Skills as the Interface Between Character and World
When I first planned this series, I assumed I would move directly from ability scores into resolution mechanics.
Once I started outlining the dice system, it became clear I was skipping something foundational.
Ability scores describe what a character is. Resolution mechanics describe how uncertainty is adjudicated. But neither of those answer a more immediate question:
What is the character actually doing?
That's where skills live.
Skills are the interface between character and world. They are the means by which capability becomes action. Before talking about dice, it's worth asking what role skills are supposed to play in a tabletop RPG at all.
What Skills Are Actually Doing
Like attributes, every skill system makes quiet assumptions about what matters.
How specific should competence be? Should experience broaden capability or deepen it? Does advancement change who your character is, or how reliably they perform?
In many class-/level-based systems like D&D or 13th Age, skills are secondary. Your class defines your identity and growth curve. Skills fill gaps. They resolve uncertainty in social scenes, exploration, or downtime, but they rarely drive the core progression of the character.
In those systems, skills are often tightly bound to attributes. If a build prioritizes Strength, Intelligence-based competence becomes harder to justify mechanically. Certain combinations feel natural. Others feel mathematically discouraged.
That bundling makes characters easy to read and progression easy to pace. It also narrows how they can express themselves.
Skill-based systems take a different approach.
In games like Cyberpunk or Genesys, skills are the primary investment. Advancement is granular. What your character becomes good at is shaped by repeated choice rather than predefined packages.
This allows competence to emerge unevenly. Two characters can begin similarly and diverge based on what they practice. Growth feels accumulated rather than unlocked.
That flexibility introduces its own tension. Freedom of investment can create uneven builds. Some skills may prove situational. Without structural guidance, expressive choice can become accidental fragility.
Neither model is inherently superior. They produce different kinds of play.
For Threshold, the question was which model supported the kind of long-term play I wanted.
What Skills Represent in Threshold
In Threshold, skills represent refinement and reliability, not permission.
Characters can attempt almost anything that makes sense in the fiction. Being untrained doesn't mean you are incapable. It means you are inconsistent.
Training a skill doesn't unlock the ability to act. It increases the likelihood that your action produces the outcome you intend.
That distinction matters for tone.
In some systems, skills answer: Can you do this? In Threshold, they answer: How reliably can you do this under pressure?
Improvement deepens competence without redefining the character's nature. You are not becoming a different category of being. You are becoming practiced. That's what supports the grounded protagonist design I talked about in the last post.
Structure, Not Math
Skills in Threshold are organized into four categories: General, Knowledge, Combat, and Magic.
General skills cover practical interaction with the world. Knowledge skills represent accumulated understanding. Combat skills represent proficiency with different categories of weapons and defensive equipment. Magic skills align with the Forms I'll discuss when I cover the magic system in detail.
Each skill progresses through five ranks, Untrained>Trained>Expert>Master>Paragon. Advancement is incremental. Improvement is steady rather than explosive.
Currently, skills are structured as Broad + Specialization. A character may invest broadly or refine focus within a narrower expression of that skill. This allows identity to emerge through practice.
Permanent Investment
Skill investments are permanent.
That decision was deliberate. Growth should matter. Direction should matter. A character's history should shape their present.
At the same time, permanence increases the stakes of choice. In a skill-driven system, misaligned investment can have lasting consequences.
Why Skills Carry So Much Weight
Because most progression in Threshold lives in skills, they are the primary way characters grow over long campaigns.
Attributes establish baseline capability. Skills refine that capability. Over time, growth expresses itself as consistency and depth rather than scale escalation.
Characters don't become untouchable. They become prepared.
That distinction is subtle, but it's central to the tone of the game.
What Comes Next
With skills positioned as refinement and reliability, the remaining question is how the game resolves uncertainty when those skills are tested.
How do attributes and skills combine at the table? What determines difficulty? What distinguishes success from partial success?
That's the focus of the next post.
What I Worked On
This phase of design focused on clarifying the role skills play in the overall structure of the system.
Up to this point, I had a working list of skills and a progression framework, but I hadn't fully articulated what skills were supposed to represent. The distinction between attributes, skills, and techniques needed to be made explicit, especially since so much of character growth lives in skills rather than in large attribute increases.
I also spent considerable time adjusting the scope and structure of the skill list itself. The current framework includes 14 General skills, 8 Knowledge skills, 8 Combat skills, and 5 Magic skills—35 broad skills total before specializations. That's more granular than something like Blades in the Dark (12 actions) but much more consolidated than systems like GURPS or Rolemaster. Some skills that initially existed separately were collapsed into broader categories. Others were split to preserve meaningful distinctions. The question wasn't just what skills to include, but how many—too few and characters blur together, too many and progression fragments into increments that don't feel meaningful. These numbers may shift as I test different levels of granularity, but the current structure aims for meaningful differentiation without excessive bookkeeping.
At the same time, I was reviewing whether the current Broad + Specialization structure was supporting identity or simply adding complexity.
What Went Wrong
The biggest issue I ran into was granularity.
Allowing both broad skills and specializations creates strong identity and clear expertise, but it also makes extreme specialization possible. In some cases, characters could accumulate very large dice pools in narrow areas while remaining weak elsewhere. That isn't inherently bad, but it raises questions about balance, progression pacing, and long-term sustainability.
The other concern is cognitive load. More specialization means more decisions at character creation and advancement, which can slow onboarding and make early choices feel riskier.
What I Changed
I haven't made a structural change yet, but I have reframed how I'm evaluating the system.
Instead of asking whether specialization is realistic or expressive, I'm now asking whether it produces better long-term play. That shifts the focus toward sustainability and meaningful differentiation rather than simulation.
To address the investment risk that comes with permanent advancement, I've started outlining an archetype framework—not rigid classes, but structured guidance that signals which skills work well together and what kinds of characters the system supports. Think of them as proven templates that show you how the pieces fit, without locking you into a single path.
What I'm Testing Next
The next step is to test different levels of skill granularity in parallel.
One version keeps the current Broad + Specialization structure. Another collapses skills into broader categories. A third limits specialization primarily to combat, where differentiation has the most mechanical and narrative impact.
At the same time, I'll be evaluating how skill progression interacts with the resolution system. Since skills increase reliability rather than raw capability, the exact scaling matters.
The next post will focus on resolution mechanics and how attributes and skills combine to produce outcomes.
Questions
When have you felt most satisfied with how your character developed in a skill-based system? Was it when you had complete freedom, or when the system provided structure?
In systems you've played that allow specialization, when has narrow expertise felt rewarding versus when has it created problems? I'm curious whether deep focus tends to work better in certain types of campaigns or genres.
If you've played skill-heavy systems with permanent advancement, how did early investment decisions feel? Did you wish for more guidance up front, or did figuring it out through play feel like part of the experience?
