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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5685598" data-attributes="member: 32740">As noted by others the problem isn't in allowing skill rolls into roleplaying situations, it's allowing skill rolls to REPLACE roleplaying situations.  As long as PC's have a requirement of supporting social skill rolls with some roleplaying substance there's far less of an issue. Again, it isn't as if 1E thieves didn't have Remove Traps skill rolls.  The issue is allowing the skill roll to entirely REPLACE any description or understanding of how the trap would work.  Traps could be FOUND iin 1E without needing to make a skill roll.   They could also be disabled without needing to make a skill roll by simply understanding how it worked or bypassed entirely by clever play.I'd be wary of putting a hard cap on anything.  The point is that it should be up to the DM to declare that there is a practical limit to the amount of re-attempts - just as there may NOT be a practical limit.  Three Strikes and you're out doesn't make sense in all circumstances and sometimes even three may be too many.  You have to rule each situation as it arises.  That is the 1E way.Poison does not have to be a devastating binary result: life/death.  This is really more of an issue of monster design from 1E.  The dangers to humans from poisons in real-life creatures varies a lot and Gary simply didn't care to be using poison in subtler ways.  I get the idea that he was trying to get players to go to great roleplaying lengths to avoid or make the poison irrelevant entirely, so he didn't need or want a more realistic approach. My suggestion would be to re-examine each monster that has poison, determine what its poison would normally be used against (predator incapacitating its prey, or prey protecting itself from predator, or just an unexpected byproduct of anatomical processes?).  A predator has poison to keep its prey from escaping or fighting back and often is not lethal, but is completely incapacitating.  AFTER the poison has taken effect is when the prey is actually killed.  Defensive poisons don't have to kill either - they are more likely to cause pain or somehow debilitate the predator to allow the prey to escape or encourage the predator to cease attacking and look for some other food.  And the effect of poisons on one species doesn't always have the same effect on others.  Lots of D&D monsters are giant versions of real-world critters so their poison often ought to be worse but there should still be species of giant spiders for example whose poison is intended for use against... blink dogs or giant flies and so the effect on PC races might not be lethal. Poison effects from missed saves can still be lethal even if they aren't outright death.  Poisons that simply cause additional hit point loss kill easily.  Poisons can cause sleep, paralysis, hallucination, blindness, wounds that won't clot, fevers, weakness, shaking, sweating, dizziness, unconsciousness or coma rather than outright death.  Don't replace save-or-die with ONLY something just as uninspired and tedious as save-or-stat-loss.  Use that too, but exercise some creativity.  Don't get trapped by the mindset that things have to fit into nice rules-defined niches.  Heck, just look at the list of 3E's Condition Summary and you can see all kinds of potential poison effects that will make for far more interesting monsters. Since this is also a fantasy environment a poison can do something really exotic like cause spellcasters to spontaneously manifest spell effects. Poisons can also vary in the time it takes for the poison to actually begin to take effect regardless of the saving throw.  Not all poisons take instant effect.  They may take rounds or even hours to begin to take effect much less run their course. It's not that they were easier in 1E but that 3E materials simply made no mention of things like maintaining an order of march or setting a watch for protection during the night.  So, DM's who hadn't already been indoctrinated into D&D often didn't know any better.  Without being told otherwise they learned that encounters begin when you roll initiative, when any 1E player would have told you that encounters happen any time, anywhere, in any form; that you might never have to roll a die in an encounter; that encounters can be overcome by roleplaying alone; that encounters could (and sometimes SHOULD) be avoided entirely by taking logical, sensible precautions and maintaining a characters "awareness" just by roleplaying. It all comes down to the fact that it's really not what rules you play - but how you play them.  I think I read that in a sig somewhere...</blockquote>

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