Abilities and Skills

So let’s summarize the skills I have in mind:

• Fortitude Skills

• Athletics – Running, jumping, swimming, climbing, all the things athletes do.
• Labor – Farming, mining, digging pits, anything requiring long hours of backbreaking labor. From clearing collapsed tunnels to building a fortified camp, you’d be surprised how often this comes up in adventuring. And when you’re not adventuring, there’s always a need for strong backs.
• Survival – Weathering harsh conditions, trekking long distances, and rousing from little sleep to do it again the next day. Includes finding shelter and water as you travel.
• Steering – Sailing a ship, driving a vehicle, or riding a horse all require physical work to steer the vehicle or animal where you want to go.

Agility Skills

• Finesse – From pick-pocketing to swapping the Gem of Doom for a fake while no one’s looking, anything that requires fast hands falls under Finesse.
• Stealth – Moving quietly, keeping to shadows, and slipping through crowds unseen. All of these fall under stealth.
• Acrobatics – From balancing on a wire, to tumbling, to parkour, sometimes quick reflexes save the day.
• Crafting – Making potions, magic items, armor, weapons, food, baskets. They all require careful handling and exacting detail.

Mind Skills

• Mechanics – Locks, traps, the strange gnomish contraption that looks like it’s about to explode. Understanding how things work often allows you to take it apart, and maybe even put it back together.
• Observation – Noticing that you’re being watched, spotting the secret door, hearing the beating heart under the floorboards, reading the expression of people and the tells of animals, all this falls under observation.
• Lore – You read. Therefore you know stuff. Maybe even a lot of stuff.
• Arcana – You’re sensitive to the flow of magic, able to understand its currents and figure out what it does.

Will Skills

• Concentration – Remaining focused despite distractions, and people trying to stab you–and sometimes succeeding.
• Influence – Someone said the core of diplomacy is to talk softly and carry a big stick. Whether it’s threats or promises, you’re good at getting what you want. Applies even when dealing with animals and others who don’t share your language.
• Performance – Dancing, singing, playing an instrument, impersonating someone, or weaving a convincing lie. It’s all about rejecting another person’s reality and replacing it with your own. And if you’re convincing enough, you can bring them along for the ride.
• Profession – One might think that having a professional job like scribing or shopkeeping would require one to have a sharp mind. One would be wrong. The primary requirement of such a job is to be able to keep focused, remain polite, and endure the petty slights of customers, bosses, and colleagues, day in and day out.

Specializations

The Math

The fifth edition of D&D uses something called bounded accuracy. This limits how high rolls can get by keeping limits on the modifier, since the ability modifier maxes out at 5, and the proficiency modifier maxes out at 6, for a total of +11. Sort of. Then there’s expertise, that doubles your proficiency modifier, spells like Bless and Guidance, that add 1d4, and Bardic inspiration, that adds d12. There’s also the rogue’s Reliable Talent, that causes any roll on the die below 10 to count as a 10. This means, at a minimum, a 10th level rogue with Reliable Talent and Expertise and Guidance and Bardic Inspiration, gets a total 25. On average, they would get about 35. That’s a bit outside of bounded accuracy.

How would I control this? For one, I wouldn’t grant expertise. I’ll instead use specialization that will grant a flat +3 that doesn’t scale with level. Second, abilities that would normally grant an extra die will instead grant an extra d10 roll that can replace one of the d10 rolls. (From the Weal pool, if we’re using that. I’ll probably make the pools an optional variant. If you’re not using the pools, this is only limited by the class feature.) So while those will increase the average, they won’t increase the maximum.

Otherwise, I’ll scale similarly to how 5th edition does. Characters will receive bonuses to their abilities from their ancestry, background, and culture, but the maximum at 1st level for any ability will be 4. Until 10th level, the maximum will be 5, and afterward, the maximum will be 6.

For the bonus from the skill, I think it will work similarly to proficiency bonuses in 5e, scaling with level. At first I was going to use the same scaling as D&D, 1 + level/4 rounded up. However, since I’m starting with a slightly higher ability modifiers, which increase to 6 rather than being limited to 5, and since my average rolls are higher by half (and my ~65% probability is about two points higher), maybe I’ll just do level/4 rounded up. So skills will max out at 5, while ability modifier maxes out at 6.

Now, let’s do some math, to determine what is Hard, Medium, and Easy for different characters. As a starting point, I consider something where someone has a 75% chance of success to be Easy, where someone has a 50% chance of success to be Medium, and where someone has a 25% chance to be Hard. Now with 2d10, we won’t match exactly those numbers, but let’s try to get relatively close. Players have a 55% chance to roll an 11 or higher, so we’ll define that as our Medium. They have a 79% chance to roll an 8 or higher, but a 2% chance to roll a double 4 or double 5, which would effectively make those values below 8. So an 8 or higher will represent 77% chance of success. Meanwhile, a 2d10 has a a 21% chance of rolling a 15 or higher, +2% for the chance to roll a double 6 or double 7. So a 15 is a hard 2d10 roll, with a 23% chance of success.

So Easy, Medium, and Hard will represent a 77%, 55%, and 23% chance of success. For the least competent character, with +0 from their ability modifier and +0 from their skill, that means a target number of 8/11/15. Now, let’s create a table for different levels, with an Incompetent character (+0), an Average character (+skill bonus and no ability bonus, though in practice this could be someone with an equivalent ability bonus and no skill bonus), an Expert character (maximum ability bonus plus the skill bonus), and the Specialist (maximum ability bonus plus skill bonus plus specialization). And see what Easy, Medium, and Hard target numbers are for each.

This results in the following for the percentage odds of success (including the possibility of doubles, assuming I calculated them correctly):