Worst skills in RPGs

[deuxhero]

First Aid in Fallout 1/2

• Highly duplicates the more useful doctor skill
• Has no ability to heal crippled limbs, the most important use of doctor
• In theory, first aid kits are lighter and more common than doctor's bags. In practice, unless you savescum to get raider v. caravan random encounters in F2, first aid kits aren't actually all that common
• To my knowledge, there's zero skill checks in either game for first aid, but are a few for doctor
• In theory First Aid is a secondary skill due to being able to be raised to mid-levels by magazines where doctor can't. In practice, these magazines nearly always cost money that could just be spent on stimpaks.
• First Aid gives access to Healer, which just slightly boosts the mediocre recovery of First Aid. Doctor gives access to one of the game's best perks, which gives a fixed damage boost against most targets.

 

[otsego]

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is the first game where I found pickpocket useful, interesting and fun. And it's not even called pickpocket in that game. I think it's just 'Stealth"

 

[otsego]

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is the first game where I found pickpocket useful, interesting and fun. And it's not even called pickpocket in that game. I think it's just 'Stealth"

Nevermind, it is a dedicated skill...

It probably shouldn't be, but it is useful in this game nonetheless.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Security in KotOR 1 - No reason to get it other than convenience, you can bash every chest with zero consequences.

Spear Proficiency (and many other weapon proficiencies) in most of the IE games - I remember there were like...three magical spears in the entirety of IWD 1 and they were all worse than many different swords/axes/bows.

Fistfighting skills in the Witcher 1 - Pointless. You can win any fight just by rocking the lmb/rmb back and forth.

Crafting skill in NWN 2 - Just why. The loot you find is perfectly sufficient to defeat anything in the game.

Ranger skill in Aidyn Chronicles - A good idea on paper, improving harvest rates for reagents and decreasing the chance of monster ambushes while camping, but in practice it just makes camp farming all the more tedious.

 

[Aemar]

Crafting, a grindy skill which belongs or should belong mainly in survival games, unless is related to creating smaller items like potions, etc. Or it's the crafting system from Underrail and Arcanum.

 

[deuxhero]

Security in KotOR 1.

No reason to get it other than convenience, you can bash every chest with zero consequences.

Or you don't want to break stealth, except Stealth is also useless except for a few instances where it can't fail as long as you have a character trained in it.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

Are "romancing skills" useless or just weird? Do any games use it for actual game progress, instead of just as a minigame with the weirdos player's "love interest"?

What games are you playing?
The only RPG I can think of where "romance" has any mechanical relevance is Fallout 2.

 

[Eirinjas]

Tracking in every CRPG has been worthless.

 

[blessedCoffee]

Throwing skill in the first two Fallouts, it receives the trophy of worst combat skill.

Unless you're using an exploit to activate flares indefinitely, collected a mountain of them, and use them during combat to murder raiders / troopers / etc with targeted shots. Then it is worth spending points on.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Security in KotOR 1.

No reason to get it other than convenience, you can bash every chest with zero consequences.

Or you don't want to break stealth, except Stealth is also useless except for a few instances where it can't fail as long as you have a character trained in it.

There's a somewhat fun scoundrel/guardian build that relies on stealth for proccing the sneak attack bonus in K1 so I wouldn't say it's too bad. Problem with that skill in general is all the cutscene trigger points expose you. Would have been nice if the game was designed with bypassing some of those in mind when doing a stealth run.

 

[Zanzoken]

Intimidate is usually a bad choice. It's often not used, and generally only when the player has the upper hand and can be better resolved by murder-hoboing. In situations where the player might need to avoid a conflict, Bluff is more often offered and usually better.

This also applies to Bluff. When Dipolamcy is split into Persuasion, Bluff, Intimidate... persuasion is almost always the best choice for the same reasons above.

The thing that's often missed in discussions like this, is that ANY skill system has to be supported by proper encounter design in order for it to work. And almost any system can be made to work if the content is properly designed around it.

If you want varied dialogue / speech skills to be important in your game, then they absolutely can be. You just have to design appropriately.

So for Intimidate there should be some encounters with NPCs who are able to be intimidated. And not just weak characters who you can easily beat anyway, put the party in situations where they are outnumbered and in danger and then give an Intimidate check that allows the players to back down a superior enemy just by bucking up at them.

Make it so there is a quest or two that you can only complete or maybe get the "best outcome" by intimidating someone instead of actually beating them up.

Put the player into a dungeon and allow them to use Intimidate to beat one of the encounters without a fight so that they are in better shape for the boss fight (still give the XP of course).

Also you can make the player actually have to do some stuff in order to unlock the speech option. So for example, maybe through investigation and dialogue you find that a certain powerful NPC has a phobia, by bringing that item they are afraid of with you it allows you to beat the encounter via Intimidation (if you have the skill) where other parties would be forced to fight. This is how we start to get noncombat gameplay that is more interesting instead of speech skills being a "press X to win" option.

Stuff like this could be built out for other speech skills like Persuade, Bluff, Seduce, etc... it just takes the decision to make it a core feature and the time and effort to implement.

 

[Eirinjas]

Intimidate is usually a bad choice. It's often not used, and generally only when the player has the upper hand and can be better resolved by murder-hoboing. In situations where the player might need to avoid a conflict, Bluff is more often offered and usually better.

This also applies to Bluff. When Dipolamcy is split into Persuasion, Bluff, Intimidate... persuasion is almost always the best choice for the same reasons above.

The thing that's often missed in discussions like this, is that ANY skill system has to be supported by proper encounter design in order for it to work. And almost any system can be made to work if the content is properly designed around it.

If you want varied dialogue / speech skills to be important in your game, then they absolutely can be. You just have to design appropriately.

So for Intimidate there should be some encounters with NPCs who are able to be intimidated. And not just weak characters who you can easily beat anyway, put the party in situations where they are outnumbered and in danger and then give an Intimidate check that allows the players to back down a superior enemy just by bucking up at them.

Make it so there is a quest or two that you can only complete or maybe get the "best outcome" by intimidating someone instead of actually beating them up.

Put the player into a dungeon and allow them to use Intimidate to beat one of the encounters without a fight so that they are in better shape for the boss fight (still give the XP of course).

Also you can make the player actually have to do some stuff in order to unlock the speech option. So for example, maybe through investigation and dialogue you find that a certain powerful NPC has a phobia, by bringing that item they are afraid of with you it allows you to beat the encounter via Intimidation (if you have the skill) where other parties would be forced to fight. This is how we start to get noncombat gameplay that is more interesting instead of speech skills being a "press X to win" option.

Stuff like this could be built out for other speech skills like Persuade, Bluff, Seduce, etc... it just takes the decision to make it a core feature and the time and effort to implement.

Perception is also a generally poor skill because of the lack of opportunity for it to be useful in a lot of games.

 

[NecroLord]

Arcanum has Heal and Spot and Disarm Traps.
All three are pretty worthless. Enemies rarely cripple your limbs with their attacks, and heal does not restore that many hitpoints.
Spot and Disarm traps are also pretty bad. You can either make a Flow Specktrometer which automatically detects Traps (it runs on batteries though) or buy scrolls of Detect Traps. Traps themselves are not that dangerous. The fire one does do some damage and can even damage your armor if you fail to dodge it.

 

[sebas]

Crafting. In every fucking game.



Except Witcher 1.

 

[deuxhero]

I maintain New Vegas had good crafting and KotORII had OK crafting, but that is largely because they both had no dedicated crafting skill (crafting was only another way to utilize your existing skills) and KotOR2's was focused on turning resources useless to you (but not necessarily other builds) into upgrades for stuff you find, and New Vegas's built items were largely consumables or required such specific materials they were just a roundabout way to give special drops.

 

[octavius]

Crafting. In every fucking game.



Except Witcher 1.

Evil Islands did crafting well.

 

[NecroLord]

Crafting. In every fucking game.



Except Witcher 1.

Arcanum had a pretty good crafting system.
It was schematics based, some you learn by going into Tech disciplines, while others you find throughout the world, or in shops. You just need the proper elements to craft, and that's it.
Simple and sweet.

 

[OneManArmyGames]

It was infuriatingly common to have skills that were never even referenced in-game for CRPGs that were supposed to double up as PC creation tools for the pnp game, like MegaTraveller or Twilight 2000.

 

[Zlaja]

Crafting, a grindy skill which belongs or should belong mainly in survival games, unless is related to creating smaller items like potions, etc. Or it's the crafting system from Underrail and Arcanum.

There was so much shit you could craft in D:OS I got a fucking headache trying to figure out and keep track of everything.

Perception is also a generally poor skill because of the lack of opportunity for it to be useful in a lot of games

Perception was very useful in D:OS, but it was an attribute in that game.

 

[CryptRat]

This kind of threads is always mentioning all my favourite skills.

Spoiler

 

[Funposter]

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

• Etiquette is almost completely worthless
• Streetwise is almost completely worthless

Excuse me, but Streetwise and Etiquette have uses outside of pacifying enemies, making them slightly less useless than the other language skills.

 

[Snufkin]

Most spells and technical schematics are trash in Arcanum. Like 90%. Also like 95% of backgrounds are trash.

 

[Maxie]

rhetoric/persuasion/speech/whatever

 

[Snufkin]

rhetoric/persuasion/speech/whatever

Persuade/charisma is amazing in Arcanum.

 

[MasPingon]

rhetoric/persuasion/speech/whatever

Only when it's a win button. I hate how speech skill was impelemented in New Vegas, where all you need is speech skill high enough to pass the treshhold(which is known to you).

Speech checks should be based on at least 2 attributes (for example inteligence + charisma or stength + wits) coupled with pesuasion/intimidate/rhetoric skills. Your PC shouldn't even be able to create same sentences if he doesn't have the right attributes, let alone passing skillcheck. Skillcheck should contain some element of uncertainty, so you could fail even tho your PC is good with words. It means that you could also critically succeed with Inteligent but less skilled character. Basically I want Fallout 1 system, it was closest to perfection for a computer game.