Revisiting the skill list for my BOLT hack, and remembering why I put a pin in the first place – writing skill lists is really hard! And if I'm struggling with it, I'm sure others are too, so let's do a #TableTopChopShop about it! 1/14

I'm not the first person in the tag to talk about this - there was a really great discussion earlier that you should read here, but that was more about whether skill lists should be used at all - this is more about how to do it if you DO use them 2/14 https://twitter.com/WuDeRpg/status/1301391748308955137?s=20

Read through that thread? Read some of the replies? Good! So here's why I personally want to use skill lists in my game: first, as mentioned in some of the replies, I think a good skill list can help communicate what a game is about. 3/14

Blades in the Dark is a wonderful example! With skills like hunt, prowl, finesse, skirmish, consort, and sway, each skill is clearly related to skullduggery and heists, and evokes the mood of the game perfectly. If only I could emulate that! 4/14

But there's another reason: Choosing from a skill list can simplify character creation and make it more accessible to new players. This is the core of why BOLT has skill lists – you pick a role, and then you pick from the role's lists of skills, and it's super easy! 5/14

Now this might get tomatoes thrown at me, but I actually think that this is a strength of D&D 5e as well. Pick your class, and from your class's skill list, choose two things that you're especially good at. I found that newbies found that part really accessible! 6/14

Now I specify 5e because D&D wasn't always like that. I played a lot of 3.5 and PF and they had large skill lists that did neither of the things I liked – skill distribution was complicated, and also the game wasn't really about those skills anyway. 7/14

The contrast between 3.5 and 5e tells me that if I'm gonna have a skill list, it needs to be simple. That answers one of the things I was struggling with, because I was debating whether Swim, Run/Leap, and Climb should be combined into Athletics. 8/14

Part of that simplicity means cutting extraneous skills, and how do I decide what to cut? Our other principle can help guide me there, as long as I remember to ask whether a given skill actually matters to the game. 9/14

Now, whenever I cut a skill, I have a little bit of anxiety. What if somebody needs that skill? What if somebody wants to climb a wall but there's no climbing skill? What if somebody wants to be good at running but not swimming and resents that I combined the two? 10/14

Going back to WuDeRPG's thread, the solution to that anxiety is not to add more skills, but to trust the players more. BOLT does this well, in providing open-ended Recall (blank), Interest (blank), and Profession (blank) skills that the players fill in themselves! 11/14

This preserves the quickness of getting to choose most of your skills from a list, the designer's ability to use the skill list to describe what the game is about, and player's ability to define their character's strengths themselves beyond what the designer could imagine! 12/14

WoD's open-ended specialty system, where you define your own “subskills” of each skill, as well as FATE's open-ended aspect system, these all counterbalance the drawbacks of a rigid skill list by trusting the player more and leaving space beyond the designer's intent! 13/14

Anyway, this thread was mostly a sort of “rubber duck workshopping” session where I wanted to get my thoughts down for the sake of processing them, but I hope it helped you! Let me know what you think – what skill lists do you like? What do you think a skill list should DO? 14/14