Game Design Principles I Learned from Fallout Part 3: Skills

in #gaming5 years ago

Today I'm going to delve deeper into the game mechanics of Fallout by looking at another layer of the game that makes everything work: the skill system.

The skill system is probably one of the simplest design layers in Fallout, but it's also the most important because it's the one that the player interacts with most.

Before reading further, you should check out Part 1 of this series, the broad overview, if you haven't done so already, since a lot of the terms that I'm going to use are drawn from that and defined there. Part 2, covering Fallout's SPECIAL system, is also out, but you can really read in any order from here.

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Fallout's DNA

Before I begin, I want to point out that this system is where Fallout's heredity from the tabletop really shows, and in particular its relationship with GURPS.

GURPS is a tabletop roleplaying game, like D&D, but its main selling point is that you can use it for pretty much everything. It's notoriously complex, a reputation it partially deserves, but the central conceit is that you have a bunch of skills that characters use to do things. You have an attribute or skill, and you try to roll under that attribute or skill's values with three dice. If the result of the roll is low enough, you succeed.

Fallout takes that and changes the mechanics somewhat; it uses a random number from 1-100, instead of three dice, and you mostly have these mechanics used when you're using skills; the SPECIAL attributes aren't typically used with rolls. However, the central game conceit is the same.

The Most Important Layer?

The skills are where you see most of the game's everyday mechanics take place. I'm not going to go over the skills in detail here, because there are so many of them, but you can read more on the Fallout Wiki if you're interested.

There are a few things going on in skills that are not immediately apparent to an observer, and it's important to realize this because there are actually sub-layers behind the scenes.

The first group of skills are combat skills, used whenever characters are, well, in combat. Defense isn't based on skills, but rather a derived statistic that we'll talk about when we get to that layer, but attacking is handled as a simple skill roll (even though Fallout doesn't use real dice, since it simulates them we'll just refer to this process as a roll for simplicity's sake going forward).

There are seven combat skills, but typically a character just needs one or two, depending on how much ammunition they are likely to find and use for their preferred combat style. This has some ramifications that can only be appreciated in light of the rest of the skill system.

There are eight active skills: these are used through a panel that the player can bring up or by other means as appropriate. Whenever a player uses these skills, they either choose a target in their environment (e.g. Steal, which is targeted at another character), or activate a special mode. Sneak, which passively makes the character difficult to detect, is one of these.

There are also four passive skills: a character with these skills receives bonuses in particular situations.

Understanding Uses

Like with SPECIAL attributes, there are places where skills can be used as a threshold: if you have less than 50 Outdoorsman you don't get a certain encounter, for instance.

This is a threshold test, and is pretty common in later games in the series, though the earlier games are more fond of random outcomes in most cases.

You also have the skill test, a 1-100 roll that is compared to the skill level of the character. The difficulty of this can be modified, making it more or less likely that a character succeeds, and the maximum value of a skill is over 100% to account for this.

Some skills cannot succeed all the time, and have a mandatory failure chance (5%).

Combat, Active, and Passive Balance

Combat skills are an interesting case in Fallout because most players will encounter at least some combat in their play-through of the game (it is possible to do a pacifist, or at least non-combatant, run of almost every game in the series). However, characters only need one or two combat skills because they all function in a more or less identical manner.

As a game design, this works to lock some players out of using particular gear because of the decisions they have made. This has benefits and drawbacks, and since part of the appeal of Fallout is the difficulty that players face while following the storyline because of in-game challenges, that makes a lot of sense. Having a plasma rifle does nothing for you if you don't know how to use it, but it's a reward for a character taking a skill that they won't be able to use much early in the game and having to avoid fights.

The other skills then come down to figuring out ways to influence the universe, and they're generally pretty well thought out. There are certainly skills that are less useful than others (Gambling, for instance), at least unless the player knows how to leverage them properly.

The important thing that comes down to the crux of the game design decision here is whether or not the skills are chosen in a way that leads to meaningful decision making and a feeling of agency for the player.

This is part of the reason why there are few passive skills, and the ones that exist tend to be very fundamental.

Combat as a Product of Layers

Fallout avoids making combat its own design layer for characters, but it also has a bunch of different layers that feed into combat, of which the skills are perhaps most important, as they determine the chance for a character to hit.

The symbiosis between skills and derived attributes fuels the combat system in Fallout, with skills serving as an active component that determines what occurs and the derived attributes determining the magnitude of those occurrences.

