Level of Play

Recently Rich and I talked some about how Dungeons and Dragons has changed since we began gaming. His first experience with D&D was the red box, D&D basic. He spent a lot of time reading over it before he actually played. My experience with D&D was with playing AD&D 1st edition.

In our discussion we mentioned how non-weapon proficiences began at the end of the 1st edition AD&D run with Oriental adventures and such. Before that, there were weapon proficiences and if a character used a weapon for which he was not proficient there would be a penalty to hit. However, there was also an often overlooked section of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for secondary skills. The premise was that the character’s class took up almost all of her time so that she didn’t have time to become much else. However, there was a table of secondary skills that would represent what the character was studying to be before becoming an adventurer.

“When a  player character selects a class, this profession is assumed to be that which the character has been following previously, virtually to the exclusion of all other activities. Thus the particular individual is at 1st level of ability. However, some minor knowledge of certain mundane skills might belong to the player character — Information and training from early years or incidentally picked up while the individual was in apprenticeship learning his or her primary professional skills of clericism, fighting, etc. If your particular campaign is aimed at a level of play where secondary skills can be taken into account, then use the the table below [ . . . ] “

A level of play to include secondary skills is something that I never encountered in my experience in 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons. The whole of my experience at that tie was dungeon crawls. I think a few times we actually rolled on the chart for secondary skills but they never came into play. Maybe this was due as much to the dungeon crawl setting – it’s not easy to find a way to bring up teamster skills in a catacomb – as it was to the lack of definative mechanics.

When secodnary skillls are used, it is up to the Dm to create and/or adjudicate situations in which these skills are used or useful to the player character. As a general rule, having a skill will give the character the ability to determine the general  worth and soundness of an item, the ability to find  food, make small repairs, or actually construct 9crude) items. For example, an individual with with armorer skill could tell the quality of normal armor, repair chain links, or perhaps fashion certain weapons. To determine the extent of knowledge  in quetsion, simply assume  the role of one of these skills, one that you a little something about, and deterimine what could be done with this knoweldge. Use this as a scale to weigh the relative ability with secodnary skills.

What the rules suggest is that the DM be the sole arbitor of when the skills are useful and how the skills are useful based on the knowledge that the DM has of some skill of their own. At least I think that is what is meant by the somewhat cryptic assume the role of these skills. I certainly hope the intent was not for the DM to role play being a skill and then use to determine what other skills can be useful for.

In a game where there are so many numeric rules and dice rolls it does seem odd to me that secondary skills were left to no mechanical process to adjudicate success. Howeve,r it seems that it would be some while before games were written that would have a true skill system other than combat. And even those, such as GURPS, would go for exchaustive lists of skills. It would be some time before something like Dogs would come out where rather than a list of skills you could have traits that would be return to the fuzziness of such a skill system.

From a list of occupations, to exhaustive lists of skills, to descriptive traits seems to nearly be something going full circle.  This is not to say that 1st edition AD&D was a story game… but given the right DM with the right tools it definately, I think, could have been the way that some people could have played it. If nothing else it seems like a near miss, place the skills under the adjudication of the players and let them think up descriptors.

Robert Frost’s The Road Less Travelled springs to mind. What if AD&D would have taken that less travelled road? Well, in part it did. It deviated from the tabltop wargames of the time. It was part of the evolutionary process of a unit to a single character. But, AD&D was what it was. It still clung to being a combat simulator first and foremost.  Besides, while The Road Less Travelled is a good poem, it is a most misunderstood poem. The two roads in the poem are the same and the narrative voice is saying, wrongly, in hindsight that the choice made such a difference.

Just contrast  ”And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black” verse the line “I took the one less traveled by” to see they were similar and not so different. I enjoyed AD&D a lot when I was learning how to role play.  i still find it a lot of fun to talk about – all the different versions. However, when it comes to playing I am more interested in both indy press trad games and story games.  Canon Puncture is, for me, about exploring these alternate games . In them I find a level of play that is exciting  again.

-Norwood