Player's Options: Skills & Powers (a comeback?)

[Dedekind]

Whoa, all this talk of 5e made me suddenly remember the 2e book Player's Options: Skills & Powers. Did anyone else use it? It has some neat options that could be how rules modules would work in 5e.

I remember thinking (at the time) that splitting each ability score into two components was awesome. The base score was determined as usual (3d6, 4d6d1, etc.) but then you could assign sub-scores that were within two of the base score. For example, Strength had two components, Stamina and Muscle. A high Stamina character could carry a lot of things. A high Muscle character could hit more often and do more damage. It was always a trade-off though; being higher Muscle meant being lower Stamina. Guess how many characters were high Stamina. (Answer: None.)

Edit: By the way, splitting skills was not awesome. It was too complicated and led to broken characters.

S&P also dropped spell progression in favor of spell points. Each character level, a wizard got X spell points. A spell at each spell level was worth so many points. You could memorize whatever spells you wanted from whatever levels as long as you didn't exceed all your spell points. So instead, of 1 third level spell, 2 second, and 4 first, you could have 2 thirds, 1 second, and 1 first.

Did anybody else use it? Do you think we'll see any of that as rules modules in 5e?

 

[the Jester]

Whoa, all this talk of 5e made me suddenly remember the 2e book Player's Options: Skills & Powers. Did anyone else use it? It has some neat options that could be how rules modules would work in 5e.

Oh God. Let's hope not. PO: S&P might well have been the most broken D&D book ever released.

I remember thinking (at the time) that splitting each ability score into two components was awesome. The base score was determined as usual (3d6, 4d6d1, etc.) but then you could assign sub-scores that were within two of the base score. For example, Strength had two components, Stamina and Muscle. A high Stamina character could carry a lot of things. A high Muscle character could hit more often and do more damage. It was always a trade-off though; being higher Muscle meant being lower Stamina. Guess how many characters were high Stamina. (Answer: None.)

Which is why what you call "awesome" I call "completely broken"- it was a powergamer's wet dream. Basically, +2 to whatever features of your stats you valued and -2 to the stuff you didn't care about.

The fact is, under S&P you could easily build a cleric with the combat power and stats of a fighter, cleric and wizard spells and cleric-fast advancement. There was not even a nod towards balance in that whole book. It's one of the only pieces of 2e that I completely banned once I got a handle on just how disastrously poorly-thought-out it was.

Let's not have any tricks where you can pick up major advantages with no cost ("no, my Str/Muscle is 20, my Str/Stamina is 16").

Skills & Powers goes on my Shelf of Shame alongside gems like the early DragonLance modules, Sword & Fist, the 2e DMG and the Complete Book of Elves. If I owned a copy of Synnibar, I'd be more likely to use it than I would be to use anything, anything at all, out of Skills & Powers again.

Heck, I'm probably slightly more likely to play FATAL than to use S&P for anything!

 

[Dedekind]

Oh God. Let's hope not. PO: S&P might well have been the most broken D&D book ever released.

Which is why what you call "awesome" I call "completely broken"- it was a powergamer's wet dream. Basically, +2 to whatever features of your stats you valued and -2 to the stuff you didn't care about.
...
<snip>

I added that right after I posted and probably ninja-edited you. I do agree it produced broken characters . Really, really broken characters.

But the spell point system was neat (and broken). And the character point pools added a lot of flavor (and broke everything). The weapon specialization stuff was similar to the feat progression in 3e and added a lot of flavor for fighters (and maybe broke them).

I guess my point is that it added a lot of customization that I could see as rules modules in 5e.

 

[the Jester]

I am totally for customization, but I'd point at 3e as the zenith of pc customization to date, rather than PO.

 

[Stormonu]

I used sections of the Combat & Tactics book, but skipped over the Skills & Powers book entirely - one look at the poorly balanced character point-buy options and I knew better than to let it into any game I was handling.

I must have been one of the few DMs who liked all the 2E Complete books (with the exception of the Cleric book). The only thing about Complete Elf I didn't like was the introduction of the 4-hour meditation instead of sleep BS.

 

[aurance]

We used it, and loved it. Yes, it could be horribly abused and needed some supervision, but it expanded character options to whole new levels. With such supervision it certainly didn't break any of our games.

 

[pming]

Hiya.

I used the S&P/C&T/S&M/HLH series for a Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign I did about 10 years ago. I ran a slightly modified version of the Night Below boxed set.

I 'expanded' the choices in those books to allow someone to take something from other classes, at a slightly increased CP cost. The end result? Pretty cool and interesting characters. The only big problem we had was my brothers ex-slave gladiator who was pretty much hell-on-sandles in battle, but useless in pretty much every other situation. We worked with it, though, and overall the campaign was a lot of fun.

The biggest complaints I hear about those books isn't really a problem with the books/rules, but with the people using them. If you have "immature" players or players who are interested in "winning" a RPG (...), it *will suck donkey snacks*! If you have "mature" players or players who are interested in making interesting characters with their own skills, expertise, pitfalls and failings, it will likely be a *very* enjoyable experience.

What I've learned over the decades of playing these silly RPG's is that balanced rules, characters, and all that other stuff that make up an RPG isn't really important at all if you have good players...and that the most balanced rules in the world won't make a lick of difference if you have a bunch of a-holes sitting at the table.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[trancejeremy]

Agreed - unfortunately, modern RPGs are designed for bad players and bad GMs, so "balance" is the main point of the design, which IMHO, ends up sucking the flavor out of the game.

And even then, those problem players will always find a way to game the system (as no system is perfect), so basically you are just hurting the good players who want to make interesting characters...

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Actually, spell points were in spells&magic...

the book was broken, imbalanced and some pieces were not thought out that well...
but after trying all those options we found a subset that really improved our play experience and was truly fun.
We found things for fighters, clerics, and mages alike... skills were really cool (it was a bit like 3.x feats and skills mixed together) Spell points were great. Weapon specializations and styles were really good.
Also beeing able to customize your race... especially the human brought a lot of good things to the table.

 

[Dedekind]

I used sections of the Combat & Tactics book, but skipped over the Skills & Powers book entirely - one look at the poorly balanced character point-buy options and I knew better than to let it into any game I was handling.

I forgot about C&T. Totally agree on the balance of S&P.

Actually, spell points were in spells&magic...

the book was broken, imbalanced and some pieces were not thought out that well...
but after trying all those options we found a subset that really improved our play experience and was truly fun.
We found things for fighters, clerics, and mages alike... skills were really cool (it was a bit like 3.x feats and skills mixed together) Spell points were great. Weapon specializations and styles were really good.
Also beeing able to customize your race... especially the human brought a lot of good things to the table.

I like the character points at each level and how you could go "buy" new attributes that had different values. There were some abilities that you had to "save up" to get and that creates a neat trade-off after a level-up.

The race customization was very cool. 4e took some of that idea, but the number of options are very small. I could totally see a rules module for 5e that implemented a racial point system as in S&P.