Skills in Roleplaying Games (Why Fallout 4 Was Good Actually)

Short history of skills: lots of early RPGs were solely focused on combat survival, but some wanted to simulate areas outside of combat. This created an effective splinter philosophy between games that think arbitration should fall to a holistic relationship between players and GMs and games that think the mechanics should empower players to drive the story with objective rolls. One thinks rules limit players, the other that it empowers them.

Twist: neither of this has anything to do with how skills work in videogames. Or, rather, how they usually don’t work.

The theory is that videogames would prevent players from