Post originally by Dylan Craig at 2003-10-16 02:02:30
Converted from Phorums BB System

The obvious point raised by the automatic/manual car example is that in some kind of car-based game (The Italian Job d20, for instance) I would be unsurprised to find different skills for every specific aspect of the driving experience.

The reason for this is pretty obvious: if everyone's character does a lot of driving, having multiple skills allows the specialisation regarding other characters that many players insist on to be maintained. Character A is the 'bike guy', Character B does chase & getaway, Character C is more skilled with 18-wheelers... and so on.

Going back to PS: Here's a game with an explicit intrigue/social interaction focus. The multiple skills exist so that, as Benjamin suggests, even if everyone's involved in the lying, haggling and politicking, there's still a difference in how they do it, a difference which is used to advance that which makes your character stand out from the others and - perhaps more importantly - the people you are talking to stand out from one another in terms of what skills you have to use (and not use) to placate/mislead/convince them.

Now, the driving game's ruleset may not work for a bunch of players that don't want to sweat the minutae of driving and want to use the game's setting as a backdrop to a more, I dunno, kung-fu-style game; similarly, if you're not all into interacting with NPCs, perhaps the intricacy of PS is going to just get in the way.

One way to (perhaps) have your date-cake and eat it, is for the Bard (DM) to call for skill rolls by cascade heading or 'action type' rather than by single skill, and allow any skill within that cascade to be used without penalty. So you call for a 'bamboozle the guard roll', and the Player says 'OK, I'm rolling Bluff for that', or 'I'm going to try Deceit'. That way, you keep the specificity of the PS system (and a guide to narrating the results of the roll)while minimising the amount of book-keeping or head-scratching by differently-focused players.

But in the final analysis, why cut all that stuff out at all? I've been a long-time foe of multi-skill and percentile systems both, but I've been pleasantly surprised by PS. The game is good enough to merit at least a trial session using its unmodified rules, and if that doesn't suit your group - well, as many on this thread have pointed out, it's no big deal to trim off the excess skills or adopt a compensatory mechanism like the one outlined above.

I mean, it could be worse, right? They could have used the White Wolf system... ;-)

DC