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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9876597" data-attributes="member: 7052563">Discussions about skill systems often lead to debates about player skill vs. character skill, but they also raise questions about what skilled play consists of anyway.  Skilled play might be creative engagement with the objects the GM has placed in a location, but players might well be justified in their paranoia about touching unknown stuff.  Is skilled play dungeon crawling like it’s 1979, poking every square inch of each level with a pointèd stick, I mean, ten foot pole?  IIRC Gary Gygax ranted about that sort of thing in the 1E DMG, and invented monsters like Ear Seekers and Mimics in order to punish over-cautious play, but gonzo deathtrap dungeons taught us that too much caution was never enough.  In junior high we “beat” S1 Tomb of Horrors and I6 Ravenloft by treating them as something akin to escape rooms, and the goal was to get out ASAP without touching anything that would get everybody killed.  Of course we missed most of the content that way, but since most of the content was trying to kill us, we may well ask why we wanted to play those modules in the first place... <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤔" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f914.png" title="Thinking face    :thinking:" data-shortname=":thinking:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Dwarves and Elves both had passive sensing abilities as far back as the early editions, so did skilled play involve making sure there was at least one of each in your party?  Passive perception is not the most exciting game mechanic ever, but it sure came in handy when secret doors might be sprinkled in at random.  These would block access to at least one room, or even whole areas of the dungeon, so they had to be found somehow.  Sometimes people do just get lucky and notice something others do not, especially because fortune favors the prepared mind.What might happen if passive perception became less necessary, because secret doors worked the same way traps work in some OSR games?  They would mostly appear in logical places the players might expect, so the goal would be to figure them out rather than to find them.  In LOTR Gandalf knows for a fact that there is a secret door into Moria, so the challenge is to use his knowledge to guess how they hid it.  But interesting challenges like that require a fair amount of prep work for the GM.  I don’t have a perfect solution, but then again I tend to like skill systems anyway, and usually prefer rules over rulings if a particular situation that requires one or the other is going to occur regularly.  I like to have codified rules for skills that let the players strategize a bit based on a realistic assessment of the odds, rather than trying to guess what the right answer is based on the psychology and tastes of their GM.  But there is always a risk of adding too much crunch that way.</blockquote>

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