Mike Mearls is talking about skills. His brief thoughts prompted a rather lengthy train of thoughts from me.

There are basically two types of utility that can be gained from a skill system:

At one extreme, you give a unified mechanic for setting difficulty levels and skill checks. This system is extremely simple to use because all a GM has to do is decide how difficult he wants a task to be (or thinks a task should be). It gives complete flexibility, but no support. For some people this is great: The GM is capable of making consistent, on-the-fly decisions that are satisfying for his players and the rules are extremely easy to learn and remember.

By adding more complexity to the system, you can offer more support to the GM in setting difficulty levels. This is what the core rulebooks do: For any given skill, there are specific guidelines for how difficult various tasks are. For some people this is great because it hard codes a consistency into the system: Players are able to anticipate how hard a task is going to be and the difficulty of a task will remain consistent from one session to the next and even from one group to the next.

(What I like about this approach in the core rulebooks is that you ALSO have a unified mechanic for determining DCs: It’s the best of both worlds. If you want or need the support of the specific guidelines, they’re there for you. If you don’t then you can just ignore them.)

By adding complexity to the system, you can also make using skills either more interesting or more precise. Examples of this include the Craft skill (which already includes a mini-mechanical system for more precisely handling the crafting of items), but could also include stunt systems designed to let you use skills in more complicated and inter-related ways.

Thus, when Mearls says: “Adding more rules to the D&D skill system […] doesn’t make it more interesting. It just bloats the system.” I don’t follow the logic. Certainly adding more rules CAN be nothing more than bloat, but they don’t NEED to be nothing more than bloat.

For example, let’s take a non-RPG example in an attempt to weed out people’s biases. We could talk about Monopoly and Candyland and Chutes & Ladders, for example: Sure, you can strip out all the rules about collecting rents and buying properties from Monopoly. Similarly, you can strip out all the rules about Rainbow Trails and Lollipop Woods from Candyland. But, in either case, you’ve simply stripped the game down to a mechanic of: “Use randomizer. Move piece around board.”

Similarly, you could remove all the rules for combining cards into more powerful hands in Poker, and thus boil the game down to “high card wins”.

Now, there are lots of people who don’t play RPGs in order to experience a game which is MECHANICALLY interesting. They don’t want interesting gameplay from the system, they just want a mechanical structure on which to hang their storytelling and roleplaying. That’s why lots of people want nothing more than a simple, unified mechanic with no bells or whistles: Roll a die, add a modifier, compare to a DC.

For people who want a mechanically interesting game, however, that simplicity is boring. You need more rules in order to make the mechanics interesting — in order to make Monopoly a different game from Chutes & Ladders.

Now, certainly, that doesn’t mean that “more rules = more fun”. For example, Monopoly probably wouldn’t benefit from a system in which you had to re-calculate variable interest rates for loans and mortgages, with those variable interest rates also impacting the rental rates for various properties.

But if you’ve got a stunt system in D&D which does nothing except “bloat the system”, then what you’ve got is a very poorly designed stunt system. Which is why it’s fairly shocking to hear Mearls, the designer of very good stunt systems (IMO), repudiating them as bloated design.

Also, Mearls’ math is wrong. In a system in which skill checks are 1d20 + ability score vs. DC, he claims that: “The (DC – the ability score + 1) times 5 is the chance of success.” It’s not. Take a DC 10 task attempted by someone with an ability score of 10, for example. Mearls claims that the chance of success is 5% (10 – 10 + 1 = 1 x 5 = 5%). It’s not, it’s actually 105%.

(The DC is 10. Your check is d20 + 10. Even with a roll of 1, your result is 11 and you succeed at the check.)

Mearls actually meant that the chance is (DC + the ability score + 1) times 5 is the chance of success.

Adding further perplexity is the fact that Mearls talks about this in connection to a house rule which is primarily about how skills are selected at character creation/advancement, rather than about how DCs are calculated.

Which leads to the other problem with Mearls’ system: There’s no mechanic for advancing skills. Since the DM is apparently supposed to just set a difficulty based on the percentage chance of success he wants a character to have, this isn’t a big deal… except when it comes to opposed checks.

So, boiling it down, I feel there are two points trying to be made here:

1. It would be nice if you didn’t have to spend skill points. Particularly from the POV of GM prep, having to spend all those points is time-consuming.

2. If you just want a barebones mechanic for determining success or failure, it would be nice not to have all these other rules and guidelines “bloating” the system for you.

Both strong points, but Mearls’ suggested solution is over-wrought and ill-thought, IMO. Here’s an easier solution:

SUPER SIMPLE SKILL SYSTEM

1. Characters have a skill bonus equal to “class skill max ranks”. Thus, a 3rd level character has a skill bonus of +6.

2. Characters select a number of skills equal to their class’ skill points per level + their Intelligence modifier (minimum 1).

3. Skill checks are d20 + ability modifier + skill bonus.

4. Ignore all of the suggested DCs in the Skills chapter. For an average person the task is:

DC 0: Automatic
DC 5: Simplistic
DC 10: Easy
DC 15: Average
DC 20: Difficult
DC 25: Very Difficult
DC 30: Almost Impossible
DC 40: Impossible

There you go. For prepping characters, all you’ve got to worry about is selecting which skills they have. For resolving an action, the DM just picks the DC he feels is appropriate. Plus, the system is completely compatible with the existing rules.

(Note: This system explicitly does not use the class/cross-class distinction between skills. It also ignores synergy bonuses, although you can toss those back into the mix on a check-by-check basis if you like.)

I’ve spent most of my free time for the past two weeks prepping what I hope will turn out to be a really fantastic D&D campaign. It started life as an Order of the Stick-inspired desire to do some old school dungeon-crawling. I’ve been aching to return to Rappan Athuk, one of the greatest dungeons ever designed, ever since I ran a very successful one-on-one session with my good friend Dave Blackmer a couple years back. So I picked up my Rappan Athuk modules and started prepping a barebones setting to drop the dungeon into.

As  I worked, though, it didn’t take long for my quick, barebones preparation to become increasingly elaborate and detailed. In addition to a plethora of original work, the campaign now includes material incorporated from The Crucible of Freya, The Vault of Larin Karr, The Tomb of Abysthor, Demons and Devils, Demon God’s Fane, Beyond the Veil, and more. Putting the best of Necromancer Games and Monte Cook together in one room has created a truly remarkable synergy that’s really gotten my own creative juices flowing.

In a couple of days I’m hoping to have a new sub-level for Rappan Athuk that I’ve prepped converted into a “suitable for general comprehension” format so that I can share it here. But I’m in a roleplaying mood, so I thought I’d share something else with you.

On Halloween this year, Wizards of the Coast posted Bruce Cordell’s v3.5 conversion of Gygax’s classic Tomb of Horrors. For those of you unfamiliar with the Tomb, the module was first released in 1978 as one of the first modules available for the AD&D game, after being used for the Official D&D tournament held at the very first Origins convention. At the time it was a fairly innovative product: In addition to the “map and key” presentation which was standard for the time, Tomb of Horrors also came with a pamphlet of forty illustrations, each presenting some part of the module which could be shown to the players at the appropriate time.

But it wasn’t the illustrations which made the Tomb a classic: It was the deathtraps. No module has left more characters cowering in terror, unable to open the next door out of sheer fear of the doom that surely awaits them, than the Tomb of Horrors.

A couple of years ago I did my own v3.5 conversion of the infamous Tomb. My version went a bit further than Cordell’s has, largely because there is a very significant and very legitimate critique of the Tomb: There are many places where the module just doesn’t play fair. The Tomb is more effective if the players can look back and regret the choices they made because they could have made a different choice. The Tomb as written, unfortunately, features many junctions where death is simply capricious. Opening a random door with an undetectable and inescapable death trap isn’t as much fun as opening a door that triggers a trap you can desperately attempt to escape. My version of the module doesn’t make things any easier (in fact, it often makes it more difficult) — but it does play fair. So that, when death comes, the players will feel terror, not resentment.

In my version I also focused the module on its trademark traps: Combat, already rare in the original Tomb, is rarer still. And always a result of a trap or trap-mentality. Most importantly, I include boxed text — making it very easy to make sure you’re giving precisely the right information about each area to the PCs (and no more).

For the past couple of years, I sporadically tried to get various people interested in publishing an updated version of the Tomb. There didn’t seem to be any interest. So I’m delighted that Cordell’s version has seen the light of day. Even if I’m secretly bitter and resentful that it wasn’t mine. (Okay, there’s not really any bitter resentment. A little secret disappointment, perhaps.)

But rather than letting my version of the Tomb molder on my hard drive, I’m going to share it with you here:

The Tomb of Horrors (RTF)
Map 1
Map 2
Map 3
Map 4
Map 5
Map 6
Zip File (All of the Above)

You’ll also want to grab either the original module or Return to the Tomb of Horrors (which includes a facsimile of the original module) for the original handouts. These handouts can also be found in the Bruce Cordell version, interspersed throughout the text.

If you end up running my version, I’d be very interested in hearing how it went. This adventure can be a lot of fun when used a one-shot. I’ll frequently pull it out if some of my players can’t show up for the game.

To give you some idea of what you’ll find inside, let me present a sample area from the module:

AREA 7 – THE FORSAKEN PRISON

This chamber is a 15’ by 15’ shaft 100’ deep, carved out of solid granite. Characters teleporting to this area from the Arch of Mist (Area 5) materialize at the top of the shaft and automatically plummet to the bottom of the shaft, taking 10d6 points of falling damage.

[[HANDOUT #9]]

FIRST LEVER: At the bottom of the shaft is a lever built into the wall. The lever is marked with Acererak’s sigil. Pulling the lever causes the floor – which is a trap door – to drop away, opening up another 100’ shaft. Characters falling down the second shaft take 10d6 points of falling damage. The character who pulled the lever may make a Reflex saving throw (DC 15) to grab onto the lever, rather than falling down the pit.

TRAP DOOR: The trap door here is illusion protected and also requires a Search check (DC 25) to detect. There is no way to determine that the lever is the triggering mechanism, but the trap door itself can be prevented from opening with a successful Disable Device check (DC 25). After 1d10 rounds, the trap door resets itself and can only be opened by pulling the first lever (which is now on the other side of the trap door of solid stone).

SECOND LEVER: At the bottom of the second shaft is another lever built into the wall. This lever – in all ways – appears to be identical to the first lever above. Pulling this lever, however, opens a secret door in the ceiling of the shaft leading to a crawl space (see below).

FLOOR: The floor of the second shaft is also a trap door, illusion protected and requiring a Search check (DC 25) to detect. And there is also another 100’ shaft below this trap door. But there is not, in fact, any triggering mechanism which opens this trap door.

WALLS: The walls are carved straight out of the rock face and smoothed. Scaling them requires a Climb check (DC 30).

SECRET DOOR: To find the secret door in the ceiling of the shaft before opening it requires a Search check (DC 25). The door is a solid slab of granite about 2’ thick (360 hp, hardness 8) and can only be opened by pulling the second lever. After 1d10 rounds, the secret door will close itself and can only be opened again by pulling the second lever.

CRAWL SPACE: The crawl space beyond the secret door is very narrow. See Area 3 for a complete description.