Hex Crawl 23 # 62: Fifth Edition's Role Dilution

Five hexes north of Alakran.

Are there tumbleweeds? There are if you want them to be, in this pan-continental desert biome. And here they are tumbling across this blank stretch of dry plain, tumbling right past the soapbox from which I continue my ranting about running 5th edition D&D in the Alakran campaign.

Today it's role dilution. 5th ed. characters inherit from 4th a greater spreading of capacities across character classes. 2/3 of the core classes can cast spells, and those who can't often have spell-like action systems like the monk or the Battlemaster fighter. Fighters can self-heal. Feats have also raised complaints of role blurring. 

But actually, even though I am an advocate of well-defined roles to match various player styles, the spreading out of power is not as annoying as the role dilution that comes from the much-remarked flat d20 skill rolls. Characters who are supposed to be bad at skills are still not that bad that they can't give it a shot. 5e skills also don't distinguish between things that can be attempted without training (like climbing), that need training (like lockpicking), and that are just brute applications of force (like opening doors).

Concretely, let's take a "weak" character with below-average ability and no special proficiency in the skill, who gets a -1 to their skill roll. And another "strong" one who gets a +5, either because they have an excellent ability and proficiency, or a superhuman ability with no proficiency. These two attempt some task with DC 13, side by side. If your naive guess is that the "weak" one should never succeed if the "strong" one fails, that's not what 5th edition D&D says.

Looking at the grid, the strong one doesn't even succeed over the weak one's failure in half of the scenarios, and the weak one succeeds over the strong one 12 % of the time - enough of a chance to try. 

The problem is that a "great" skilled character only has a bit less than twice the chance of success of a "bad" skilled character. This means that characters can try all kinds of things they're not really suited to, especially if there is no downside to failure. Sure, you can mess around with the math and the DCs and the system, but then why not just play another RPG that has these things better worked out?

Improving 52 Pages: Skills

The skill system in my 52 Pages house rules is based on d6 rolls, owing a debt to the d6 system in Lamentations which itself hearkens back to the original D&D of resolving "skill" determinations as chances out of 6. Recently I've been having thoughts about it and have come up with what I think is a definite improvement. Here is the system as it stands:

After over a year of play, I've found the high levels of skill, failing only on a 1 in d12 or d20, are easily reached by a rogue or a gnome within a few levels, because those classes gain two skill points a level instead of one. I'm not against this in itself - it's good at a certain point to be reliable at such everyday things as sneaking or climbing up a building. The problem comes with trying to scale these super-skills to more difficult tasks. Even if you interpret the -2 for a hard skill as applying to skill ranks and not the die roll, a rogue who started with 3 in a skill and concentrated on it through level 3, getting 7 marks and having a base d20, can meet a hard skill with only a 1/6 chance of failing.

I came up with this system which I think is not just more elegant, but could be the dead-simple engine for a whole game if applied to things like combat (although Paolo camped a stone's throw away a while ago, with something that eventually became 5MORE...).

Instead of using different dice at high ranks of skill, once past 5 marks, you start adding on Reroll marks that let you reroll a failure on that skill every time you use it. Importantly, this anchors the highest level of skill at 5 in 6, with hard tasks, at -2, having a natural maximum of 3 in 6. On the other side, rerolls can be gained by getting bonuses above 5 marks; for example, if you have two marks in Stealth, but you are sneaking around in your native (background) terrain and the thick terrain makes it easy to hide, the +2 for background and +2 for easy task give you six marks: 5/6 success and one reroll in case that fails.

A side bonus is that the same die is used for all skill rolls, eliminating the confusion of switching around to different dice that I've see new players thrown off by.

If you want to set some tasks as near-impossible, they would be at -4: 1 in 6 for a master-level skillsperson, and even someone with two rerolls would be not at all sure of getting it.

The other fix is that rogues get an extra skill box per level but they must split the two, allowing more even advancement.