Doing this lets a fairly deep system emerge without requiring players to master any system. The individual elements on each layer provide points of reference for the players while remaining simple enough to be easily grasped. Parallelism between the different skills make it so that the player watching a combat encounter knows that the same mechanics govern it as govern any of the other actions that their character might undertake within the game universe, and vice versa: other actions follow a subset of the combat rules.

Advancement

Skills in Fallout start at a baseline influenced by a character's Special. Characters tag favored skills, which advance more quickly, and can allocate skill points, which improve characters.

Skills are probably the most fluid element of a character in Fallout; of all the layers they change the most during play, except for some of the derived attributes which can theoretically be modified more frequently (but, ironically, may not actually change as much in practice).

As a character develops, their skills increase in such a manner that they become more defined. Their strengths grow, and their weaker areas may become more significant as they face greater challenges. This keeps the player engaged and makes it possible to play the game again for a much different experience, assuming that the player changes the way that they allocate skills.

The Strengths of Fallout's Skill Layer

  • Fallout's skill system is significantly distinguished to permit a wide range of characters, and give a lot of flexibility for what players want their character to do.

This is really the main point with a skill system: you need players to have choice and meaningful decisions.

  • The 1-100 roll mechanic and parallel setup of all skills as a similar numerical value aids comprehension.

It's worth noting that I've seen games that make different types of numbers for their active and passive skills. A system like this might have a value of 1-100 for active skills, but a 1-10 for passive skills to give an example. I like the fact that every skill in Fallout has the same number because players don't have to worry about this.

  • Tagged skills permit focused, streamlined development without allowing characters to grow too powerful.

When we think of people or characters, we often define them by their meaningful traits, and skills are valuable and therefore a good point to focus on. The Fallout system encourages the creation of cinematic characters who still have flaws.

While this may seem like it is a bad thing, characters who are too powerful become undefined by nature of not having any exceptional area of expertise. It is a balance between strength and weakness that makes conflicts compelling and interesting.

  • The inability to master everything in a single game encourages players to play again.

Back in the 90's, when Fallout was released, the internet with its treasure trove of games didn't exist. In many cases, a person might only be interested in a game or two, and Fallout is an example of a game that encouraged players to keep playing beyond its first run (and Fallout is already a game that can take 40 hours to complete).

Adding more variety increases player value, and the fact that this was achieved by letting characters shine in certain areas meant that there weren't arbitrary thresholds, like a New Game + system, that could lead to players feeling like they had to complete chores to access the full content of the game: you chose what things you saw because they're what your character could get to.

The Weaknesses of Fallout's Skill Layer

  • Hyper-specialization in a single-player game can combine with poor player decisions to gate content.

While the system in Fallout works great in most cases, it is possible for a player who is not accustomed to the style of game to make decisions like picking only combat skills or only non-combat skills without really thinking about it and finding themselves incapable of completing some of the elements of the game.

This is a bonus when the player is aware of it and embraces it, but is not so good when the player does it by accident.

Likewise, some skills are more useful in certain stages or areas of the game, and a player who doesn't know that may get frustrated by a seemingly arbitrary difficulty curve if all their skills are mostly useful in a particular stage of the game.

  • Null synergy/cross-application requires competent designers to create game content or emergent mechanics to fully utilize and balance each skill.

Fallout is systems-driven, and the Skills layer is the primary layer that is used by its systems. Because skills are used only when required, there are some issues with how it can be applied. Fortunately, Tim Cain and the other people working on Fallout did a tremendous job ensuring that all skills were valuable, but it is something that can be a sore spot for other designers (Deus Ex's much-derided Swimming being a perennial example).

The recent video game Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel have some interesting skill systems, and in the sequel in particular there are skills that have bonus effects in addition to whatever you would normally use the skill for. Some skills, like Telekinesis, have ongoing emergent systems, something made powerful by the increased technical sophistication of hardware and software since Fallout's day.

In tabletop games, this is less of a concern as well, because players have a more active role in defining the world.

Likewise, this is a reason why designers need to be very careful to think about how many elements they add to a layer: too many layers quickly creates issues with paralyzing players' ability to choose how to build a character.

Wrapping Up

The skills layer in Fallout is very fine-tuned, and represents the player's main way of interacting with the game universe.

While it's got a lot of strengths, it also is an example of a way that Fallout's designers could have gotten themselves in trouble, and a showcase of their talent that they were able to use their system well to connect to the game's universe.

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