When I was still interested in contemporary D&D, I noticed that there are only a few skills that are not necessarily equivalent to ability scores.
- Nature.
- Arcana.
- History.
- Medicine.
- Sleight of Hand.
- Perception? (mentioned here).
Forget Sleight of Hand for now; an agile PC picking pockets or opening locks is a strong archetype, despite the fact these are completely different skills in reality.
An indeed, in AD&D a thief with high Dex gets some bonuses to both picking pockets and locks.
Nature would include things like foraging, hunting, orienting, and tracking. In old school D&D, the first three are just X-in-chances, unrelated to ability scores (or class, level, etc.). AD&D adds tracking to rangers, but not much else.
Perception would include things like hear noise and finding traps. Modern D&D ties this to Wisdom, but there is no reason to think a wise cleric is more perceptive than a quick-thinking warrior or a sly thief.
The AD&D thief gets no Dex (or Wis) bonus to hear noise, but curiously gets a Dex bonus to find traps... A mistake, IMO.
Then there is Arcana and Medicine. These are not skills in B/X or AD&D - they are just things the mage and cleric are supposed to do (although using spells instead of skills).
Finally, there is no skill for lore - players discover that by themselves, not characters.
I don't have much of a conclusion here. Except that, maybe, some skills work nicely with ability scores, while others could simply IGNORE ability scores.
In a modern game, having two types of skills would look strange - in contemporary D&D, for example, basically ALL d20 rolls include some ability score (attacks, saves, checks/skills). I'm not sure I'd do it myself. But it is something to consider, as it seems to work quite well in old-school D&D.
Edition-neutral comment. My thought regarding skills has been that characters generally get better at their abilities as they increase in level. At its most basic implementation, that's not true of skills. And basing a roll off a characteristic score alone means that a 1st level PC and a 10th level are not really different. Maybe if characteristic-based skill rolls also included a level-based bonus...
ReplyDeleteThis is the big question: should "challenges" be affected by abilities, classes, or both? I'd say 'both" most of the times.
Delete5e may be right to make it about 50-50 (ability bonus and proficiency).
In 5E they allow the DM to use a different attribute than the expected one for some tests. It should be easy enough to have some tests with no attribute bonus at all.
ReplyDeleteCould be a good idea, especially for perception. Maybe nature too, if you're a barbarian with negative INT. And medicine so the cleric is as good as the mage etc.
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