Hark, let us once again gaze upon those skills that do nothing. It was fun the first time, after all.
Roleplaying games are full of skills: social skills, combat skills, magic skills – the list goes on. Some are obviously good. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what to do with Persuasion. Others require specific play styles. Intimidation is potentially useful, but only if you play a character willing to leverage it. Then there are the skills that have no function whatsoever. You should never take these, even if their description makes them sound cool. What skills are they? Funny you should ask. I happen to have a list.
1. Occult, Call of Cthulhu
Call of Cthulhu (CoC) is the game of a million investigation skills: Anthropology, Archeology, Accounting, and so forth. Those are just the A skills. Last time, we looked at Appraise and how absolutely useless it is. While that’s still true, there’s another skill that’s perhaps worse. At the very least, it’s more insulting.
Occult is the skill for knowing about the supernatural, but specifically not Cthulhu-Mythos supernatural. It’s for vampires, werewolves, fairies, and the like, none of which exist in the CoC world. In other words, Occult is a skill for knowing about fake magic in a setting with real magic. As a game master and player, that confused the heck out of me. Why would they even bother putting a skill like that on the character sheet? So you can definitively say this murder victim was not mauled to death by a werewolf? At least Appraise gives you actual information, even if it is useless. Occult just tells you what you already know, because this is a game about Cthulhu, not werewolves.
I’ve wracked my brain and am hard pressed to come up with a situation in which Occult would be useful against the Mythos. Maybe if an Old One cultist tries to disguise their rituals with witchcraft’s trappings? But why would they do that? Even in that very specific situation, it’s not clear what useful information Occult would provide beyond “there’s something else going on here.”
Occult is a skill trap. That is, it seems useful to the uninitiated. A new CoC player won’t know there’s a distinction between fake magic and real magic. They might take Occult under the reasonable assumption that knowing about spells and mystic signs would be useful in a setting full of spells and mystic signs. If they didn’t double-check the skill’s description, they’d be none the wiser.
CoC’s 7th edition added a caveat that GMs may decide if non-Mythos magic exists in their game, and if they did, Occult would actually be useful. But as a GM, I would never do that. CoC is a game specifically about Lovecraftian horrors. Adding witchcraft and vampires will only dilute the theme.
2. Animal Handling, Pathfinder and Many Others
Animal Handling is so notoriously useless that it’s become a joke, much like the old canard of Bards being underpowered. Worse even, because 5th Edition fixed the Bard,* and Animal Handling is as useless as ever. It’s a skill that shows up in multiple genres, from classic, high fantasy adventure to modern, gothic horror.
Why? Why do so many game designers continue to include this skill, despite its reputation? I can’t say for sure, but my theory is that it doesn’t sound useless in the design room. Animals are a constant part of life, especially in high fantasy settings, so it’s natural to assume there should be a skill to interact with them.
The problem is that there are few, if any, dramatic uses for this skill. The vast majority of suggested uses are really mundane stuff, like teaching your dog a trick or making sure you know what to feed different kinds of livestock. The most dramatic game event involving animals is riding, which is always its own skill. It’s almost unheard of for GMs to make their players fight normal animals, because they tend to be weak and because it feels silly. The PCs are armed with swords and magic; they can deal with some wolves. Anything powerful enough to be a threat doesn’t count as an “animal.”
Modern settings are worse because encountering animals is far rarer. Potentially it could be used to get past a guard dog, but most players would rather use Stealth for that. Ironically, the letter of the rules for New World of Darkness (NWoD)* makes Animal Handling really powerful. You see, dogs are powerful in NWoD, especially in a game of mortals. Animal Handling lets you train dogs to attack on command, and there’s no limit to the number you can have.
However, this is still useless because few GMs will allow it. Letting PCs have minions is a headache. The GM has to figure out what’s happening to them at any given moment: if they can even feasibly be in this scene, etc. More damning, a PC traveling with their pack of attack dogs will break the gothic horror mood NWoD works so hard for.
