I was reading some old forums about Top Secret/S.I. and someone called it a task system which they hated. Is this a term for skill based games?
It's been an age... I remember knowledge areas and ten sided / percentile dice but not much about the system itself (and there was an edition before SI). And I may be combining / mixing up the editions too. There is a Kickstarter on for a new Top Secret game called "Top Secret: New World Order" by the author of the original TSR game. Still e few days on the KS I believe and the PDF level for the core book was about $10 iirc.
You say "Task System" to me and I think of the (later) Traveller and Megatraveller games...
I generally think of a task based system as one with defined difficulty values that determine what a character needs to achieve with their roll. Common defined levels are along the lines of: Easy, Routine, Difficult, Formidable, Impossible or various synonyms. The GM just needs to assign a difficulty to know what the PC needs to roll to achieve success.
I generally think of a task based system as one with defined difficulty values that determine what a character needs to achieve with their roll. Common defined levels are along the lines of: Easy, Routine, Difficult, Formidable, Impossible or various synonyms. The GM just needs to assign a difficulty to know what the PC needs to roll to achieve success.
That's pretty much exactly what Traveller (with the DGP task system added to it) and Megatraveller did. It systemized a rather chaotic method of determining success and failure at a given task. I always rather liked it myself.