I'm not even sure this is entirely necessary. The two groups I game with are unusual in that they each have 3 rogue or rogue-like gnome characters, so each one can specialize (and has) and it looks like they have the whole gamut covered even at level 4 or 5. Lone rogues in a party may instead find it more efficient to spread their skills out more.

When Many Adventurers Do One Thing

Sometimes the efforts of many add neatly, as when many arms try to lift a gate.

Other times, they add imperfectly, as when many eyes try to sight or many ears to hear. It's a mix of varying factors: what's being sensed "out there" and the individual's attention. The individual can only contribute so much.

Other times, additional hands are useless, as when picking a lock, or downright counterproductive, as when many people try to hide or sneak.

In a game, very few skills add neatly except for the sheer application of brute force. Those that add uselessly should be obvious. Which leaves the imperfect and the counterproductive situations to deal with.

So when adding skills imperfectly (and why not, there are diminishing returns even when opening a door because only so many people can get good leverage):

One person = one check
2-3 people = 2 checks
4-7 people = 3 checks, made by the 3 best people
8-15 = 4 checks, made by the 4 best, and so on.

Each power of 2 adds another check.

And when skills interfere - as when a large group is trying to sneak:

One person =one check
2 people = 2 checks
Up to 4 people = 3 checks, made by the 3 worst people
Up to 8 = 4 checks, made by the 4 worst, and so on.
Up to 16 = 5 checks and so on.

Failure by any one means noise is made or they can be seen.

One Page Skills

One thing that's becoming clear about this project is that I don't just want to jam as much 18 point font onto a page as possible. I want there to be breathing room on the page.

When it became clear from feedback that I needed to have weapon and armor restrictions in about the same place as saving throws and hit points for the classes, something had to go off that page. That something was skills, and since I was planning an additional page with skill examples, it became clear that I could also move the hard-to-find skill use section from the background and language page to an all-in-one skills page. As a bonus, this better meets my goal to have systems be modular wherever possible.

The main new thing is non-prophets getting a Wisdom bonus for noticing and hearing things. Think of Wisdom as awareness. Prophets' awareness is otherworldly, so they don't get the bonus, but others with high Wisdom who are more in the here and now do. This also means that every stat except Charisma now bears on skills - and effectively, the benefits of Charisma on reactions and followers are their own powerful thing.

Tiny Competences

It started when the Band of Iron tried to snap the bard's ghost off the path of regret by singing one of his songs to him.

So the question came up for each of the characters - can they sing?

From twistedtwee

Singing, dancing, playing an instrument, riding, swimming, whistling ... Let's call these kinds of abilities competences. I find them tricky to handle because ...

• They don't easily fit into a given ability score or skill. Someone who's a great athlete could still have never learned how to swim. Someone who's a great singer may not know how to whistle.
• They don't work as skills that the characters can invest in, because many if not most people in the setting can do these things at some basic level; some people are hopeless at it, or never learned; and some people are naturally great at it. The distribution is two-tailed with a fat middle; it's not something like lockpicking where most people are bad and only a few are trained.

A comprehensive game system would have a list of several dozen skills already on each character sheet, with each of these competences represented. It's not likely any of these characters would put "points" into singing, so they would all be treated as fairly inept at the task. But this is not really satisfactory, even if we were playing that kind of complicated game. Some people are just naturally good at singing, others are not.

Another kind of solution, more compatible with the rules-light old-school ethos, is to key singing ability to the closest available stat, in this case Charisma, and roll an off-the-cuff check. But something about this solution also doesn't satisfy. It assumes that someone who is a great singer will also be a great leader and vice versa, but these things don't always go together.

In play, when the party's singing ability was called for, I just had them each roll d6 and note the result on their sheet:

1 = hopeless at it
2 = not good
3-4 = average
5 = good at it
6 = great at it

This system then got used in actual play to determine further uses of competences such as whistling (don't ask) and riding.

More recently, I've produced a character sheet with a list of short words, using an even simpler system. For each competence, you roll the die, circle the word if you got a "6" - meaning you're especially good - and X it out if you got a "1" - meaning you're especially bad.

