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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5369917" data-attributes="member: 4937">One of the things about OD&D is that is particularly prone to the creation of a 'common law' approach to the game rules.  It's rules are such that there is no Constitution covering the basics of governing the game.  Most player propostions fall firmly into areas outside the rules.  What tends to happen is that a group that plays together for a long time creates a body of table rules which, though they haven't been formalized or written down, nonetheless have the same force of law as written rules.  Once a DM rules in a particular way on a subject, then the players have the expectation that he'll rule again in identical situations in the same fashion, and once a DM has ruled in a particular way on some subject it's easier to resolve the situation in the same manner rather than inventing a new way.   So the group as a whole becomes bound by an acknowledged or unacknowledge type of 'stare decisis' and eventually this dominates table play far beyond the actual written rules.For example, OD&D has almost no rules regarding the use of skills in the game.  Every OD&D through 1e AD&D table ends up incorporating some set of unwritten rules for how skill challenges are handled, and how the fortune, risk, or randomness to any such proposition is handled.   Effectively, each group grows their own informal skill system.  Some of these skill systems are quite elaborate and their users could with thought formalize them.  Others are less obvious and less susceptible to easy analysis, but nonetheless are still rules systems for handling skills.For example, a table might informally adopt a 'secondary background' for each character.  The character then gets what is officially a non-delimited and non-enumerated list of 'nonweapon proficiencies' based on this list.   Of course, in point of fact, some informal rule and social agreement actually governs how extensive the list of skills you are allowed to claim actually is, and so in fact the list is delimited and could be post-hoc enumerated.  That's actually the critical difference between a skill system like 3e and what you might describe as OD&D's skill system.  A 3rd edition DM or player is uncomfortable unless he knows ahead of time what he is allowed to do and how well he can do it.  But based on their experience, an OD&D player is uncomfortable with a clearly delimited list because he fears, somewhat correctly, that formalized skill systems are hard to balance and tend to favor narrow specialization over broad base knowledge.  In effect, what the OD&D player says is, "I trust my judge to be fair better than I trust written law."  But, and this is my point, the OD&D in effect - though it isn't on his character sheet - has some sort of skill list that grows over time and is based on background and experience and which is designed to be fair to all the other players and not let the cardinal rule of roleplaying - "You can't be good at everything" - be broken.  And if the OD&D player allowed it, it could be formalized.  But, of course we know that the fear of formal rules will keep that group firmly in the land of common law and adjudication and to a certain extent in the self-delusion that they don't have formal rules.  They just aren't formal rules in the sense we are used to thinking about, but every British subject of the Crown for example knows the reality and power of Common Law.</blockquote>

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