3. Traps, 7th Sea
If you’ll forgive the pun, it’s a trap! The Traps skill* is Occult except worse: It sounds really useful. In a high action swashbuckling game like 7th Sea, just imagine all the awesome traps you could make: chandeliers rigged with flintlock pistols, nets that trap boarders and fling them overboard, the possibilities are endless.
Sorry, but you can’t do any of that. If you read the full description, Traps is used exclusively to create snares for small animals. That’s right, you can’t even catch deer with this skill. It’s wabbit season only. When I first looked at this skill, I read it three times, certain I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t.
When, exactly, are swashbuckling heroes going to lay out snares for woodland creatures? Most 7th Sea adventures are more about adventure than breaking into the fur trade. It could be useful if the characters were lost in the wilderness, though they’d still need the materials to build snares in the first place, and even then Tracking would be more immediately useful.
Many players, not anticipating this level of absurdity from their skills, will take Traps, assuming they can use it on human enemies. Then they’ll be stuck with a skill that, at most, will let them make a few extra doubloons from rabbit pelts. To add insult to injury, there’s a separate skill called Set Traps, and that one is for use on other humans. Really, 7th Sea? Really? Even worse, Set Traps is in an expansion book. So you get to pay money to fix the game designer’s mistake. Beautiful.
4. Enigmas, Mage: The Ascension
Before continuing this article, you must answer me these questions three: One, what is a skill for figuring out riddles? Two, what is the most useless skill in all of Old World of Darkness (OWoD)? Three—Oh never mind, you’ve figured it out. The answer is Enigmas. According to the book, this skill is for figuring out “puzzles, riddles, and mysterious circumstances.”
Those first two sound somewhat useful, right? In a setting full of magical creatures, surely one of them will demand that you answer a riddle. Maybe they’ll want to know the airspeed of an unladen swallow. The problem is that it’s incredibly anticlimactic to roll to solve a riddle.
If GMs go to the trouble of creating puzzles, they usually want the players to solve them. That’s part of the fun. They aren’t going to let someone bypass an encounter they spent hours on with a single skill roll. At best, they’ll let the player use Enigmas to get a hint. Even then it’s an empty benefit, because if the puzzle is well-designed, the players should be able to solve it with no extra help.
The last item in Enigmas’ list of uses, mysterious circumstances, sounds like it has potential as well. Something that broad has to have applications, right? Unfortunately, it’s actually too broad to be useful. Nearly any situation the PCs aren’t sure about could count as “mysterious circumstances.” Again, we have a problem where the GM can’t let a player use the skill like that, because it would solve the entire scenario with a single roll.
There is one actual use for Enigmas, buried deep in its list of specialties: cryptography. Turns out the skill can be used for codebreaking, though you’d never guess it from the description. That could be useful for a hacker-type character, though it’s not clear why they wouldn’t use Computer instead.
5. Use Rope, 3.5 D&D
In case it was ever important to know if your 12th level elf sorcerer can tie a slip knot, we have Use Rope. This skill is so specific in its use, I can only assume it’s leftover from an early design stage of Third Edition, when it was meant to be a gritty, realistic system.
Use Rope had the dubious honor of being dropped from Pathfinder’s consolidated skill list. The folks at Paizo decided that while they were keeping Animal Handling, Use Rope would be a bridge too far.* It’s not difficult to see why.
Nearly all of this skill’s example uses are better covered by the Climb skill: securing a grappling hook, tying a rope around yourself so you don’t fall, etc. In fact, with the rules as written, Use Rope is a secondary requirement if you want to climb anything. Fortunately, no GM I know has ever run it that way. It’s hard enough to get people to take Climb at all.
Then there’s rolling to tie up a prisoner. While it’s true that in real life someone can escape from poorly tied bonds, is that really something we want in a game? I can just imagine GMs saying to their players, “Sorry, your important prisoner got away because you didn’t know the right knots.” Plus, if there’s ever really a question about tying someone up, wouldn’t Escape Artist be just as good, if not better?
