Skill Systems for pre-3.x D&D

As I've posted over on ENWorld (in the Legacy games sub-forum), I am weighing the various options for a skill system for my planned Dunlyle campaign.  As I explained, there are several options:

1. No skill system at all -- use ability checks with appropriate modifiers
2. Secondary skills only (as per 1st edition)
3. Rules Cyclopedia skill slots
4. 3.x skill points
5. 4e trained/untrained skills
6. The Adventures Dark & Deep system, based on a prior OGL creation, which involves the purchase of skill ranks with experience points, the skills themselves use a modified ability check system.

Flexibility vs. Specialization

At first blush, the "no system" has a lot going for it.  There is something liberating, frankly, about not having a skill system and just winging the outcome with your players.  Obviously, this requires a level of DM flexibility and skill, as well as the trust of the players.  It also requires consistent application.  Over the course of a campaign, the flexibility/"winging it" solution ends up with loosely codified houserules using a variety of modifiers to either the target number or the die roll itself.

My main beef with this (as well as the 1st edition solution) is that it does not allow a PC to excel at a particular skill.  How do you simulate arcane knowledge, tracking, or even being a great horseman in Basic D&D?  Clearly, not everyone has this knowledge -- so you end up with a houserule that says some ability checks are only usable by certain classes.  This creates a de facto "class skill" system where some skills are only usable by trained individuals and others (like stealth, say) are usable untrained.

On the other hand, there are other cans of worms opened with a full-blown skill system exported to pre 3.x D&D.  Many of the rules mechanics (surprise, finding secret doors, falling into traps, etc.) are handled on a flat 1 in 6 or 2 in 6 probability, with no distinctions between different races and classes of PCs.  Once you inject perception, athletics, and other combat and non-combat skills into the mix, you are fundamentally altering how the basic game works -- and not just for the PCs.  You then have to account for these attributes for all of the monsters.  Which is probably why Gary went with a simple mechanic in the first place.

What 4e got right

Yes, my fellow grognards, there were some advances in 4th edition, the biggest one in my mind being the rules for passive perception and insight.  The passive mechanic allows PCs to spot secret doors (in elf-like fashion) without looking for them, and also provides a target for opposing stealth rolls to determine if PCs are surprised.  Passive insight functions like 3.x's Sense Motive skill.  Once you decide that you need a skill system, you need a way to keep it manageable, and passive skills fit the bill.  Passive perception, in particular, helps deal with the trap-finding problem in prior editions, where the paranoid thief/rogue character searches every 10' square with a fine-tooth comb.  Of course, that's what wandering monsters are for, too.

I also like the concept of the trained/untrained skill in 4e, though I'm not a fan of the execution.  Trained skills in 4e are essentially ability checks against a set DC, delivering a flat +5 bonus for training, and all skills go up with character level automatically.  I think this could be adapted to basic with tiers of bonuses for each rank of training (which is very similar to the Adventures Dark and Deep implementation).

How Skills are "bought"

If you have a skill system, you then have to decide how they are acquired.  The Rules Cyclopedia uses a weapon proficiency analogue called skill slots, and allows the expenditure of multiple slots to simulate greater expertise.  3.x uses skill points and is by far the most customizable system.  4th edition essentially uses skill slots. 

Adventures Dark and Deep uses an interesting xp purchase option, trading off xp for skills with a maximum number of ranks per level.  I am lukewarm on this last option, simply because it is such a giant tradeoff for a player to learn an interesting "flavor" skill (like a social interaction skill) at the cost of hard-won xp.  This system feels more like a GURPS-like, character-point driven game where character advancement is piecemeal (do you want to increase your skills or other abilities?) rather than level-based.  I like point-buy games, having played Champions for years, but to me this runs counter to the level mechanic in all versions of D&D and I'm hard pressed to see where a player would want to learn any skills until he was of a fairly high level and the xp costs involved were proportionately less painful.

At the moment, I'm leaning heavily towards the Rules Cyclopedia as a way to provide some structure and specialization to skills in pre-3.x without getting overloaded in details or having to create monster skills to oppose PC skills.  I also think having some kind of rules makes it more clear to the players how actions will be adjudicated.  But I would love to hear how you deal with skills in your games.

Adventures Dark & Deep Kickstarter

Joe Bloch, aka the Greyhawk Grognard, has just launched a Kickstarter funding event for Adventures Dark and Deep, a Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore.  This product is a supplement for 1st edition and OSR products, adding new classes, spells, monsters, a streamlined combat system, and other features.

If you haven't seen Joe's material, painstakingly and lovingly coaxed out of dozens of sources on Gary Gygax's intentions for the advancement of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, you are missing a distinctly Gygaxian expansion and clarification of the game.  As Joe puts it, it's his attempt to render the AD&D 2nd edition Gygax would have written.

I support this on Kickstarter and I encourage you to do so as well.

That Old Feelin'

It started when I put my computer game habit to the side and picked up my pen & paper games again.  I'd never let go of PnP gaming, having maintained a place in Brodie's 3e/4e game as a player and 3e DM for the last 12 years, more or less.  But I noticed, frankly, that I wasn't being the kind of husband, father, and man I wanted to be while fully absorbed in computer games.  I started seeing clients whose marriages were falling apart due to computer and video games.  It was time to let it go.

But D&D is a different animal, to me anyway. It's a hobby, theater of the mind, a creative outlet, and a social occasion.  For me, computer games were a suppressant, a tranquilizer.  D&D expands my real life and engages both sides of my aging brain.

So the box(es) of D&D materials beckoned, and the writing started.  Once the writing (blogging, and campaign-building) began, a need for an audience formed with it.  I suspect this is a partial reason why people blog -- the dual need to "get it all down on paper" and express oneself combined with the very basic need to communicate on a brain-to-brain basis with those of a similar bent.

