I'm a glutton for systems - there are so many fascinating ones out there. My players, however...not so much. As I've mentioned, we mostly play - or played - Rolemaster, from 2nd edition through to the RMU playtest. They love it, and haven't really wanted to change. I managed to convince them to try Pathfinder, but it didn't take, sadly. We meet up about twice every five weeks on Skype - these days, none of us live in the same city - so PF just seemed too unwieldy for irregular 3-4 hour sessions (as was RM, but there was a great deal of system mastery in the group, so that helped). In addition, we don't always get a full turnout - and running PCs and NPCs just gets a bit much for yours truly.
So we settled on Advanced Labyrinth Lord - quick, clean combat and character generation, and easy for me to run PCs when the player is absent. it has been, for the most part, a bit of a blast. The ease of combat, in particular, makes a huge difference when sessions are short and infrequent. I recently did something of a survey of the players to see whether we wanted to continue in this vein: the feedback was mostly positive, but it was mentioned that PF and RM had more nuance in terms of creating characters, and that players liked a skill system.
So, at the risk of being very un-OSR, I set to work (it's not as if I need much persuasion for that sort of thing). I didn't want a whole bunch of skills, but I wanted reasonable coverage, which meant replacing the various quirky mechanics peculiar to the various classes (we use a wide range of classes drawn from third-party sources) with a more unified system that still promoted differences between the classes.
Fortunately, some of that work, at least, had been done for me: I borrowed the basic framework from Brave Halfling's Delving Deeper: Skill Systems. But I didn't want a 'skill rank' system, although I did want my players to be able to decide - at least in part - where they were more competent. So I settled on skill points, and a table containing 5 levels of proficiency that improve as one advances in levels. The table works exactly like the Saving Throw tables in Labyrinth Lord, but the column used is a function of how many skill points a character has in a particular skill. The categories - and the number of points required to qualify - are as follows:
Unschooled 0 skill points
Familiar 1-5 skill points
Practiced 6-12 skill points
Experienced 13-19 skill points
Mastered 20 or more skill points
Characters accumulate skill points - and allocate them - as they level up, but they also get boosts from various sources during character generation: Backgrounds, Culture/Lineage and Class. All up, characters get a total of 70 skill points plus 4 per level. Given that there is a reasonably large number of skills, it's pretty hard to master more than a couple - especially being as how I've added in some Combat Maneuvers and Weapon Competencies (of which more later).
One last thing about this system: no matter how many points your Magic-User spends on the Stealth skill, they are extremely unlikely to outperform a Thief, especially at higher levels. Thieves add half their level (rounded up) to Stealth checks to Move Silently and Hide in Shadows. but the Magic-User can, at least, have a chance of successful skulking.
The skills - most of which are self-explanatory (which will not, of course, stop me from elaborating on them in the next post) - are listed below: they're the bastard child of Fantastic Heroes & Witchery, Pathfinder and the Delving Deeper book referred to above.
Arcana, Athletics, Brawn, Concentration, Deception, Detection, Endurance, Expression, Etiquette, Healing, Legerdemain, Lore, Manipulation, Mechanics, Movement, Nature, Religion, Riding, Stealth Streetwise.
Actually, this information is already out of date - stuff being constantly refined, trimmed, elaborated. I've realised, essentially, that I'm creating a new game (Heartbreaker, anyone?), albeit one with a B/X engine, mediated by the rules in Labyrinth Lord.
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