So far, the list is: Ride, Swim, Sing, Dance, Play (instrument), Gamble. In practice, some of the competences do relate to ability scores if people are trying to do something exceptional or contested, but mostly it's a case of whether or not people can do the activity at a basic level.

Any more ideas for the list?

When to Role, When to Rule and When to Roll

One point, left dangling from my recent series, I'd like to address: When should a DM use an analog mode of task resolution based on player descriptions of actions in role and your rulings on them, and when should he or she use a digital mode, rolling dice against set skills and difficulties?

There's a great benefit to seeing the physical environment of an adventure for what it is, rather than an abstract map dotted with "trap" and "secret" symbols. A lot of task resolutions then become simple. Is there a naked, unworked stone corridor? Then any tripwires or pressure plates or door seams will be evident to anyone with two good eyes, even in flickering torchlight, when proceeding forward at the glacial pace of dungeon exploration. I mean, try not noticing everything there is to notice while taking a minute or more to examine a 12' stretch of corridor, 1st Edition AD&D style.

What if the task is more difficult? Say there's a gossamer-thin tripwire spun by dark elves, or a seam of uncanny dwarven construction. Say there's a complicated bas-relief that could be hiding any number of buttons or holes, or a cracked floor with any number of outlines possible. For these, I would say that a long and close inspection would reveal the hidden feature. In player terms, they would have to give me a detailed description of what they are doing, and repeat that each time they are doing it.

Player attention, in other words, is a resource, drained by repetition and boredom. But forget what I said about trying to model this with limits on character attention. It's a player thing, not character. And player things, too, are analog.

If you want to reach the heights of immersion and intellectual challenge that come from an analog game, you have to trust your players to respect their time and enjoyment. You have to trust them not to abuse your system by giving long descriptions of detailed searches  at all times. If you're playing with dopey kids or grown-up asshats or hyper-task-focused fun-murderers, use a more rules- and dice-bound system - please!

You also have to resolve not to let them cheat their way into this resource, using crappy min-maxer crutches like the standing-order instruction sheet (see under "excel spreadsheet" anecdote there).This is just one of those times where you have to know what your group is like. Don't assume the worst right away. But don't think that the right system can substitute for mutual consent to have fun. Good players will fret about the possibility that an asshat could ruin the game, or even the possibility that they could be that asshat. But they won't actually do it.

Eventually, the environment will channel their attention. They'll zoom along a blank corridor or room in real time, because they know that any danger there will be spotted by their cautious in-game progress. They'll stop and check out mosaic floors, complex sculptures or patterns ... if they're wise. Your naturalistic, analog signaling of opportunities for complication will guide their attention. "Dwarven craftsmanship" or "illusionist's castle", of course, should spur them to new and temporary heights of paranoia.

Now, when do you roll? Yes, my game has a "notice detail" skill. And I use it for the same purpose as saving throws in James M's classic analysis. It gives players a digital chance when their analog skills don't quite meet the challenge. Even if you're running down a corridor, you might notice the tripwire that your slow advance would make obvious. Even if you're just standing next to a bookcase casting idle eyes on it, you might notice the odd jointwork that sends you looking for an opening device.

There's one caution, though: I haven't yet had players get up to the point where their skill in notice detail becomes near-automatic. In my system a rogue could get there by level 4, though at the cost of everything else roguely. With more even development they're likely to max out the Notice skill around level 8.

I'm not sure whether the greater chance of success at those heights is a just reward for sticking it through, or a blow to the fun in analog gaming. Perhaps the balancing factor is this: At higher levels, you're more likely to face complex, brain-challenging mechanisms and effects, so that the challenge is not whether you see them, but what you do once you see them.

Iron God: Taking Secret Doors Beyond the Letter S

Level 2 of the Tomb of the Iron God module is the actual burial place of the corpses consigned there, and it has more secret doors than a season of Scooby Doo cartoons. There are other things that aren't ideal about it and I tried to fix ... which I'll get to in the last post of this review. But the secret doors were the toughest thing to work out on the fly.

