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<blockquote data-quote="teitan" data-source="post: 8201398" data-attributes="member: 3457">i don’t know if I am alone but to me, skill systems kind of ruined D&amp;D/AD&amp;D. It was all exciting at first to pick them but the way they conflicted with thief abilities was unfair to thieves, extrapolating the thief system just made it a mess like Palladium.&nbsp; Just using the secondary skill system was broad enough to imply a series of broad base skills for a PC to work from in down time and could also help adjudicate in adventuring environments with enough granularity to keep a game flowing without turning social encounters into dice chucking affairs rather than role playing opportunities.the alignment expansion I think is where a sea change occurred. While Law and Chaos were more cosmic forces than hard moralities before, tacking on good and evil kind of encoded a morality into it as opposed to the more cosmic conflict it seemed to represent in the Gygaxian dialect. The alignment languages also made sense as Law, Chaos because they were more like what we would call Celestial or Abyssal and the like. This is why Neutrality was so hard to wrap your head around because it represented a cosmic balance because alignments were a specific choice with good or evil being more indicative of morality. So the Lawful Good Paladin was one, choosing to side with the cosmic forces represented by Law and then was morally good. It really shouldn’t have anything to do with observing the “law of the land” that seems a common interpretation extrapolated from later materials. Law vs Chaos was a literal cosmic conflict and the Neutral forces were choosing to keep both in check. It’s grainy when the good and evil axis are juxtaposed on the morality axis with neutrality where Chaotic Neutral and Lawful Neutral just seem out of place.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="teitan, post: 8201398, member: 3457"] i don’t know if I am alone but to me, skill systems kind of ruined D&D/AD&D. It was all exciting at first to pick them but the way they conflicted with thief abilities was unfair to thieves, extrapolating the thief system just made it a mess like Palladium. Just using the secondary skill system was broad enough to imply a series of broad base skills for a PC to work from in down time and could also help adjudicate in adventuring environments with enough granularity to keep a game flowing without turning social encounters into dice chucking affairs rather than role playing opportunities. the alignment expansion I think is where a sea change occurred. While Law and Chaos were more cosmic forces than hard moralities before, tacking on good and evil kind of encoded a morality into it as opposed to the more cosmic conflict it seemed to represent in the Gygaxian dialect. The alignment languages also made sense as Law, Chaos because they were more like what we would call Celestial or Abyssal and the like. This is why Neutrality was so hard to wrap your head around because it represented a cosmic balance because alignments were a specific choice with good or evil being more indicative of morality. So the Lawful Good Paladin was one, choosing to side with the cosmic forces represented by Law and then was morally good. It really shouldn’t have anything to do with observing the “law of the land” that seems a common interpretation extrapolated from later materials. Law vs Chaos was a literal cosmic conflict and the Neutral forces were choosing to keep both in check. It’s grainy when the good and evil axis are juxtaposed on the morality axis with neutrality where Chaotic Neutral and Lawful Neutral just seem out of place. [/QUOTE]

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