The Death of the Old School—Skill Systems
More relevant for our purposes than
Unearthed Arcana is the other hardback rules volume of 1985:
Oriental Adventures (OA). Following close on their heels was the 1986 duo of the
Dungeoneer’s and
Wilderness Survival Guides. Collectively, the effect of the sudden appearance of these four new rules-laden hardbacks six years after the last official AD&D rules release, plus the clear shift in module design in 1984 and
Dragon’s insistence that all material going forward would use the UA rules when relevant,[2] eventually led players to refer to this late period of 1st edition’s life as 1.5 edition (or 1.5e).[3] A major element of this new quasi-edition was that the three non-UA books all fielded D&D’s first (non-thief) skill system: the non-weapon proficiency (NWP) rules.[4]
System-wide skill systems (as opposed to those associated with a single class, like skills for the thief, which debuted in 1975's Supplement I: Greyhawk) were an early game design innovation. They first showed up in 1976 in FGU's Bunnies & Burrows game, but are better known to most through their implementation in Chaosium's popular BRP rules system, starting in 1978 with RuneQuest. Skill systems have some core downsides. They add more rules to the game, imposing a comprehension tax that makes it take longer to learn (and to leaf through the book during the game when you're in search of a rule). And, as with any character option added, they make characters take longer to create, as players want to go through everything available and make informed choices. All the same, there are numerous games that utilize skills well, and if done well they can provide a useful means of differentiating characters and defining their capabilities: this is not an article claiming that there is no role in game design for skill systems.
But to understand why they matter from a specifically old-school perspective, it's important to realize that, when a player wanted to do most anything in the game prior to this point, they usually had to negotiate with the DM for how to do it: was it possible, if so what would it entail, how long would it take (for time was a vital currency in old-school play) and finally, how would it be resolved mechanically (e.g. roll 1D6, 2D6, 1D20; Gygax favoured percentile). A player would a) in general have to describe what they were doing (even if often this was just a very brief description), and b) tend to leave things that were assumed to be outside their grasp to NPC specialists (“why would I know anything about alchemy?”). Tasks were arbitrated on the fly by the DM, with those that came up often enough typically given answers that progressed to the status of house rule. Each group could handle things in their own preferred fashion. With skill lists, even if optional, players tend to look to these as official implementations and want to use them in that fashion, greatly reducing the scope of rulings.
Skills also almost inevitably shift the playstyle to what one might call button-based gameplay. Players no longer feel the need to describe what they’re doing, because the relevant skill check (or its kissing cousin, the attribute check) allows a shortcut. To pick one example, every old-school ruleset back to OD&D had a basic X-in-1D6 roll search method for secret doors, but this existed side by side with a narrative approach to actually finding the door that could entirely obviate the need for a roll; see p. 13 of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures and pp. 97 and 99 of the 1st edition DMG for a good example. As time went on, the roll aspect came further to the fore, while the narrative angle retreated to the background. B/X was happy to run with a declaration of intent followed by a roll (p. B21 and B60), as was Mentzer, largely ignoring the narrative element. Eventually we wound up with a universal application of “I make a Search check”, with the narrative element abandoned entirely.[5] This broad tendency is so powerful that even with there being a caveat right in the rules of “X roll shouldn’t take the place of roleplaying or logic”, you still have people just shortcutting to rolls, because people are naturally lazy.[6] To return to the question I opened with, "what sort of gameplay does this rule create?" Here we see a mechanic slowly but surely changing the face of play.
[2] “The Transition Starts Now,” Dragon #99 (July 1985).
[3] The first reference to 1.5e I can find is from 1995, in the rec.games.frp.dnd usenet group.
[4] I'm not including the 1st edition DMG's Secondary Skill system here. This system, which gave a character a pre-adventuring career (e.g. farming, sailor, teamster, hunter, trapper), and a broad knowledge base derived from this, featured no rolls or special abilities. It was "up to the DM to create and/or adjudicate situations in which these skills are used or useful to the player character." This system would be featured as an option in 2nd edition as well, alongside the NWP system.
[5] The common OSR approach to secret doors, as epitomized in Matt Finch's influential
A Quick Primer, largely follows the AD&D and earlier approach, but as we have seen, it was not the only method used in old-school play and there has been some pushback against Finch's depiction as overly reductive or even anachronistic. See
this Alexandrian article for a 2009 example of such.
[6] Another good example of such includes the D&D/AD&D thief, whose skill-based set of abilities lent itself well to button-based gameplay ("I search for traps"—*rolls*). See also
this article on "hidden skills" in B/X, and
Grognardia's overview of the thief's role in D&D. At the same time, for those who find the traditional OSR interrogative approach to be an exercise in
pixelbitching, cutting to the chase with a simple mechanical solution can be very freeing. Similarly, placing the burden of estimating risk vs reward and the mechanical execution thereof on DMs relied on the DM being good at doing that on the fly, and many were not, easily leading to frustrated players and relief at having something codified by professionals (though one look at the procedures in the
Survival Guides made it clear that professionals did not always get it right). Again, we’re largely speaking of how approaches can differ and change, rather than always contrasting right vs. wrong.
