OSR OSR Gripes

lowkey13 · Jul 11, 2019

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Monayuris · Jul 11, 2019

Celebrim said:
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.

The thief, as I read it (at least from Greyhawk) had abilities that were borderline supernatural. The thief had Climb Sheer Surfaces, Move Silently (not stealthily), Hide In Shadows, etc.

None of these conflict with the manner of adjudication as you describe because they aren't mundane abilities. Even without the existence of the thief, I would be ok with a player taking a grappling hook and rope out and casting it over a wall and proceeding to climb it. There would be no need for any kind of roll, the player is successful. But if the same player attempts to scuttle up the wall with their bare hands, I'd rule it would be impossible. The thief Climb Sheer Surfaces ability gives them a chance to do something a normal character can't.

My approach is with the correct tools if it can be done, it is within a typical characters actions.

Thief skills aren't replacements for typical character activities. They represent actions that are beyond what typical characters are capable of.

Tony Vargas · Jul 11, 2019

lowkey13 said:
I mean, in fairness, it's more of a, "Woah, you just don't get it."

There is just /so/ much of that...

lowkey13 · Jul 11, 2019

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lowkey13 · Jul 11, 2019

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Celebrim · Jul 11, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
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.

Well, first of all - and this was still a problem - you weren't the only one. A M-U could after all just cast Invisibility to hide.

And secondly, you are looking at this very differently than I ever looked at it.

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.

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.

And the 1e way of looking at being good at something was equally binary. Either you could do something or you couldn't do something. It had no consistent idea of difficulty, no idea of default values. Something was either easy or it was impossible. The thief skills were the first attempt to deal with "hard but not impossible" and it was a step forward however stumbling that step was. So in 1e everyone could do things that were easy, like climb a climbable wall. And no one could (without magic) do things that were impossible, like climb a wall made of glass. And the thief who was good at climbing could climb things that were 'nearly sheer' (and even with some difficulty things that were actually sheer).

So no system. So of course no consistency between tables.

By no means was 3e a 'let down' in the respect you are talking about. Being valuable to the party doesn't mean jealously hording what you can do. I did make some tweaks in things but here we had a strong commitment to making the thief good at things. And I would say the class has been very successful both in my 3e RAW play and in my homebrew version of 3.X play. It's popular with the players and has a lot of roles it can fulfill.

When I said 'niche protection' remained a problem, I meant exactly things like 'Trap Finding' meant that no matter how good a non-thief was at noticing things it was impossible to notice a trap. That was locked back in the binary thinking of 1e. It was a less advanced way of looking at things. I had no problem with the rogue being especially good at noticing traps, but the fact that they niche protected that meant problems. It isn't the way I would prefer to have done things (which is closer to how Pathfinder has dealt with the issue). Likewise, when spells granted skills, it bothered me how cheaply they valued skills relative to a spell. So if you were to see my versions of Knock and Spider climb, you'd see how much I elevate acquisition of skill in order to balance spellcasting and skill use so that spellcasters no longer can cheaply acquire skill by minimal expenditure of spell resources.

Celebrim · Jul 11, 2019

Monayuris said:
None of these conflict with the manner of adjudication as you describe because they aren't mundane abilities.

We are definitely on the same page here.

Celebrim · Jul 11, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
There is just /so/ much of that...

Ain't it the truth.

Sometimes I just wish people would apply that standard to themselves before breaking out analogies about ice cream as if I was arguing preferences.

Tony Vargas · Jul 11, 2019

Celebrim said:
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.

OK, so you're not coming from the perspective I was wondering about.

Everything you said makes sense, then.

Ratskinner · Jul 11, 2019

Celebrim said:
But so much of the OSR seems not devoted to fixing it but celebrating its brokenness.

QFT

Celebrim said:
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)."

Absolutely matches my experience. I know players that always seem to roll up an 18% STR Dwarf Fighter...every....single...time. The baffling thing to me is when I hear some of these same guys talk about how "stat-dependent" the later editions are. It's like: "Are you lying to me, or yourself?"

Celebrim said:
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.

Yup. Our group did, too. Same result. Supposedly, we're playing OSRIC right now, but even then we've modified so many rules that I hardly recognize the game.

Celebrim said:
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.

I am often struck by the thought that random tables and generators are really the heart of some people's love of old-school. I've run enough Fate to know that using something like Inspiration Pad Pro to generate lists of names, monsters, sites, heck even plots and schemes can really help get the improvisation juices flowing. It also can really help in any game when the player's ask "What's his name?"