One of the detractions you occasionally hear lobbied against Dungeons & Dragons is that it doesn’t handle skills well. This is particularly in relation to social challenges, but I’ve seen it in other contexts.

The more nuanced version of the complaint is that D&D is too binary: that its skills are purely pass/fail. It does not handle partial successes.

These, much though I hate to admit it, are fair complaints. Do they matter? Often, no. In an RPG, you can go a very, very long way without rolling dice. The DM can listen to what you want to do, come up with what happens next, and you can continue on in that way for hours. You don’t always need to fall back on mechanics.

And, let’s face it, D&D has a pretty fun combat system which does use game mechanics effectively.

For those who want even more mechanics to play with in combat, there are other RPGs and even other editions of D&D! The same for the converse.

But you’ve got a D&D character, and they have skills. You want those skills to matter, right? Otherwise, why bother choosing them?

(The very basic form of D&D 5E ignores skills altogether – I don’t know any who play it that way. Do you?)

The trouble in resolving skills is not that they don’t have partial successes. It’s that it’s dependent on the scenario and challenge design. Let’s face it: A lot of us are absolutely awful at providing good challenges that include skill use in a meaningful manner.

As an example, I recently took my players through a Cyberpunk RED scenario. (I love that game). The bunker they were investigating had a selection of locked doors. When their techie came up to each door, he made a Security skill check vs the target number. On a success, the door opened. On a failure, it remained closed. Due to his specialisations, he aced every check. It made the party happy to have a security specialist with them. But was this a great challenge? I would say not. What happened on a failure? The door remained closed, and they couldn’t continue on the scenario.

(In truth, I would have improvised back-up plans, but it didn’t change that this part of the scenario design wasn’t particularly interesting).

Now, I hear a few of you mention Skill Challenges. These were a technique in 4E where the player would have to roll several times, getting a target number of successes before failing their check three times. So, perhaps these doors required 4 successes before 3 failures to open. Apart from making the dice rolling take longer, does this change the basics of the scenario? Not really.

One of the more advanced techniques (and often used with Skill Challenges) is the idea of failing forward. Yes, you don’t succeed on opening the door flawlessly, but it still opens – you just suffer a penalty. Perhaps those further into the complex are alarmed. Perhaps the techie gets an electric shock and suffers damage. This requires more thought, and it helps when the scenario designer does the work for you in advance. (If you are the scenario designer, it helps when you build up a library of such cases. Other adventures may help with inspiration).

This is better, but often it still runs into that same problem of not being that interesting. What choices are the players making? Probably very few.

Back to that Cyberpunk RED scenario. In fact, I hadn’t designed the doors to be a Security challenge. I’d designed them to be a Netrunning challenge. (Then the netrunner decided to play the techie instead. Sigh). And Netrunning in Cyberpunk is a far more interesting beast. Because it relies on lots of decisions from the player – just like combat. In many ways, it is combat.

Do you run from the ICE? Do you attempt to bypass it? Do you fight it? Do you ignore it and trigger the door control and accept the damage? Lots of interesting decisions. And that’s what you want.

Even that is not always enough. Because there was one more element that would make this great: Time pressure.

Yes, the netrunner has an interesting situation to solve, but how much better would it be if at the same time, the rest of the players were fighting waves of enemy, pinned down under turret gun fire. Everyone is engaged, and the netrunner wants to act as quickly as possible.

That’s when everything is at its height: the scenario has brought you to a point where everyone is doing something, and everything matters.

But Merric! It’s just a bloody door.

And so, we come back down. Because there are many times when the pacing of the scenario requires it to just be a door. To be picked, broken down, or otherwise bypassed. Not to take too much time, but rely on a simple roll, which validates the creation choices of the player, and move the action along. You need the quiet times as well as the busy times.

The bad use of skills is when there’s only one way through, and when failed, the scenario ends. That’s not good. Alternative routes. You want them!

Skill use? It’s all in the scenario design. How complicated it is, what the penalties are for failure, what pressures you are under, and the alternative solutions. System can only go so far. It can suggest solutions, but for good skill use, think about the possibilities inherent in the scenario. Either explicit, or created through the interaction of player and DM.