(This post is not as spoilery as the last one, so no cut.)

Anyway, we are not talking about dwarven or magical workmanship here. I ended up deciding that most of the doors could be seen; either in passing with a d6 skill check if you're on the same side as the door (exploration movement is slow going as it is, and most party members have a 1 or 2 in 6 chance), or automatically if you're giving that area special attention. No, you cannot give every area special attention - or at least I'm going to make that process player-boring, and eventually you as a player are going to make the choice that it's better to die a hero than live an obsessive grind. But an exception can be made for the niche-lined walls that parties have an interest in searching for loot.
 
The secret doors show as outlines of fine grooves in the limestone corridor walls. In the burial chambers, they appear as seams down the middle of a row of stacked niches, the halves sliding back both ways when opened. Niche doors usually open by pressing a button at the back of one of the niches, and these buttons also open the corridor doors, though they may be some distance away from their chosen door. Part of my map notes involved working out which niche button would open which secret door. There was a good moment when I combined one of those buttons with a poison needle trap that was already in the key. "Okay, you push the button in ... with your finger ..." Well, the dwarf had a great save and made it, but from then on, used his axe handle.

What was hard was squaring the many, many secret doors dividing the level into sections with the appearance of wandering skeletons and the need of nonintelligent monsters to rove around the dungeon. Some of it I just handwaved, other times there would be floor plates on the inside of a secret area that could let skeletons out. The players quickly grew paranoid and started whispering about a "skeleton factory."

As with pit traps, it's all-to-easy to answer "Why did the monks put so many secret doors in their burial ground?" with "Because it's a dungeon, duh!"  But if I had it to do over again I would have reduced the number of S'es on that level. Make some of them plastered-over concealed doors, which is more plausible if you're talking about a burial ground where some sections eventually get full. Just erase the unnecessary ones, like the ones that represent only a shortcut between two areas you can reach anyway, or the ones that hide one down-stair area from another.

This obsession with secret doors - on every level! by the half-dozen or more! - has apparently left its mark upon a whole generation. You see, as D&D players grow up, they get certain ideas about how their family lairs should be constructed ....

OSR Contradiction 2: Player Skill vs. Minimal Dungeons

Does OSR mean an Old School Regurgitation of everything that was played, printed and xeroxed in the olden days of the adventure gaming hobby? Or an Old School Refinement, taking the best products and learning from them, and looking past the rules as written to mine the reminiscences of the founding roleplayers and see exactly how they had fun?

Geomorph by Fighting Fantasist

Certainly, if you look at almost all old school modules you'll see two things that had rules associated with them: pits and secret doors. Especially in the early days, these rules were rough and ready, betraying the miniatures origins of the game: roll a d6 and fall in on a 1 or 2, roll a d6 and detect the door on a 1. Because there were rules, and character features that improved the odds, it was seen as necessary to include pits and secret doors in any dungeon worth its salt. Leaving them out would be like leaving sand traps and water hazards off a gold course.

Many, many games were played with this mechanistic, 8-bit digital method. Many more would be played using the more sophisticated rules that interacted with character skills and eventually turned into Spot checks. What almost nobody was doing was the "player skill" method that's seized the Old School mantle. Next to no space in Dragon magazine was dedicated to elaborate analog mechanical trap descriptions in the manner of Courtney's Hack & Slash blog. What you saw instead was rules, charts, tables.

So does your Old School Reenactment involve tooling around a graph paper funhouse just rolling for pits and doors? And if your Old School Rejuvenation involves tapping ahead with a pole, what effect does that have? Is the pit lid heavy or light? Might it tip open or echo with a tap? These are questions that need analog solutions, immediately bypassing the "roll 1 or 2" crudity of the Old School Rules.

Tomb of the Iron God is the dungeon we have been playing in since January. It's by Matt Finch, who also authored the 95 Theses of player skill, the Quick Primer. By the Primer, using player skill for pits and secret doors requires analog descriptions of their mechanisms. But in the module, recreating the more usual form of Old School play (or perhaps just out of reflex), you have oodles of un-detailed pit traps and secret doors. Bam! Contradiction. Yes, the module notes tell you to ad-lib ... and ad-lib I did. But I would have appreciated being tossed at least a bone or two for such frequent, important, and eventually unexplained features of the catacombs.