And then the old feeling came -- the need to DM again.  I suppose I knew it all along, but having written up Dunlyle, I needed to experience it, and not just to playtest it either.  I wasn't ready to just file it away or be content to occasionally pull it out and tweak it.  I needed to feel it and let it live.  Cue the Dr. Frankenstein analogies.

It will also give me a chance to playtest Joe Bloch's excellent Adventures Dark & Deep.

5th Edition Hopes and Fears

Like many gamers in my age demographic, I await news of D&D 5th edition with a mix of hope and trepidation.  On the one hand, Monte is at the helm; it won't suck.  On the other hand, its stated goal of unifying the various editions -- and thereby providing something for everybody -- runs the risk of pleasing no one at all.

As of this writing, my favorite editions remain 3.5 and Pathfinder, for one big reason: character creation.  I find that 3.5/PF deliver the most ability for PCs to create the character they want within a fantasy world framework.  While this is sacrelige in many OSR circles, I like feats and skills as presented in 3rd Edition and its progeny.  Is 3.5/PF perfect?  No -- the oft-stated objections (rules bloat, wargaming feel, challenge rating/build-the-adventures-around-the-PCs, the power curve, high-level play wonkiness) are mostly valid in my experience as a player and DM.  But that sweet spot (say, level 3-10 or so) was awesome.

I have gone back and reviewed many of my Basic Set / 1st Edition materials, and downloaded and reviewed several of the carefully-crafted OSR retro-clone products, including Labyrinth Lord and Joe Bloch's Adventures Dark and Deep.  I value the original and OSR products for their relative simplicity, flavor, nostalgia, and sense of real danger to the PCs.  However, I like a product with a little more meat on the bones, particularly regarding skills and adjudicating non-combat actions.  Adventures Dark and Deep has taken the step of adopting a alternative skill system based on xp expenditure that is partially tied to ability scores -- thus, for many of the skills, it is cheaper to train if your best ability score is that skill's prime requisite.

Mixing and matching these elements then, as Monte in fact says he is doing, my fantasy 5th edition would look something like this:

• Same core design re: six ability scores, hit points, saves, armor class, etc.
• Feats, or some mechanism to customize characters to provide unique abilities
• Skills or ability check modifiers to allow resolution of non-combat actions
• Ability to run 0/1st edition style gameplay (i.e., battlemap/miniatures optional) for quicker play
• Flattening of the power curve
• Deadliness -- the game needs to be dangerous
• Rewards should go back to pre-3e: xp for treasure, to encourage alternate means of "winning" other than monster-slaying, which begets the Challenge Rating/match-the-encounter-to-the-PCs thinking.

Transformation: from Gamer to Game Writer

I'd been following Joe Bloch's blog for awhile when I caught the notice for his self-publishing company, BRW games: "Now Accepting Submissions."

I had been tooling around with some ideas (having come back to pen and paper gaming after a short hiatus) when it occurred to me that writing for a publisher was the key missing piece for me.  Having precious little time to actually game, the idea of adventure writing during my free time grew into a passion.  After a few emails back and forth with the very gracious Joe, I began writing, using his excellent Adventures Dark and Deep beta ruleset as the gaming framework.

Writing about games is, clearly, very different than gaming, though many of us in the blogosphere seem to enjoy musing on gaming as much as the act itself.  What I was not prepared for, however, was the rather gaping chasm between being a DM and being a writer for DMs.  Now, after over a month of going at it, I can confidently say: it's harder than it looks.  As a fairly competent writer, I had no worries about being able to put proverbial pen to paper; my concern quickly became how to best organize my ideas into a coherent whole, and how to best capture those elusive ideas before they slipped away into the mental ether.  Pages and pages of yellow tablet paper quickly filled up.  Everything has to be explained.  One simply cannot expect implications, transitions, or clues to be obvious.  As part of discovering the need for Clarity, I achieved crystallization of a trinity of masters that I was to serve.  The quest of writing thus became a trial to attain three sometimes-conflicting objectives, Clarity, Creativity, and Productivity.

Creativity is, itself a fascinating topic.  My good friend Brodie is an expert on the topic of creativity and the very notion of the genesis of ideas.  What quickly became apparent to me was that in adventure writing (as in painting, sculpture, movie-making, or any other creative endeavor), it has all been done before.  As I drew and populated a low-level dungeon, I kept kicking myself -- oh, great, another lowbie Kobold encounter.  But I trudged onward, trying to make that Kobold encounter as memorable as possible.  Eventually, I gave myself a break, for at a slightly deeper level lurked the thought, "people expect it to be that way."  There was more than one Hollywood western, after all.  In the end, like Hollywood producers, I determined that the end result, creatively, should be the same only different.  By infusing creative organizational elements, interesting locales, new monsters, memorable NPCs, a variety of situations, and unique treasures, I could hopefully deliver something familiar yet interesting -- something worthy of a ten-to-twenty dollar gamer investment, perhaps.

Productivity is ever-present.  The output must be generated.  This requires real time in front of the keyboard and at the graph paper tablet.  To write something for the gaming public -- something that would be entertaining, useful, and worth spending actual money upon -- it needed sufficient bulk.  If all you do is "ideate" and organize, you will never have an end result.  Someone has to do the heavy lifting of hammering out the necessary prose, and it can be a chore.  There have been days when writing up ten dungeon rooms has felt like a major accomplishment.

I have finally submitted the manuscript and have (mostly) resisted the urge to go back and compulsively edit it more, and have moved on to the next project.  But it's hard to move on when the echoes of the last project are still bouncing around ...