill rolls come into things is more when the player wants to have the character do something using the skill. As the example, the player might want the character to try and bend the bars of the prison cell. But there is no reasonable way anyone would be able to do this so a flat roll isn’t even an option. But the character has the Muscle skill! So the play will call that they want to use the muscle skill to try and bend the bars at this point the player will attempt to roll under the skill level and if you as the GM decided that the bars are of some extra sturdy metal or they are really thick you might add a difficulty penalty to the roll that lowers the skill value for that roll. Like wise you could also say the stone around the bars has been weakened and so the roll will be easier than normal and raise the skill value for that roll.

So knowing where the characters are at skill wise and having an understanding of how they are using their skills you can use the difficulty of a situation to get the success rate to something like 55% if that is what you want.

So in the end there really shouldn’t be as many whiffs as you would think unless you want the game to have them. However, when it comes to handling the whiffs that is a lot of the fun of the game, what will the players do when things don’t go according to plan?

#3

Thanks! That’s helpful, I think. Especially if I think of it in terms of Skills being there to solve only the toughest problems. In most games, Skill rolls are more or less the thing that drives the narrative forward, but here they seem more like tools the players can use to wrestle the narrative in their favor – with appropriately long odds. If I think of it that way, it does make lots more sense.

#4

EDIT: I just looked back at all of that i typed below and it is just more of my long winded ramblings. So for a TLDR version, yeah think of it like you said, a way for the players to wrestle the narrative in their favor. Let them be creative and you as the GM are there to just sort of keep it from getting to crazy.

— WARNING Long rambling brain dump follows —

In Crown and Skull one of the focuses is to move to a Player Focus so the players will say I want to use “Skill X to do Thing Y” and as the GM you will be looking to see if that use first makes any sense and then doing a quick decision on how difficult or easy that task would be.

So for example in the bend the bars example if one of my players said the wanted to use there Repair skill to try and remove bars using the tools they have with them on the outside of the cell to free the other player I would allow that. But if a user just says something like “I want to use my swimming skill to remove the bars” I’m going to ask them how they think that is going to work and if it just doesn’t make sense I would either just not allow the roll or maybe I would say using the swimming skill like that will have a difficulty of 20 which would lower their skill value by 20 points for that roll.

Or if you have players that are going to get really creative one of them might have a skill use that wouldn’t directly be able to bend the bars but maybe they can use it to make the roll for the other player easier. So one player on the outside of the jail cell might have a horse and the “Animal Training” skill. So they maybe can’t use that skill to bend the bars directly but perhaps they can tie the horse to the bars and use the Animal Training skill to get the horse to pull at the correct time to make the Muscle skill roll for the character on the inside easier.

So maybe animal handler will just makes a skill roll and if it succeeds it makes the muscle check easier by 3. And if you really want to have fun if the animal handler rolls a critical fail the muscle check is harder by 1.

#5

As a GM, I rarely call for skill rolls. I ask the characters what they do and how they do it.

If their action would have some consequences, I let them know and ask if they wish to proceed. I leave it up to the players to tell me what skills they want to use. If it seems very accurate and works perfectly, I’ll just let it happen. If it seems like it’s going to be incredibly difficult but they have the right tools and skill, I let them roll the skill as is or with a bit of bonus.

The choice players have is to be good at a few things or be mediocre as many things to have more skills for Attrition. I would always recommend having a good and small set of skills. If they are really worried about getting killed, then recommend they buy useful equipment and to play carefully. 4 goblins against one adventurer will start shredding them up.

Also remember that death starts happening if they don’t have inventory to absorb a hit.

#6

Love this. The freedom around handling bonuses wasn’t something I really picked up from the free guide, but it makes a lot of sense. It feels like treating the characters’ skill values as more “starting points” that can be dialed up or down depending on the situation.

#7

Regarding your Death, comment. Does that mean that you can techinically strategize to take attrition to your skills before equipment to stay alive longer?

#8

If given the option, yes. This will be based on the Attrition type received. Keep in mind that Flesh Attrition hits just skills, but DESTROY is going after equipment. If they get a choice, it might suck losing a skill, but at least you’ll be alive to run away.

#9

Thank you for your response. So let’s say a PC has one skill left to scratch off and no equipment to scratch off and they recieve a Destroy Attrition. Does that mean they now have to scratch off a Skill?

#10

That means that PC is about to DIE!

if you have to destroy or cross off equipment and you don’t have any, you took a hit to the heart.

End of Phase 5 and they’re a goner!

#11

Gotcha, thank you. :ok_hand: