Handling Adventuring Tasks - Draft from my Houserule Doc

The following text is Open Game Content.


Adventuring Skills

Adventurers learn some commonly used skills, in the course of their chosen career. Certain classes have their own special rules for determining success in these instances, the Thief in particular. Unless otherwise stated, the following rules help determine a Characters chance of success at accomplishing typical adventuring tasks, when random determination is called for.

For example, a non-Thief character has found a Trap and is attempting to disarm it. After the Dungeon Master explains what the Character sees and has found out, the Player will then tell the DM, how he is going about removing or circumventing the Trap. If the Player’s plan is sound and there is no need for a random number to be introduced, then the Character will succeed. If the plan is a risky one and the DM decides that an appreciable chance for failure exists, then the Character’s Dungeoneering Roll will come into play. If the Player isn’t sure how he would go about disarming such a trap, or concocts a seriously flawed plan, then he will also be allowed to fall back on the Character’s Adventuring Skill. This may be particularly necessary, in cases of highly complex, specialized Traps.

Other types of Adventuring Skills, like those covered under Stealth, will always be determined by a percentile roll.

Dungeoneering: Dungeoneering includes Disarming Traps, Jimmying Locks and other common tasks involving mechanical aptitude. Characters begin with a base 10% chance, +/- their Dexterity Adjustment, to perform these actions. Racial modifiers may also come into play.

Stealth: Stealth includes Moving Silently and Hiding. Hiding is not quite the same thing as a Thief’s ability to Hide in Shadows, or a Druid’s ability to Hide in Natural Surroundings. Characters begin with a base 10% chance, +/- their Dexterity Adjustment, to perform these actions. Racial modifiers may also come into play. Stealth abilities may not be used, when wearing metal armor.

Perception: Perception helps determine a Character’s chance of detecting secret doors, detecting traps, being surprised, and noticing easy to miss details. The base chance for most of these actions is a 1 in d6. Surprise can be variable, but in situations where it comes into play, Characters, Monsters and NPC’s  will usually have a 2 in 1d6 chance of being surprised.

Expertise: At times, a Player will want his Character to perform an action, which is related to his class, but for which there is a chance of failure. For instance, a Player may need to know if his Magic-user Character is familiar with an obscure Arcane legend. In such instances, the Character’s base chance of success will be 10%, + 10% per every other Level of Experience, up to a maximum chance of 98%. In certain cases, Ability Score adjustments will also be factored in and with such a broad area of action, there are often other considerations, which may affect a Character’s chance of success.

Advancing Adventuring Skills

Expertise is handled as given in the description above, but a Characters abilities in Dungeoneering, Stealth and Perception, may also increase. 

At 2^nd Level and every third Level thereafter, a Character’s Dungeoneering or Stealth skill may be increased by 10%. The Player may, if desired, split this between the two Adventuring Skills, however he sees fit. After adjustments for Ability Scores and Racial Modifiers have been taken into account, a Character’s Dungeoneering or Stealth skills, may never go beyond 90% (this restriction is not placed on any of the abilities of the Thief Class. Likewise, a Ranger may increase his Stealth to 98%)

Instead of increasing Dungeoneering or Stealth, a Player may save up these points until +20% has been banked, and then use them to add a +1 bonus to Perception. Perception may never be increased beyond a 5 in 6, and regardless, the chance of being Surprised will never be less than 1 in 6 (though Dexterity Adjustments can effectively, further negate Surprise effects.)

If the Thief Class is not available in the Campaign, or if no Player elects to run a Thief, then the DM might allow Characters to add an additional +10% to their Dungeoneering and Stealth and to start with a Perception of 2 in 6.

End Open Game Content.

I wanted to add a Comment of mine, from below:

Thanks guys. A lot of the inspiration came from a Fight On! article by David Bowman, which discussed letting non-thieves advance in dungeon type tasks, using the d6 mechanic. I'm using a modification of the Thief by Al at Beyond the Black Gate, which also helped shape things. I split up his Thievery into Thievery and Sneakiness, which are more comprehensive versions of the Dungeoneering and Stealth, which other characters get. His Thief also has another skill set, the name of which escapes me, but it covers the same things as the Perception skill, listed above.

In Just Two Easy Steps I Can Destroy D&D!

