Skill system: use of phrases
Rubbermancer:
...and it also leaves the studious GM free to incur personality penalties on his poor unwitting players. "Greed" is a great example; "you see a gleam of gold in the corner of your eye. Take a greed check to avoid reflexively turning towards it when you know there's a Gorgon behind you."
Richard:
Using verbs to identify the skills being used is a really neat idea. Although I can't offer advice, I will applaud the idea for being (imo) a good one.
Bossy:
Well, I am not sure that it is such a good idea. Or more precisely, I think this should be re-phrased in terms independent from language properties (verb, noun, etc). I have a hunch this will lead to strange situations.
For instance consider ride. Would you allow ride horse, ride elephant and ride car? The answer will obviously depend on the setting:
modern: hell no, one has nothing to do with one another!modern rules lite: yeah, riding would be like pilot, so no problemRome: ok, as long as you mean those carsGolden Horde Khanates: no way, ride means ride horse, only the conquered ride chickenI'll admit that this is a rather contrieved example but I see where I'm getting at. Some words have more different meanings than others, and the meaning of a word depends on its context.
Finally, you could even end up with untranslatable skills. The meaning conveyed with a verb in one language may not be translated as a single verb in other one. It may not matter a lot to you but it is quite hard to play RPGs in foreign languages, so if you want to target wider audiences then your rules must be easy to translate.
Now for the constructive. I understand and praise the idea to have skills assembled from individual parts. I've toyed with similar a idea for a prehistoric game, where characters should not be too specialized (they were required to survive in a wide range of situations). What I did was to split skills into Feats and Environments, and a roll would rely on one appropriate Feat added to one appropriate Environment.
For instance:
Feats: Stealth and Fight
Environments: Outdoors and Indoors
Now you can roll under four combinations. Of course not all combinations are meaningful. This was actually inspired from SimulacreS (in french, sorry), a rather obscure French RPG, their axes were a bit more abstract.
Bossy:
I've just skimmed over TechNoir. It uses a related idea: skills are donoted as verbs and effects are modulated by adjectives. Characters and gear have different adjectives. It looks quite nice though I never played it.
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