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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8958816" data-attributes="member: 4937">[USER=5435]@fuindordm[/USER]  While I understand your desire to keep a 1e feel to the skill system, one of the biggest problems a skill system has is when it assumes that all tasks are equally difficult.  For example, if swimming in a current is a minor feat, does swimming in calm water automatically succeed for all PCs or is it easier to some degree?  What about swimming in heavy surf to avoid being thrown against rocks?  Is that just the same minor feat or is it somewhat harder?  The problem with basing your skill system off a D6 is that any modification to the chance of success becomes pretty gross and clumsy.  Another problem is that for any skill system, there needs to be a level of accomplishment that becomes automatic for a person with sufficient skill and talent.  That is to say, given that you have this much skill, there exists a task that is so trivially easy that the odds of failure are close enough to zero that you don't need to check for it (<<1%).  And, as skill increases, then there exists a task which previously had a small chance of failure that now becomes trivial and certain.   If you don't do that, then all sorts of verisimilitude problems pop up, like weaker characters being effectively more likely to open a stuck door than a stronger character, or weaker characters having some chance of opening a stuck door no matter how stuck it is.   And aside from simulation concerns, reliable skills are good for RP because players will tend to avoid using a skill that has a chance of failure.  For example, most 1e AD&D thieves skills were avoided largely or entirely by skilled AD&D players because the consequences of failure were high enough that any degree of failure usually wasn't worth the risk unless you had no other choice.  Thief players would work around the skills and treated them largely like saving throws, not things they could do.While you seem to understand this at some level because you have notes pertaining to things like automatic success and degrees of difficulty, I don't think you understand how important these things are.  It's highly important that skills be highly reliable at some point even when and especially when they have important story consequences and are occurring under stress.  33% to fail to climb a tree when it is important means you just don't climb trees if you can avoid it.  It becomes a saving throw when you have no other choice, not an active course of action to pursue.There is also the problem of presumably under such a system a thief has a professional skill in climb.  What happens when climbing a sheer surface becomes easier than climbing a tree?  And most importantly, what about walls somewhere between a sheer surface and a tree - something 1e AD&D massively struggled with?  Or why can't a non-thief gain some skill at climbing sheer surfaces or moving silently or what not?  And like with the tree climbing, why isn't moving silently influencing your surprise system or if it is, to what degree?  I feel like you haven't really unified all non-combat tasks under a single system, which IMO would be the primary goal.  I don't want to be in a situation where I'm choosing between multiple circumstantial systems.  There are some things that I think 1e AD&D does capture better than 3e, particularly with things like jumping being a fixed distance based on skill and strength.  A lot of athletics skills should be more reliable than a skill test and not be highly dependent with respect to degree of success on the fortune roll.  3e's attempt to figure out how far you jump based on directly scaling 1d20+skill to distance is a mistake.  But the idea of unifying all skills into a single system is a strong one that I think needs to be implemented.</blockquote>

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