Descending vs. Ascending AC

Yesterday, if you had asked me which one I prefer, I would have said "It's really six of one and half a dozen of the other." That it's the same thing, just moving the components of the equation around a little bit. If you put a gun to my head, I would have considered that ascending is a little easier to deal with for newbies, a fact offset, in my opinion, by the superior flavor of descending AC. I've never had any patience for the "decending is so hard and counter-intuitive" crowd. As a matter of fact...

Hold on a second.

My son will be seven in November. Granted, he's bright and familiar with the idea of character levels and hitting monsters, from playing video games. But, I just now went at taught him how to read an AD&D combat matrix. It took less than a minute for me to describe what a matrix was and for him to get the concept and tell me what a 5th level Fighter needed to hit AC0. When I told him to look at it kinda like a calendar, it clicked right in for him. He would have got it sooner, but he was trying to watch Jimmy Neutron, while daddy was distracting him with this little experiment.

Anyhoo, I've been planning on using Ascending AC, just because. I like experimenting. While putting everything else together, I was considering how I would handle multi-classing, deciding to use the AD&D rules for such characters. I then idly wondered how doing it 3e style, might work. I immediately didn't like the idea and here's why.

Now, with the AD&D xp progressions, the To Hit Bonus of a multi-class character might move too far ahead. At low to mid levels, the highest level of a MC character will usually only be 1 behind a single level character. Until the MC character hits its ceiling, that is. With LL/AEC, an MC's highest level will tend towards being 2 or 3 behind. That's from a fairly quick assessment, only checking F/MU's in the systems. All in all, it would require some tweaking, but doable. So, what bothered me about the idea?

You would have to change Saves around, of course. I don't like the 3e Saves. The older schema better emulates, in an abstract way certainly, the idea. Gary goes into Saves a little in the DMG and JB has a wonderful post, along the same lines. I like the Single Save w/class appropriate modifiers, from  Swords & Wizardry. Which is what I'm using. Now, if I shuffled it around as well, we could turn that roll into a  (+x) + d20 = 20 or better to save, type deal, also. Very close to 3e.

But, not really! 3e takes things in a different direction by making the DC variable. Instead of needing a 20, you might, at the beginning, only need a 14 or so. Some things would hit 18 to 20, for a while. Then, you get one of my biggest dislikes about 3e and you see it across the board. With Saves, Skill Checks, AC's and To Hits. The goal-post moves.

A bad-ass high level Fighter will make most of his Saves in  TSR D&D. That's because he's a high level bad-ass Fighter! In 3e, that's not the case. He'll often just end up just having to roll against a very high DC. The Breath Weapon from a Great Wyrm Red Dragon is DC 40. At 20th level, the Fighter's Reflex Save is +6. So much for being high level! He'll get some help from dex. Of course, he'll also be decked out like a Christmas Tree, in regards to Magic. So, he might have a chance to make the save. You know, depending upon what weird prestige classes, he's picked up.

A Thief puts his Skill Points into picking locks, only to find that he's then having to roll against DC 35's and up! The whole Powergaming thing, is certainly a part of the design. "Let's move the characters up in level real fast and blow everything out of proportion so they're not too powerful."

Ok, if said high level Thief was in Hermes' stronghold and trying to pick the lock on the god's vault, I would make things a bit tougher than usual. But that's a rare and special case. A high level Thief should be able to Ghost his way through the vast majority of shit, because he's a high level Thief and that's what they can do!

A Balor (it was a Proper Noun, Dammit!) in 3e, has an AC of 35. That's -15, to you and me. Sort of, anyway. If I recall correctly, a Red Great Wyrm has a To Hit of +44. A Pit Fiend has an AC of 40. No problem, just break out the Epic Level Handbook and toss out some +10 Magic Swords - That'll larn em'.

I know all this has been hashed out before, and I'm not trying to start any edition war shit. I like 3e. Just less and less as time goes by and I have no desire to DM it ever again.

Now, if I wanted to turn Saves upside down I could. I would just cap it at DC 20.  I would certainly cap Ascending AC at 30 (it starts at 10, for those who don't know) and probably never see anything that high. In running a very high level AD&D campaign, I don't think I ever used a -10 AC.

But, after thinking of all this today, that Gygaxian flavor is tasting better and better. I'll certainly still use the traditional Saves and I might just go with descending AC, instead. All in all, it's more pleasing in my eyes and the other direction reminds me of silly things..;)