L
lowkey13
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Well, the debate definitely preexisted the evolution of the idea of skillfulness in D&D.
In general, it was mostly climb/find traps/remove traps that I think presented the biggest ideological problems. I've never heard anyone suggest for example that characters were assumed to have skill in picking pockets or picking locks. I think people easily accepted that picking pockets or climbing locks were skills most people didn't have.
Remember, you have to look at this through the lens of the Braunstein inspired ruleless open ended game versus the modern notion of a universal fortune system. How did people check for traps before 'check for traps'? Well, they proposed the character carefully inspecting and looking at the object, and if they looked at the right thing carefully enough they maybe convinced the GM that they found the trap. I don't think this process usually involved a fortune test, because when I've witnessed this debate in the past the grognard side normally hates the whole idea of a fortune test. There idea is that by careful play by the player you find the trap and that is how it was done back in the day.
Similarly, I wasn't just pulling out of the air the whole take off your boots and armor thing. That's how I've been told stealthy movement was done back in the day. Again, I don't think the system was, "If you take off your boots and armor and you roll under Dexterity then I'll let you move silently." The judge simply decided whether or not the plan was good enough work and if it did it didn't and if it wasn't it wasn't. If the fortune system preexisted the Thief and was in any way widely known and accepted, my expectation is that the thief would have referenced it instead of having its own table of skills by level and we would have gotten the idea of a NWP way before we did. Nor have I heard anyone, Jordan Peterson included, describe such a nascent skills system.
The problem of course that you always ran into as a DM is that you know had this system for adjudicating extraordinary actions but it only applied to thieves. You had no system for adjudicating extraordinary actions for non thieves and more importantly you had no system for adjudicating ordinary actions. For rather ordinary actions, you still basically had the old Braunstein system of deciding for yourself if something was climbable. Climb a ladder? Yes. (No check.) Climb a dressed stone wall? No. (No check.) Climb a tree? Err.... Yes? Maybe? Not this tree?
And that's where the system started failing. Yes and No were easy answers but the thief skill system still really didn't address the in between cases well. Remember, we wouldn't have a notion of difficulty built into the system until 3e. So how much easier was it to climb a tree than the nearly sheer wall the thief was climbing? How much harder was it to climb a nearly sheer wall of ice? Rules smiths and module writers and other DMs started having to try to work with the system as it was, and as you might expect - just with other attempts to jury rig a skill system - the suggestions that they made were all over the place.
There is just /so/ much of that...I mean, in fairness, it's more of a, "Woah, you just don't get it."
Had the most skills is a world of difference from the only one with special abilities, that were either the only way to accomplish that range of tasks - or the only way to accomplish 'impossible' examples of those tasks.
It's the latter I'm curious about.
From this other point of view I'm hearing about, now, it was a sole example of things staying the same: that, before, everyone could perform every Thief special ability, to a mundane level, though no mechanics were generally forthcoming, but the Thief's facility was truly special in every case, "now" (in 3e) only Trapfinding was special.
So, were you on the original-Thief Special Abilities were nigh-supernatural, do-the-impossible things, or just considering it as one way of looking at it? Because 3e would seem quite the let-down if you were committed to that viewpoint at the time.
None of these conflict with the manner of adjudication as you describe because they aren't mundane abilities.
There is just /so/ much of that...
OK, so you're not coming from the perspective I was wondering about.You're looking at this in a rather binary way, of either the thief could do nigh-supernatural things or else he was just ordinary. It's a false contrast I never really had in my thinking. All I thought is, "The thief should be good at climbing walls.", or "The thief should be good at stealth.", or what have you.
But so much of the OSR seems not devoted to fixing it but celebrating its brokenness.
You'll either find a method with less randomness or your group will tacitly accept cheating:"Yes I did roll two 18's for my character (on the 18th character that I rolled up)", "Yes I did roll two 18's for my character (after I rerolled the 7 that was ruining the character it luckily was an 18).", "Yes I did roll two 18's for my character (it was a 2 sixes and 2 threes, but I figured close enough)."
Really, I tried running a 1e AD&D game a few years back and it was really shocking just how badly it played compared to a modern rules set or that I put up with it for more than 10 years.
I mean there are things I do love about it and I know how to improvise, it's just that I hate having to improvise every freaking thing. That's way too much heavy lifting that distracts from playing the game.