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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5312453" data-attributes="member: 3887">The only problem w/NWP's was the name. It's clunky, though almost charmingly so, kinda like the names of the planes on the Great Wheel. What's wrong with calling them 'skills'?I agree w/eyebeams... they worked fine for a game that didn't assume everyone in the world has class levels. What they lacked in granularity or, ahem, realism, they made up for in pure, simple playability. NWP's were fine for situations where the player describing the action they were attempting wasn't practical. Can you describe riding a horse well? -- or, more to the point, could most DM's tell if the player described riding well, umm, well? (I couldn't). This points to an often overlooked problem with the 'just describe what your character is doing' school of task resolution -- it's built around the assumption the DM knows how the particular task is done and therefore can adjudicate it without resorting to pulling arbitrary target numbers out of their butts (not that there's anything, at all, wrong with that).I liked NWP's so much I bolted on all kinds of extra benefits for taking multiple levels of certain ones. Also, my admittedly foggy memory was that NWP's first appeared in AD&D supplements; Wilderness Survival, Dungeon Survival, and OA. They were moved to the PHB in 2e, but still presented as optional.</blockquote>