Worst skills in RPGs

[__scribbles__]

What are some skills in RPGs that are pretty much useless?

Wasteland 1 is filled with useless trap skills. Forgery, bureaucracy, confidence, sleight of hand, clip pistol, knife fighting etc. Almost seems like half the skills in W1 were purposefully made to make you waste skill points.

Ultima Underworld is another. Traps, picklock, repair, appraise, charm, tracking, are pretty much a waste - at most being semi-useful if you invest a few points into them.

Deus Ex has the Swimming meme.

Bonus question: Is including deliberately useless skills bad design?

 

[Zanzoken]

Anything related to money i.e. Barter, Trading, Mercantile, etc. In most RPGs you'll end up rich regardless of these skills just from looting.

Bonus question: Is including deliberately useless or otherwise impractical skills bad design?

Yes 100%. That doesn't mean all skills should be equally useful and all builds should be equally viable. However if you offer a skill for the player to choose, then you owe it to the player to create opportunities for that skill to matter.

 

[Arbiter]

Outdoorsman and traps in Fallout 1.

 

[Kabas]

Not useless but the worst ones are the weapon skills. The kind that are tied to a very narrow weapon groups to be exact, like "daggers", "shortswords", "broadswords", etc.
Sucks to find a new magical weapon only to realise that nobody in your party can use it. Sucks even more if it's a single character RPG and you're stuck with a single weapon choice for the whole game.

 

[behold_a_man]

Bonus question: Is including deliberately useless or otherwise impractical skills bad design?

Or it may imply lack of time to flesh them out, or a bugged game - like intimidation in Bloodlines. Is time management a design element?

Outdoorsman and traps in Fallout 1.

Outdoorsman gets really useful if you don't know what you're doing, as it speeds up your character on the world map.
A road that on outdoorsman 20 takes X time will take ~0.63X time on outdoorsman 91.


Besides, pickpocketing has a bad tendency to be close to useless in most games.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Systems like Wasteland's and Fallout's worked better if you translated them to pnp where you had more freedom to be creative with every instance and encounter. With fixed content in a crpg, almost 2/3rds of those skills are useless.
In DE, swimming is a meme, but the final section has a rather big swimming section.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

sense alignment.
most of the times any non-combat charm spell.
just these days, after having heard it being heralded as the best role playing game ever, i went into baldur's gate 3 with a full charisma spellcaster loaded with charm spells. 100% dead weight, several of those spells did outright nothing and my best had a 40% chance of just wasting my turn for no effect at all.

Deus Ex has the Swimming meme.

and yet later in the game can open several new possibilities. after 20 years, i can recall at least the long flooded tunnel in paris catacombs and skipping a whole area in the underwater base.

 

[NecroLord]

We talking just video games, or even tabletop?
My man, clearly you haven't heard of FATAL...
Anyway, in answer to your bonus question, only skills useful to an adventurer and a life on the road should be included. You know, healing, maintaining weapons and gear, speech and oratory, intimidation, infiltration, fighting, etc.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

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.

 

[NecroLord]

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.

A Barbarian best communicates with his axe and fists.

 

[Zlaja]

Daggerfall with orcish, nymph, and harpy as your primary skills.

 

[Kabas]

sense alignment.

This reminds of the ranger's tracking ability from IWD.
It only provided you with a text containing some info about your current location and warning you in advance about some potential encounters. Like "lots of lizardmen tracks, also traces of a few giant spiders nearby" or "this temple was clearly attacked by the Yuan-Ti and their troll slaves, one troll might still be here".
Technically useless but flavourful and cool.

 

[octavius]

Pickpocketing.

 

[Butter]

The Realms of Arkania games included various skills that were present in DSA, but made them either literally useless or nearly useless. If you take Seduce or Animal Lore or Geography or Dance, you're playing the wrong game.

 

[Arbiter]

Outdoorsman and traps in Fallout 1.

Outdoorsman gets really useful if you don't know what you're doing, as it speeds up your character on the world map.
A road that on outdoorsman 20 takes X time will take ~0.63X time on outdoorsman 91.

Fallout gives you clear directions on where to go, so it is not that important.

