Skill Rules

Story Lens

Craft, Nerve, and Consequence

A skill check says who you are under pressure

When the lock refused to turn, Ilya could have forced it and risked the alarm. Instead she listened for the tumbler rhythm, slowed her breath, and chose patience over speed. The chest opened, but the delay let patrol boots reach the hallway.

Skill rules carry that tension. A roll is not only pass or fail; it defines cost, pace, and exposure. Expertise should feel reliable, but never frictionless, because every attempt happens inside a living scene that keeps moving.

• Frame checks around stakes the table can name before dice hit the table.
• Use partial success and consequence results to keep momentum instead of hard stalls.
• Let specialization shine, but attach contextual tradeoffs that keep decisions meaningful.

Introduction

Skills represent practiced capability, while attributes and difficulty determine how often that capability succeeds under pressure.

Skills represent what a character has practiced or learned, such as lockpicking, climbing, negotiation, and other trained actions. When an action could reasonably fail, you roll percentile dice to determine the outcome.

Attributes influence many skills, and both skills and attributes improve through leveling and progression. Anyone can attempt anything, but results depend on attributes, skills, and task difficulty.

Investing more points in a category of skills grants Category Bonuses tied to that category. OpenRPG treats category bonuses as shared familiarity: related training helps, but completely untrained skills do not receive that benefit.

Dice Mechanics

Skills use the same difficulty ladder as the rest of the game, with target numbers already shown on the character sheet.

When a skill check matters, first choose the relevant skill, then choose the difficulty tier. The character sheet already shows that skill’s target number for each tier, so you do not need to build the number yourself. Roll percentile dice and compare the result to that target.

• Skill Use: pick the skill, pick the difficulty tier, and roll against that tier’s target number on the sheet.
• Opposed Situations: when two characters directly compete, both still use the same skill-and-difficulty ladder; the GM decides how the two results interact.
• Examples in dangerous scenes: use the same target-tier approach for things like climbing during a fight, forcing a door under pressure, shouting commands in chaos, or trying to disarm someone unless a special rule says otherwise.

Skill-Based Rolling

The public reference version of skill resolution is a three-step loop: determine difficulty, apply bonuses, then roll.

Skill-based rolling is resolved by choosing a difficulty tier, reading the corresponding target number from the character sheet, and then trying to roll greater than that target to succeed.

1. Determine Difficulty: discuss with the GM and settle on a difficulty tier. The target becomes the number shown in the relevant difficulty column for that skill.
2. Calculate Bonuses: total up active consequences and any other relevant modifiers that apply to the player’s roll.
3. Roll Percentile Dice: on a natural roll of 5 or lower, or 96 or higher, you have a critical. Apply bonuses and then reference the result in the outcomes section.

Difficulty - Skills

The GM chooses a difficulty tier from the fiction, and the character sheet provides the matching target number for the relevant skill.

For skill checks, the GM assigns a difficulty based on task complexity, conditions, tools, time pressure, and how well the chosen skill fits the job. Once the GM picks the tier, the character sheet provides the matching target number for that skill.

Difficulty - Attributes

Some checks use a raw attribute directly instead of a skill, especially for senses, recall, resistance, and broad physical effort.

Sometimes you do not roll a skill at all. Instead, you roll directly against the most relevant attribute: Sight to notice a hidden trap, Hearing to catch a quiet conversation, Memory to recall a fact under pressure, Emotion to read a room, Strength to force a door, or Endurance to outlast a pursuit. In those cases, the attribute itself is the character’s relevant stat, and the GM judges difficulty from the fiction just as they would for a skill check.

Category Bonuses

Category bonuses reward investment within a discipline without granting expertise to completely untrained skills.

Category bonuses represent familiarity within a discipline. Learning more inside one skill family makes related trained skills easier to develop and use.

• For every 10 total base skill points invested in a category, trained skills in that category gain +1.
• This bonus is capped at +3.
• A skill must have at least 1 base point invested to receive the category bonus.
• Completely untrained skills do not gain the category bonus.

Active vs. Passive Use

Some checks are declared openly by the player, while others are triggered or resolved passively by the GM.

Opposed Checks

Opposed checks are used when two characters directly compete and the GM must compare their efforts.

Opposed Checks

When two characters directly compete, such as arm-wrestling, debate, or stealth versus perception, use an opposed check. Let A be your relevant score and B be the opponent’s.

• A’s success chance is approximately A / (A + B).
• B’s success chance is approximately B / (A + B).
• You can implement this either by having both sides roll normally and comparing degrees of success, or by converting the relative chance into a single target number.
• Example: if A = 50 and B = 100, then A’s chance is about 33% and B’s chance is about 67%.

If using degree-of-success, you can apply momentum. A near miss in an arm-wrestle, for example, might impose a -10% penalty on the next attempt because of fatigue or lost leverage.

Impossible Tasks

Do not roll when success is automatic, failure is uninteresting, or the task is not plausible in the fiction.

Do not roll for things characters always do or when success is certain and failure would not change anything interesting. Likewise, do not roll for superhuman feats unless the character’s stats and the fiction make success plausible.

If success is not plausible, the task is simply not possible without new tools, assistance, setup, or a change in circumstances.

Outcomes

Roll results should produce more texture than simple pass or fail when that texture meaningfully changes the scene.

Compare your final roll to the target number for the chosen tier.

The Partial band is a drama tool. Use it when it meaningfully changes the scene through time lost, noisy success, resources spent, worsened position, or similar tradeoffs.