Despite many years of playing D&D in high school and college, I’ve never seen anyone roll Use Rope. It’s just so out of place in the high fantasy romp of a good Dungeons and Dragons game. If anyone reading this has managed to find a real use for this skill, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
While it’s always fun to point at all the silly skills out there and laugh, skill use is an important part of game design. Skills are an opportunity cost. Every point spent on one skill means a point not spent on another skill. Useless skills will cost players fun at the table, as the points they spend generate little to no return. Designers: please test your skills to see if they are actually useful in play. Game masters: help your players get skills that will work in your game. If we all do our jobs right, skills like these will cease to plague our games.
Treat your friends to an evening of ritual murder – in a fictional RPG scenario, of course. Uncover your lost memories and escape a supernatural menace in our one-shot adventure, The Voyage.
Issues like this are one reason why I am lately leaning towards systems without actual skill lists. My two favorites in this respect are Cortex+ and Fate Accelerated.
Fate Accelerated is nice because it allows extremely simple character creation, especially combined with the system given by Fate games in general. Though its strength is also its weakness. Characters rely on approaches rather than skills. While this is good in that it allows characters attitude to reflect their competence, it occasionally leads to odd results in which PCs try and claim that they can ‘Forcefully’ hack a computer or ‘Cleverly’ punch someone in the face, in order to always roll their apex attribute.
Cortex also is similarly interesting in that respect in that it allows whatever is important to the story to dictate mechanics. It is especially interesting in this respect how, when Smallville and Leverage are contrasted, we see how emotional connections and competence can drive the mechanics depending on the respective genre. Though I haven’t actually played this one yet, so I can’t really comment on it much. Default Cortex+ and Firefly also both seem to use skills as well regardless.
Fate Core also gets an honorable mention for having such a simplistic skill list, though it leads to the inverse problem. Probably the worst example is that the Lore skill is extremely problematic. Because it is used for every sort of knowledge, from military tactics to constitutional law, it could lead to something like a former soldier knowing less about a military tactics than a college professor. This gets even worse if Lore becomes the skill used for magic.
I’ve never tried Fate Accelerated, but I know what you mean about Fate Core. It’s possible, especially with the right stunts, to make a character who can use the Stealth skill for just about everything.
I’m now considering an article about skills which are TOO useful. Not as common, but definitely something that happens.
Animal Handling is perfectly useful if you’re roleplaying a Good alignment properly. Good characters, and some others, shouldn’t want to slaughter innocent animals who are just protecting their territory/young/selves from the adventurers rudely stomping through. Peacefully placating them without violence is a perfect use for Animal Handling. It doesn’t fit every confrontation, but neither do the similar non-violent Diplomacy and Deception type skills.
These are only useless skills if you treat D&D games as mindless killing exercises and ignore alignment and realistic player character reactions.
Use Rope should be used the way some GMs use skills like Sneak and Set Traps: Don’t let the players know what number was rolled on their behalf, so they don’t know for sure how good a job they’ve set up until it comes to the exact moment that it either works or fails. It adds tension what would otherwise just force the players to keep re-rolling until they get a success, which is dull.
Any time the players have to tie up a prisoner, a horse, cargo on a vehicle, the extended rope from climbing down a long drop, an improvised fix to something, and all the other ropey things, you’re building in sneaky opportunities for the GM to add in a moment of surprise tension, but without just randomly being a dick about it. It gives a dice-heavy but fair way of generating these small annoyances and terrible shocks when you least expect them.
Yeah, our group uses Animal Handling a lot. One fun example was when a giant octopus was attacking the city harbor, and our ranger player used his Animal Handling skill to convince the octopus to leave!
Plus, there are plenty of dramatic uses of Animal Handling. We had one where an enemy hippogriff kept getting hit by friendly fire so the paladin (nearest player, who also had animal handling) got a chance to try to pacify it. He rolled really well and wound up riding it for the rest of that battle, it was epic!
I was going to say some of this.
In Pathfinder, animal handling is explicitly called out as being necessary for getting your animal companion to do what you want it to in a fight (assuming something like a dog that you are not riding). After a few levels it becomes a non-issue as long as you are keeping ranks in it because the DC is static. But at low levels it is an important part of the balance, because at those levels having a whole other character to control is a big deal, and that character might not be able to act every round.
I still say “Use Rope” can be a useful skill. Rope is the medieval version of duct tape and knowing how to use it makes the character more versitle.
