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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7633195" data-attributes="member: 4937">Your assumption that there were many or any tables out there which let you climb a wall after make D20 under dexterity check is what I think is entirely wrong here.  I don't think that existed as a consistent methodology more or less anywhere.  There may have been some tables doing that before or after the introduction of the thief because anything is possible, but if I had to bet based on the evidence I'd say, "Nope."The evidence I would cite is the complete lack of submissions to Dragon or any attempt by TSR itself to fix the skills problem with that methodology.   No one ever even thought of it, and I knew people writing into dragon trying to get published and certainly no one at TSR was going, "Hey, you wouldn't happen to have a fix to the skills problem would you?"  We mentioned Len Lakofka earlier, and he was one of the best most self-aware critics of the D&D system of the era and he addressed the problem with the thief design and it's intent, but not in the way or context you are imagining which is I think a very anachronistic and very modern view that assumes the existence of a fortune test.Even when NWP did consistently get to make a D20 or under roll, it was still a silo'd skill or ability granted to you and not something that worked off the assumption of a broad system available to all.My suspicion is that before the thief there was no system.  And after all, this is EXACTLY what the OD&D people most often trumpet as why it was better.   So the 'system' such as it was for climbing a wall is you described your approach for doing so to the DM and he gave you a pass/fail on whether it worked.   That is to say, prior to the thief, no one was rolling the dice as part of a fortune check for hiding or climbing at all.  They just asked the DM to describe the wall, and if it was rough and uneven then they tried to convince the DM that they had a successful approach for climbing the wall, and if they succeeded in that they just had climbed the wall.  I think based on everything I've read and first hand testimony that was in fact how OD&D was played.And you could still play AD&D that way and in fact I think it was intended to play that way after the introduction of the thief.   What the thief let you do for the first time is get a roll to succeed even if you couldn't talk the DM into letting you automatically succeed.   And in a way that was revolutionary.   We were moving away from a pure Braunstein resolution methodology where everything was about convincing the referee your plan would work.In point of fact, I doubt very many walls were climbed in OD&D unless before the session the DM wrote up, "The north wall if closely inspected is rough enough that handholds can be used to climb it."  And again, the reason is that I knew players from that era (a cousin for example) and I also joined just after that era and I know how DMs tended to approach the problem.  For example, for wall climbing if a fighter proposed climbing a wall, the DM would probably point out the wall was of brick or closely fitted stone or carved stone and that would be it.  You couldn't climb it.  If a table argument erupted (because no rules!) it would focus on 'realism', and the DM would probably say something like, "You put on plate mail and a 40lb backpack and climb yonder cinderblock or brick wall, and I'll let your character climb this wall.  Climbing a brick/stone wall is not realistic."  In practice, the only walls that would have been climbed were ones the DM blessed as climbable for reasons of their own.</blockquote>

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