Next time ... my solutions and the players', an in-play review.

Wisdom: For the Ultimate Priest or the Ultimate Scout?

D&D's Wisdom stat seems to be the most easily dispensed when people write house rules and variants. If you don't like clerics, you won't like wisdom, for starters. Even with clerics left in, something seems to compel people to re-envision this unwanted stat ... as sanity, luck, piety, will. Check out this D&D tutorial video and the way Wisdom has to be handwaved around. Do "common sense" and "sense of self" really go together with "religious involvement"? Why, in 2nd edition on, does Wisdom give bonuses for skills like perception, outdoor survival and healing?

A wise guy, huh?

The prevailing view of wisdom in psychology is that it's the long-term knowledge of how best to achieve a meaningful life. Fine, but try translating that into a die roll bonus. Robert Sternberg, one of the predominant researchers in intelligence, argues that beyond IQ (reasoning ability, equivalent to D&D's Intelligence stat), success in life is also predicted by creativity, and by a third "street smarts" factor which he sometimes calls "practical intelligence" and sometimes "wisdom." The problem with this third factor as a game stat is that it's about making the right decisions. Feeding players the right decisions or forcing them to make the wrong ones because of their Wisdom would be a recipe for frustration.

This is why Wisdom constantly has to be reinterpreted as a character, not player, attribute. One approach (let's call it "Piety") is to just say it's whatever it takes to be a cleric/priest/paladin and tie it exclusively to divine magic. This is similar to what I do with Intelligence, renaming it Intellect, and treating it as "head for book learning." The problem here is that really no other character class has any reason to have a high Wisdom.

There are two other very different things Wisdom's asked to do, especially in 3rd edition D&D, with its design pressure to make all game elements meaningful. One is "Will" or ability to resist mental influence: 3rd edition has Wisdom modifying Will saves. The other is "Perception" or awareness of one's surroundings: 3rd edition also has Wisdom modifying a variety of skills like Spot, Listen, Sense Motive and Survival.

Well... Will and Piety perhaps go together, if you make the long assumption that contact with divine forces is the only way to resist influences on your mind. But Will and Piety are definitely at odds with Wisdom as Perception. The static, supportive role of cleric in the original game is right opposite the scouting, mobile role of the thief. It doesn't seem right that both classes draw on the same stat, when AD&D explicitly stated that their roles were opposite, and each one's prime requisite was the ability score the other could ignore completely.

How to resolve this mess? I recently had the insight that if Wisdom = Awareness it could mean different things for divine and profane classes. Simply put, have priest-types (or prophets) not get the Wisdom bonuses for earthly things like listening. Their awareness is attuned to a different sphere.

To sum up, in my game going forward, high Wisdom has the following benefits for a prophet:

• Qualifies for the class
• Stronger miracles, healing and abjuring evil.
• Stronger Mind saves (similar to 3rd edition's Will)

And for a non-prophet:

• 13+ Wisdom gives +1 on d6 perception skills; 8- Wisdom gives -1..
• Bonuses in Wisdom gives 10/15/20% bonus to experience, but no penalty for low Wisdom - the logic here being similar to awareness, that a prophet's Wisdom is too tied up in higher things to help learn pragmatically from experience.
• Stronger Mind saves.

Yes, this means that Wisdom is still a melange of Piety, Perception, Will and even the kind of life-learning that shows up in the psychology definition. I'm happy to live with that conflation, just as I'm happy for Dexterity to cover both fine and gross motor skills. The important thing in a character system is to give a variety of choices that make global sense, not create the ultimate human resources instrument.

Another thing to think about - if and when I introduce a Druid class to the game, their nature-bound spirituality would let them get both divine and mundane benefits of Wisdom.