Yes, I would advocate a “use duct tape” skill in a modern d20 game.
I think enigmas are a good skill for Mage: the Ascension. The skill description says: “When gut instincts fail and logic can’t offer a solution, the character with a broad knowledge of Enigmas sees clever solutions, hidden meanings, and the motives behind such tricks.” Enigmas is used in Time of Judgement: Ascension for figuring out that utopia literally means no-place, when presented with “tell them you serve nowhere”. This is highly useful but not absolutely necessary. Also look at the “possessed by” section: “Analysts, Detectives, […] Philosophers, Psychologists, Raving Nutcases, Really Annoying Old Masters” It makes sense for enigmas to be able to oppose Arcane, too (although there are no mechanics for it, or even any mention of it).
My Pathfinder Cleric had a pet owl, and that was the only time I regularly used Handle Animal. I taught it to drop vials of alchemist’s fire on enemy warriors, and had to roll to make sure I successfully directed him. By 5th level I had taken Familiar Bond, giving me an empathic connection to him and rendering the skill largely moot.
Other uses I put it to were calming a horse (because a couple people in our group never combat trained theirs) and caring for an owlbear cub (though I think after the initial approach, I used Heal instead). Our campaign is set out in the wilderness, tough, and we do a lot of travel by horses. I can see the skill as being totally useless to your standard dungeon-crawling adventurer.
Your guess is as good as mine for why “Use Rope” ever existed.
I no longer have gaming books and accessories since I lost the house in ’01, but I recall that the CoC editions I had included a description for vamps with an advicer “Every game needs vampires.” And it ahd a description of the ways “Occult” could possibly be used under the skill. But as I never actually played it, I’ll bow to your description:-).
You could be correct. The 7th Ed book has a little mention that the GM must decide if non Mythos magic is real or not. I just know that as a GM I would never do that because I don’t like mixing Lovecraft with urban fantasy, and that seems to be the default assumption.
Handle Animal is actually kinda overpowered in D&D 3.5 if your DM doesn’t ban you from just buying a herd of trained attack mules.
In low level games, mules are cheap enough that even a 1st level character can afford multiple, and are a valid threat against most foes – or for that matter, PCs.
Fortunately, few people decide to genre shift from Adventuring to Zerg Rush.
Hmmm, my kid does have a lot of farm animal toys… A herd of mules, or a flock of chickens… what a great idea!
In Pathfinder Society, they had to implement a rule that you could only buy/have one animal involved in combat, because people were showing up with like a herd of lions elephants or whatever that they had bought and trained.
Animal Handling skill is quite important in my group’s current D&D 5E game. We’re reliant on horses for overland travel, and someone has to take care of them and keep them. Predators/monsters occasionally attack us or the horses. They’re prone to panic and run off, so someone has to make sure that doesn’t happen. That someone is whoever has the best Handle Animals skill.
“keep them healthy.”
Actually people laugh at Handle Animal until I gently remind them that mechanically there is very little difference between having a tamed animal and a druid’s animal companion. The druid uses magic to get the animal but the tamer can do the exact same thing to get a bear on his side by leaving apples by its den, it just takes a bit longer but still only a few weeks by the rules. If a bear has 4d8 HD then according to the rules I only need to roll a 19 to tame it and it takes like three weeks or something. While it takes longer than just being a druid the bear becomes my friend at the end of that time and I can teach it stuff like “defend me” so it attacks others attacking me. And there’s nothing that says I can only have one bear. You have to treat your animals well as if you make them do stuff they don’t like a lot (like getting hurt all the time) they will run away but this goes for the druid or animal tamer. There is no rule that says the druid can tell his animal companion to keep taking sword hits and it has to like it, in fact whenever he casts Speak With Animals the druid will learn quickly that the animal doesn’t like it, especially if he almost dies each battle. And taking an animal somewhere it doesn’t like can also make it run away, most animals will not go underground and this is usually ignored and the druid or tamer must handle the hawk to swim for just a minute or the lion to climb the invisible stairs. Just think about real life and animals being “handled” and how through this “useless” skill we have hunting dogs (that hunt with people that aren’t druids or magical), we have dogs that can sniff out bombs and disease, and we dogs that lead blind people around. I mean whether it’s fantasy or reality, Handle Animal is certainly far from useless.
