Runequest: Climbing to Greater Heights.

This is going to be a short post. I had a thought the other day about Climbing skill checks and how they normally are approached in tabletop role-playing games and maybe how Gamemasters can improve upon what we have been doing up until now. I'll be approaching this from the rules of Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (RQG), but I think this can be applied to other RPGs as well.

Some Details about the Runequest Rules (Optional Reading)

In case you didn't know; when making a skills check in RQG, The player rolls a D100 and compares the result against the percentage next to the skill being rolled. It's a Success if the roll is equal to or less than the percentage of the skill. If Ragnar has a climb skill of 50% (written as Climb: 50%), it's a success if they rolled 50 or less on a D100. 

RQG has degrees of success as well; A Special Success is when the roll is equal to or less than 1/5th of the skill's percentage and a Critical Success is when the roll is equal to or less than 1/20th of the skill's percentage. For Ragnar, they would have a Special Success on their Climb: 50%, if they rolled 10 or less. It would be a Critical Success if they rolled a 3 or less.

The roll can also be a fumble and a fumble is when the roll is equal to 5% of the range of failure for the skill. Rolling a 100 on a D100 (which is when both dice come up with 0's) is always a fumble. In Ragnar's case, this would mean that they would fumble if the roll was a 98 or higher.

Degrees of Success

The degrees of success have various effects on the type of actions being made. In the case of climbing, how successful the roll was can affect how quickly or how far you climb each round. With a Success equal to traversing 5 meters up a wall, twice that for a Special Success, and 25 meters for a Critical Success. A Failure, on the other hand, results in zero progress up the wall and a Fumble means something bad happens. Something bad doesn't have to mean that you fall off the wall either. It could just mean wasted time as you've gotten stuck and have to climb down a bit before any progress can be made again. It could also mean that you made enough noise that a nearby guard or beast heard you and comes to investigate. 

When to Make Skill Checks

In RQG, characters normally succeed at routine actions in normal conditions. However, in stressful situations, the Gamemaster can call for skills rolls. Essentially, this means that if the pressure is on and failure can have a detrimental outcome to the story or character(s) then a roll should be required. But this post is about those times when we need or are required to make a skill check. 

Arguments

In RQG you can also use an ability to give a boost to a skill check if you make a successful check with that ability. This is referred to as Augmenting; which is also adjusted based on how successful the argument check was. If failed, however, you can gain a penalty instead.

Climbing: A Group Effort

With all the details out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks as they say (IDK who says this or why).

From my long history playing tabletop RPGs, Climb has always been treated as an individual action. This usually looks like:

1. Each player says they are going to climb something. 
2. The GM calls for some kind of Climb Check.
3. Each Player makes a Climb Check.
4. GM tells them what happens as they succeed or fail. 

In this situation, each player makes their own skill check to climb. It's almost like they each take a different section of the wall or cliff face and begin to climb. But that's not really how most people approach climbing half the time in real life. When people go out on the weekends to climb a cliff face they function as a team, with one member of their party taking on the role of leader; going up the cliff face first - setting up the safety line and stakes as they make their way to the top. Everyone else follows behind the Climb Leader. They are following the same route that the leader has picked and trying their best to use the same handholds and footholds that the leader used. As a team, they make it to the top because of the work of the leader.

So I think the way climbing should be treated in RPGs is more like this unless the players state beforehand that they are trying to compete against each other. The way this would look is like this:

1. The party decides they are going to climb.
2. The Group figures out who the strongest climber is; this would be the character with the highest skill in Climb. The group makes this character the Climb Leader.
3. The Climb Leader rolls their climb skill check. 
4. Using the Degrees of Success that are present in RQG, if the Climb Leader is successful, the other players gain a bonus when they roll their skill checks. In RQG this would be a +20% if successful, +30 is a special success, or a +50% is a critical success. No bonus for a failure or fumble.
5. Each other character makes a Climb Check, adding the bonuses they gained from the leader if any. 
6. GM tells them what happens as they succeed or fail to climb the cliff or wall.

This best reflects how climbers work together to ascend mountains or cliffs and I think will, on the other hand, remove some of the more awkward aspects that can crop up when it's time to climb anything. You always have those characters who are terrible at climb checks and will always fall off the wall. This lowers the possibility because, as a team, the better climbers would be helping the weaker climbs. 

Other Options:

There are other options for these situations, as well, that maybe you will find more appealing and would rather use instead. The following are two ideas that I could think up while writing this post.

One Roll

You could have only one character make a single Climb Check for the whole team, which works similar to what I wrote above except it is just the Climb Leader who makes a climb check. The team succeeds or fails based on how well their best climber does at the roll. 

Zero-Sum, Maybe?

Another option is where we determine the success of the group climbing by having each character make a Climb check as per normal. The GM then counts up the successes, then counts up the failures. If there are more successes than failures - the party succeeds as a group. If there are more failures than successes, the party fails as a group. If there is an equal amount of Successes and Failures, then they cancel each other out. The group both succeed at the climb but the task took longer and was more tiring than it should have been. Fumble rolls should count as two failures instead of one, as the fumble has caused an issue for the whole group and not just for one single character. 

Wrap Up

Well, that was the thought I had about climb checks. I think, at least in concept, one of these optional approaches to handling Climb checks should be easy to apply to any game system. Not every game system has Degrees of Success. Most tend to have a simple Success or Fail for skill checks. In those situations, a single bonus will still work for success. It is up to the GM to figure out what an appropriate bonus or penalty would be and what works best in their game. I'm going to be testing this out in my game the next time we have a situation that calls for it. Climb Checks don't come up very often.