Character Birth: Choice vs. Speed

Count me on the side of quick with a few choices rather than slow with a lot of choices, when it comes to generating characters for adventure games.

My One Page system cuts out an element of choice - not without some controversy as I recall -  by having class determined directly by stats which can, if necessary, be switched around once. It works choice back in, though in a relatively light way, by allowing open-ended selection of background descriptors that can have some effect on when skills work best.

Oh yeah, I changed the skills sheet some so that languages and backgrounds could fit in.  I am pretty happy now with the way backgrounds are a kind of "adjective" or "subject" that modify the base chance that the very generic skill gives you. You only get to use Knowledge to remember facts that are part of your background, and if you try using most skills in a setting or task consistent with your background you get a +2 on that (these are indicated on the new version of the character sheet, below).

I've noticed recently, though, that character generation with this system tends to bog down around skill and equipment selection.

The solution for equipment is to have random tables for weapons and standard starting armor, and to pass around a deck of cards with the six equipment packages so that the party as a whole is adequately equipped for their first expedition. That's for a future post ...

The solution for skills was simple. As I had it, players were "choosing" only a pip or two of skills to shift around their character sheet. So why not just have skills also flow from class and stats - keeping in mind that the flavor and scope of each skill in my system is modified by the freely chosen background descriptors ...

Anyway, this is what's going on the end of this sheet now.

At this point I'm a little overwhelmed by the multi-ring circus I've got going on in my free time, what with the One Page system ( a little stalled out, as I got done what I needed to run a few games with it, so the impulse to complete is kind of dormant for now ), the Genre Worlds tables, Zak giving the high sign for the Obstacles & Openings cards, and even more, including some contributions to other people's product and a big slow secret project. It will all come complete in the fullness of time, I guess.

Skill Resolution: Red, Yellow, Green

I believe there is an apocryphal quatrain of Nostradamus that starts out

When the Cook of the Mountain returns to Wizards' lair
To beat the Old School drum, or maybe not

And the Monsters and Manuals swell to the number 78
With the crackling flames of men of straw
Then Tupac shall slay the one whose initials are JFK ... (etc., etc.)

In other words, how should dice rolls, DM rulings, and rules procedures be balanced? This sounds strangely familiar to me. But let me try and tie it all together.

What Monte Cook was proposing is simply a feature that all RPG resolution systems have. Think of three zones. In the red zone, an action fails. In the green zone, an action succeeds. In the yellow zone, more resolution is needed.

The d20 resolution system that Cook co-designed for 3rd edition lays the zones out like this, based on what's known about the action's difficulty class number (DC) and any modifiers that apply:

 1 + mods > DC           
 Any other DC/mods combination (resolution from d20 roll)
20 + mods < DC    

Going to the other extreme, a system based on DM's say-so and interaction with players looks like this:

DM says you can         
DM asks you for more questions and decisions (resolution from information provided)
DM says you can't    

 What exactly was Monte proposing in that recent article? Details are hazy, but it looks something like this:

Rules say you can (character skill > challenge level)        
If character ability = challenge level, roll dice against an ability check (resolution from dice roll) OR player describes action in such a way as to change from "no" to "maybe" or "maybe" to "yes" (resolution from information provided)
Rules say you can't (character skill < challenge level)   

 Which is not too far from the Grand Unified Model of all Refereed Gaming:

Rules as interpreted by the DM say you can (character skill > challenge level)        
If the DM finds no clear "yes" or "no" in the rules or in the DM's head, roll dice against an ability check determined by the rules, or by the DM if the rules do not cover it (resolution from dice roll). Player can describe action in such a way as to change from "no" to "maybe" or "maybe" to "yes" (resolution from information provided)
Rules as interpreted by the DM say you can't (character skill < challenge level)  

From which all else can be derived depending on the exact procedures which are privileged in the yellow box, the amount of stuff in the rules, and the amount of stuff in the DM's head.

But you know, since I started on this post earlier today I think it might have been scooped a little more elegantly.