Buff animal handling!
Occult is useful in COC several adventures features non mythos creatures.
Like the Derelict and many people use other monsters in their COC Games not just the generic mythos creatures.
Where Occult comes up in CoC is any time the Investigators might be dealing with any of the many Spiritualists, Theosophists, Thelemists, et al. running around in the 1880s-1930s span that usually serves as the game’s core setting(s). “Fake Magic” was a significant subcultural movement, with some very notable personalities of the era (e.g. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Aleister Crowley, Harry Houdini, Helena Blatavsky) promoting or debunking it.
So, no, it doesn’t tell you anything about Cthulhu, per se, but it might be useful in identifying a cultist’s reading material, recognizing what an NPC is up to, realizing that a Mythos-related phenomenon isn’t behaving the way a traditional supernatural phenomenon is “supposed” to, providing plot hooks to Investigator’s who are involved in any of the paranormal investigation societies of the era, etc. And, for better or worse, it sort of has to be in the game conceptually because reading the Necronomicon isn’t necessarily going to make you a better psychic investigator, while having intimate familiarity with the various spiritual movements knocking about England in the 1920s isn’t going to make you an expert on shoggoths.
All that said, I’m enjoying these posts. Thank you.
Also, a lot of those circles and societies were not exactly secrets, but were not really open to outsiders, either. There were all kinds of rumors of secret information, magic, old religious rituals, and so on floating around. If you wanted to know who you needed to know to get a step closer to the bottom of things, occult could be a very useful skill.
Occult is VERY useful in certain adventures. See, the genius behind Lovecraftian horror is that it doesn’t dissociate itself from mundame superstition, it enhances it. That’s why it feels so real : it’s based on real preexisting concepts.
Occultism will tell you what voodoo is, what the Gods of the Ancient Egyptian Pantheon are, the legends surrounding vampires, what Yeti and Sasquatches are. It will tell you rumors surrounding UFO sightings, will might very well be Mi-Go or other mythos nasties. And ALL of that info is incredibly useful.
The PLAYER knows that the information given by the Occult skill is probably false, but your character almost certainly does not. If you run into a blood drinking seemingly deathless Cthulhu monster, why would your character who has no knowledge of Cthulhu assume it’s some kind of Deep One and not recall knowledge about vampires or ghouls?
So, there are two ways to run this, and they’re both bad.
#1: The Occult skill gives the PC knowledge of vampire or magic lore, and the PC thinks it’s real. This will obviously lead the PC on the wrong path and be an active detriment.
#2: The Occult skill give the PC knowledge of said lore, but the PC views it as a scholar documenting a cultural phenomena, rather than a true believer. There are a handful of edge cases where this might be useful, if a Mythos threat is following the patterns of a non-Mythos occult figure, but most of the time it will just be useless information.
I have seen it animal handling used ONCE in my admittedly bereft time playing Call of Cuthulhu at college in the Before Times.
We were fighting a wizard and one of the spells he cast when he was losing and tried to run away was summoning a swarm of rats- which, under this edition, was treated as a single monster.
One of the members of the group had taken a few points in Animal Handling for flavor as her idea was a woodman/outdoorsy type. She rolled low enough to get a ‘hard pass’ on her skill, and the GM said ‘why not?’ and she took control of the rat swarm. She got the killing blow!
My GM was running a modified version of CoC, and one of the things he came up with was that Occultism and Mythos gave ‘different kinds of information’ from the same things. I was never able to figure out what exactly he meant, but what i THINK was going on was that Occultism was essentially a ‘poor mans Mythos’ skill. Not as useful, and useless for some of the really obscure monsters, but Unlike mythos it could be taken from character creation, and did not damage sanity.
Yeah Occult and similar skills put GMs in a hard spot when it comes to games with a horror edge. The whole point of these games is discovering unknown supernatural stuff, that’s what makes it fun, but here’s a skill that logically should let the characters just know about this stuff?