Classic Rant: Alternate Palladium System Skill Rules

I like the Palladium system. Overall, I have little beef with it. It's mostly very good at what it does; it's fast, it's not particularly complex, it runs smoothly, and it gives you that fast-and-loose kind of feeling.

Except the skills. The skills fail at all of the above. Skills are not fast, and they are complex.  They are the single biggest drag in the character creation process, the one thing that stops one from being able to say that the Palladium system would really be a great introductory or "pick-up" sort of game. Imagine Palladium, but where it only took you five or ten minutes to make a character, instead of having to spend a half hour poring back and forth from your OCC to the Skills section trying to look up the percentages (and progressions) of every single fucking skill, because they're all different. 

It doesn't run smoothly; the percentile mechanic is easy enough, but what happens when you level? This skill goes up 5%, that one 4%, that other one 2%! Once more, you are forced to look up everything (or at least, if you were smart enough to jot all the progressions down in the first place, you still have to take more time than you should have to double checking that you brought each skill up its required amount).

Finally, it's not "fast-and-loose" at all. It doesn't much fit with the rest of the system. In Combat you don't have twenty thousand different maneuvers; you just have "strike", "dodge", "parry", etc. But with the skills you, have "Radio operator: basic"; "radio operator: expert", "radio operator: superexpert"; "radio operator: jamming", "radio operator: techno-wizard radios", "radio operator: DJ", "radio operator: Ham"; "radio operator: shock jock", "radio operator: semi-intermediate that-kind-of-stage-where-you're-halfway-to-expert", "radio operator: ninja", and of course "radio operator: Fred".

It's idiotic.

So in any case, we were talking quite a bit about Palladium's skills a little while back on theRPGsite, and I hadn't forgotten about it. I had asked a few people what their solutions were, but none of them seemed quite radical enough. So here's what I came up with:

You know how all the skills are divided up into very broad categories? Make THOSE categories the skills!
So the new Palladium game system skill list would be:

Communications
Domestic
Electrical
Espionage
Mechanical
Medical
Military
Physical
Pilot
Pilot Related
Rogue
Science
Technical
Wilderness

Plus the weapon proficiencies, that we'd keep as it is. There you go, twenty million skills pruned down to 14.

Now, every skill would begin with a base 30% + 4%/ level progression.

But beyond that, if you wanted to make it slightly more sophisticated, you could say that the old skills were just skill "specialties", that a given class would get a bonus for when rolling their skill as relates to that specialty. You would now have the skill specialties be automatically determined based on his OCC skills and related skills (and wherever his OCC related skills indicated a bonus to an entire skill-set, that would apply as an overall bonus to that skill including to any specializations; if an OCC related skill set indicated "none", that would mean that excepting any specializations already given under the OCC skills, the character has a value of 0 in the skill). 

Physical skills that gave you actual bonuses to attributes could only be taken if they were one of your OCC skills, otherwise they don't exist. For hand-to-hand skills, you could assume that if the option is given in the OCC to take a "higher" grade of hand-to-hand combat, you will have that higher grade. In other words, every PC will start out with the highest hand-to-hand type permitted by their OCC skills, unless the player himself wants to have inferior combat skills for some reason of character.

So for example, let's take the RIFTS "City Rat". It has for its OCC skills the following: streetwise (+20), pilot motorcycle (+15), pilot automobile (+10), math: basic (+10), running, wp of choice (1), hand to hand:basic. It also notes that the city rat could optionally have hand to hand: martial arts (or assassin if evil-aligned) if they use up one "other" skill.

So first of all, we assume that the City Rat will indeed have Martial Arts (or Assassin). Then we factor in the various specializations to end up with a skill set like this:

Communications
Domestic
Electrical
Espionage
Mechanical
Medical
Military
Physical
Pilot
-motorcycle +15
-automobile +10
Pilot Related
Rogue
-streetwise +20
Science
math: basic +10
Technical
Wilderness

He also gets to pick one weapon proficiency, and takes running, which gives him +1 to P.E., +4d4 to speed, and +1d6 to sdc.

Now we look at "other" skills. Here is where we will determine the actual values of the skill. In the case of the City Rat, the "Other" skills are listed by category as: Communications: any (+10 to radio:basic and surveillance), domestic: any (+5), Electrical: basic only (+5), Espionage: none, Mechanical: automotive only (+10), Medical: first aid or paramedic (+10) only, military: any, Physical: any (+5), pilot: any ground vehicles, jet pack, robot basic combat (+10) only, pilot related: any, rogue: any (+15), science: math:advanced and chemistry only, Technical: any (+10), wilderness: none.

So now the skill list ends up looking like this:

Communications 30
-radio basic 40
-surveillance 40
Domestic 35
Electrical 0
-basic electronics: 35
Espionage 0
Mechanical 0
-automotive mechanics 40
Medical 0
-paramedic 40
Military 30
Physical 35
Pilot 0
-motorcycle 45
-automobile 40
-ground vehicle 40
-jet pack 40
-robot basic 40 (robot basic combat)
Pilot Related 30
Rogue 45
-streetwise 65
Science 0
chemistry 30
math:advanced 30
math: basic 40
Technical 40
Wilderness 0

As you can see there are effectively only 21 skills for the PC to worry about, and all of them will be going up at the same rate. When the time comes to level up, the player will just have to add +4 to each skill.

Next up, to finish rounding the character out, we see how many secondary skills he would have received. In the case of the City Rat, he had 10 secondary skills. In our system, you multiply that amount by five to receive the total amount of extra points you have to put into your skills listed above. You can put those points into any skill that isn't listed as having a rank of "0" (those are skills not available to the class and will never go up), either into the main skill or the specialization, but any points you put into the main skill do NOT end up raising the specialization at this point (this is to avoid the obvious wholesale points-pumping that would otherwise occur). So in the case of the city rat, you'd have 50 points to spread around into your various skills.

Finally, as the PC goes up in level, every three levels (lv. 3, 6, 9, 12, 15) the PC can choose two "adds" to the skill-set. An "add" can be either a bonus of +10 to a skill (general or specialized, there's no difference at that point), or a new weapon proficiency, physical skill, or robot combat technique, if any of these are allowed to the class.

So do let me know what you think about this solution to the problem of Skills in Palladium! I'll certainly be giving it a whirl if I ever get that RIFTS campaign I've been thinking of running going...

RPGPundit

(originally posted june 16, 2007)