Yes or No skills

[Zulgyan]

The main problem with skills is when they enable you to do ordinary stuff "better". Because then you need to start crafting a system around skills, and it ends up being very much what Calithena said:

odd74.proboards76.com/index.cgi?board=philosophy&action=display&thread=918

But what about YES or NO skills. Skills that work in a binary fashion... such as...

Sailing: you know how to sail a ship through sea.

In an OD&D non-skill system, it would be quite reasonable that not ALL characters know how to sail.

Other example could be...

Potion Brewing
or
Weapon Forging
or
Poison Making

etc.

They kinda work as "know languages". Either you know them or you don't.

what do you think about these YES or NO skills??? Would a non-skill, non-universal task resolution OD&D benefit from them??? What problems do they create??

I would keep the list extremely conservative and not include things such as "swim" witch every adventurer should be able to do. Not everyone should have skills. Only character with high intelligence or wisdom.

[philotomy]

I prefer something like AD&D's secondary skills. For example, if you have "sailor" as a secondary skill (which is really something like a previous profession or character background), the referee and players assume that the PC knows how to do the stuff a sailor would know (e.g. how to sail a ship, tie a variety of useful knots, speak the lingo to mix with other sailors in port dives and bars, et cetera). I'm not sure how useful actually making a list would be, though; I don't see a big benefit.

[busman]

A Traveller like pre-life generation might be an interesting way to generate these. It was always one of my favorite parts of Classic Traveller.

[jcstephens]

May 18, 2008 20:44:39 GMT -6 philotomy said:

I prefer something like AD&D's secondary skills. For example, if you have "sailor" as a secondary skill (which is really something like a previous profession or character background), the referee and players assume that the PC knows how to do the stuff a sailor would know (e.g. how to sail a ship, tie a variety of useful knots, speak the lingo to mix with other sailors in port dives and bars, et cetera). I'm not sure how useful actually making a list would be, though; I don't see a big benefit.

I've been toying with something like this:

In addition to a class, characters also take an occupation (their day job, so to speak). During play, they become the 'go to' guy for any task associated with their occupation. Taking your sailor example, Bob the Sailor knows how to swim, and handle a small boat, and work as part of a ship's crew. He also knows something about knot tying, and can predict the weather. If he starts using nautical terminology and saying "Arrrr!" a lot, so much the better. The point is that there's no set list of tasks, just the player's imagination and creativity.

Other characters can swim too, and tie knots and guess about the weather. But Bob's the one who gets XP for it. I'm still working on how much, it should be enough to encourage Bob to look for chances to do sailor stuff, but not so much that it overshadows monster whacking and treasure grubbing.

Finally, a character can change occupations each time he gains a level. This allows for shifts in campaign focus, or if a concept just isn't working out.

[blackbarn]

May 19, 2008 2:02:50 GMT -6 busman said:

A Traveller like pre-life generation might be an interesting way to generate these. It was always one of my favorite parts of Classic Traveller.

There's actually an early 3rd edition book that does something like this, the only problem being it's purely for background flavor and doesn't actually "build" your character based on the results. It's called the Hero Builder's Guidebook and is the only 3E book I still own, precisely because of the life-path generation section.

It would be a great place to start if you wanted to flesh out such a system for any version of D&D. You'd just need to note which abilities or skills are gained for each entry on the background tables.