 

[Silverfish]

Unarmed in Fallout 3 (yeah, I know). The scaling between 20 and 100 amounted to about 3-5 points of extra damage depending on weapon (bare hands got the least, power fists and deathclaw gauntlets got the "most"), but the Iron Fist perk, which had no required skill level, increased damage by a flat 5 points with 3 ranks, so the optimal unarmed setup was actually with minimal investment in the associated skill.

Champions: Return to Arms had elemental weapon buffs for the wizard class which was cool in theory, but the buffs were actually bugged and would override any enchantments or socketed effects the weapon already had and then would permanently remove those effects when the buff ran out.

 

[behold_a_man]

Outdoorsman and traps in Fallout 1.

Outdoorsman gets really useful if you don't know what you're doing, as it speeds up your character on the world map.
A road that on outdoorsman 20 takes X time will take ~0.63X time on outdoorsman 91.

Fallout gives you clear directions on where to go, so it is not that important.

But it can get very important if you want to do a specific ironman run - the supermutant at the Necropolis can force you to go to the Mariposa base - and then what? You might be screwed if you don't have certain countermeasures, and it's convenient to have some additional time to get them, especially given the fact that those skill books are dirt cheap.

 

[luj1]

Is including deliberately useless or otherwise impractical skills bad design?

Big difference between "deliberately useless" and "impractical" so the answers are yes and no.

 

[Turn_BASED]

Daggerfall’s language skills

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

• Etiquette is almost completely worthless
• Streetwise is almost completely worthless
• Centaurian is almost completely worthless
• Daedric is almost completely worthless
• Dragonish is almost completely worthless
• Giantish is almost completely worthless
• Harpy is almost completely worthless
• Impish is almost completely worthless
• Nymph is almost completely worthless
• Orcish is almost completely worthless
• Spriggan is almost completely worthless
• Critical Strike is bugged but does increase hit chance rather than damage
• Dodging is bugged and decreases the PC's chance to hit rather than enemies' chance to hit!

Spoiler

Still a good game, though.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

but bro think about the BIG MAP! trust me Daggerfall is a masterpiece look all those places that are all the same that you can explore! and all the cool shit that do not even work! best The Elder Scrolls game ever!!

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

"Bad skills" are usually good ideas, just poorly implemented.

• Pickpocket - devs have to code a specific and rather complex mechanic that's not tied to core gameplay. They don't have time to do it properly, so they nerf it until it's useless.
• Traps - extremely difficult to balance, because it can either do no damage or kill the player instantly. Devs go with the safe option and make traps harmless.
• Barter - it's only balanced if the economy is balanced, which it rarely is, particularly in the late game.
• First Aid, Doctor, Restoration magic - useless if you have 50 potions in your inventory, something which is also tied with the economy.
• Poison/disease resistance- poisons are usually underwhelming for the same reason traps are; it's frustrating for casual players to die from poisoning without having antidotes in their inventory(or so the devs think). Even when poison can kill you, devs make sure there's always an antidote nearby.
• Diplomatic skills - either you have a one-size-fits-all skill like Speech in Fallout, in which case it's an obvious choice if you actually want to access all the content, or you have various skills like Etiquette or Intimidation which are used 3 times in the entire game. Having multiple skills requires meticulous balancing like in AoD, otherwise it doesn't work.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Advanced Bear Sex in Baldur's Gate 3. Oh wait, you said useless, nvm.

 

[Iucounu]

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"?

 

[Cohesion]

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

• Etiquette is almost completely worthless
• Streetwise is almost completely worthless
• Centaurian is almost completely worthless
• Daedric is almost completely worthless
• Dragonish is almost completely worthless
• Giantish is almost completely worthless
• Harpy is almost completely worthless
• Impish is almost completely worthless
• Nymph is almost completely worthless
• Orcish is almost completely worthless
• Spriggan is almost completely worthless
• Critical Strike is bugged but does increase hit chance rather than damage
• Dodging is bugged and decreases the PC's chance to hit rather than enemies' chance to hit!

Spoiler

Still a good game, though.

CS and dodging are fixed in DF Unity, right?