One-Page Skills are Hard

This was a real tough page to design. The skills each have a little row of tick boxes on the character sheet. The space limits of that, and this explanation page, forced me to strip down the skills into a bare six things. Even then I'm cheating a little with the skinny font on the explanations. Is all of this necessary? I'm not sure.

There's a little outside baggage from another roleplaying game I followed. Its designers got into trouble for not presenting examples of each difficulty level of action for each skill, in one of the revised editions. It was the usual nerdrage thimblefest, but made me appreciate that in general such guidelines are a useful thing to have. Here, the examples also let you know what traditionally separate skills fall under each category.

Backgrounds also appear on the character sheet; the player supplies two adjectives or nouns like Woodland Barbarian. Wizard, Priest, Elf and Dwarf have one word supplied for them; respectively Magic, Religion, Woodland and Underground. Knowledge skill points are hard to get. I figure this is a way to realistically show knowledge in a background area that retroactively depends upon ability to learn, but requires too much study to improve while adventuring.

Mechanics with the appropriate Background could also represent some kind of craft skill, if needed. But the four-color universe of adventure has little patience for naturalistic characters who hammer their own armor...

All this rethinking means that characters in my previously presented starting page get way too many skill points, so I redid that too. Most characters start with one part-shaded box in most skills, so it's not like only rogues can climb.

I guess the character sheet should be next, or at least the first page.

One Page Vital Stats

Following the program of One Page Rules, today I present a kind of "master handout" that introduces many of the vital stats characterizing PCs, NPCs and other beings in the game.

This is page 2 ... right after the introductory page where the general play and point of the game, and such terms as "character", "creature", "DM", "d6" and so forth are described. I haven't laid that out yet.

This is a different system than the more elaborate Old School Players rules I'm using for my current campaign. It's built for concision.

More to come ... as always, let me know if this way of presenting rules is clear.

I'm also going to issue a blanket acknowledgment to Telecanter, whose silhouettes will show up throughout this series.

Don't Lab Me In

My path of thinking up until yesterday ran as follows:

Mr. Wizard

* Several of the classic magic-user spells can be duplicated by more mundane, "scientific" activities like research in a lab, digging in a library, or just straight up buying stuff. Why throw a low-grade damage spell when you can throw a dart? Why cast Mount when you can buy a horse? You can research, replacing Identify and Comprehend Languages; dowse, replacing Detect Magic; throw oil, pour acid, spread grease ...
* So it would make sense that if wizards are to have "at will" skills, they should be mundane skills like research or alchemy, while spells are restricted per day or effectively per encounter.
* Most of these abilities would require some kind of base like a library or laboratory, which the character could borrow from an established wizard at first, and work up to owning their own.
* The skills would automatically succeed in this base, or at least only fail on a very low chance. The wizard could also try to use the skills in the field at a lower chance of success; trying to remember how that ancient script goes, for example.

This would lead to a vision of the low-level magic user as a dart-throwing, horse-buying, half-mundane scholar; a scientist-wizard, as in historical medieval times when the realms of science, magic and medicine were not all that distinct. Very "Forgotten Realms, " Greenwoodian realism, the kind of thing that appealed to me in the fantasy settings of the 90's.

But the more problems I had implementing this, the more I started to kick against the very idea. The One Page idea doesn't have space to mess around. Its character classes need to shine in bold, distinct primary colors, not "realistic" but drab mud-hues.

Put this in your lab and smoke it!

The hell is SCIENCE? You want me to MIX CHEMICALS IN A LAB? Screw that! A wizard does everything by magic. He lights his pipe with his thumb. Has a minor demon do the dishes. Magic upholds her very costuming, in most cases! (see illustration)

And on top of that, your wizard is an adventurer. Can't be tied down to a lab for too long. Even renting out a lab in each new town is a bit too much of a chore. That kind of mundane stuff is for other people to do, and for adventurers to pay for in rich yellow coin looted from a moldering tomb.

So instead of lab abilities, I've decided to add one page of low level spells, and just increase the number of spells available per day. That's coming up next, along with a specific mini-debate about the Identify spell.

Did I make the right call?