RPG Review: The Ghost Tower of Inverness

For whatever reason, I don't think I played C2: The Ghost Tower of Inverness more than once or twice. Part of the reason, now that I think of it, is my grandmother needed the picture of the seer within it as a model for the Halloween costume she sewed for me - my grandmother was quite the seamstress but not particularly familiar with the fantasy genre.

The Ghost Tower of the title refers to the central tower of the castle of the dreaded wizard Galap-Driedel. The entire  Castle Inverness was magically lifted "from the very foundations of rock upon which it rested." Within the central tower was said to be the "Soul-Gem" which "dragged the souls of men screaming from their mortal flesh and trapped them within its many facets." When one day the wizard failed to return an angry mob (presumably with pitchforks and torches) stormed the castle and tore down the central tower. Though on fog-shrouded nights the central tower can supposedly still be seen (a "ghost tower" if you will).

The default background for the adventure has the Seer of Urnst persuade his duke to employ adventurers to retrieve the Soul Gem. Obviously this is something which can easily be adapted to fit any campaign. Originally meant for tournament play, the pregenerated characters have interesting backgrounds, primarily being criminals who go on this quest in return for amnesty. Escorted to the ruins of Inverness they are given an amulet which will teleport them back once they retrieve the Soul Gem.

The first part of the adventure involves the ruins of the castle and the dungeon beneath it. There are four parts to the dungeon, all leading to a locked central chamber. Each of the parts will give them one fourth of the key to the central chamber.

The dungeon has classic D&D wandering monsters - Rust Monsters, Gelatinous Cubes, Ghouls, etc. However what makes it memorable is its numerous puzzles. There is a room where stepping on a certain part of the floor teleports a monster into the room. Another room has 16 bugbears standing in stasis, a stasis which is broken upon certain conditions. Perhaps most memorable is a chess room where the players find themselves as a chess pieces.

Upon gaining access to the central room the adventurers travel back in time to when the central tower existed, with the rest of the adventure taking place in the tower.  The tower consists of chambers dedicated to the four classical elements, air, earth, fire, and water, with dangers and monsters appropriate to the elements. There are also some funky gravity shifts such that one level is upside-down in relation to the other levels. Finally our bold adventurers reach the Soul Gem and must retrieve it while avoiding getting their souls trained.

One thing worth noting is this adventure has numerous handouts providing pictures and illustrating various rooms in extra detail - not to the extreme that Expedition to Barrier Peaks would later do, but still rather useful.


While the adventure requires a lot of leaps of logic - accepting all the logic puzzles, the time travel, the bizarre environments of the tower, etc., it is in many ways a classic dungeon crawl. Designed for mid-level parties, the greatest challenge is not really the monsters but rather the dungeon itself, where sharp thinking greatly reduces the risk to the adventurers. The dangerous dungeon brings to mind the Lankhmar story "The Jewels in the Forest", originally entitled "Two Sought Adventure".

How would this work as an adventure today? Obviously it still makes a fine AD&D 1st edition adventure and no real work would be required for 2nd or original edition versions (or their clones). Similarly it would fit very well with games such as Adventurer, Conqueror, King System; Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role Playing; and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Adapting them to later editions would certainly be doable but likely with a lot of work to properly balance the encounters.

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Story-Based Adventures

Both my current and immediately previous campaigns could be considered "old school" campaigns. Right now I'm playing Dungeon Crawl Classics and my previous campaign was of Call of Cthulhu, something of a living fossil in that despite being in its 6th edition it is very close to the game it was when it started.

Despite this I don't necessarily consider myself to be an old school player and this blog has discussed newer games in addition to the older ones. I've enjoyed both flavors.

Reflecting on this has made me think of the transition from old school to new school gaming. In the 70s and early 80s most adventures, at least for D&D, had the slimmest of plots. There was typically a dungeon and sometimes there was a bit of a plot and reason for you to go there but these were usually easily changed. In his Grognardia blog, James Maliszewski has referred to this transition as the Hickman Revolution. Tracy Hickman wrote the Desert of Desolation series of adventures which had a stronger plot than previous D&D adventures - though even at this point I would say that it would be awfully easy to discard much of the background of those adventures. For those unfamiliar with this series, it was expected that the adventurers would unleash a fearsome Efreeti on the desert, later free a Djinn and finally seek out the Tomb of Martek as a way to re-imprison the Efreeti. However, the adventures were centered around fascinating locations that were very easily pulled out of their plots and adapted to other plots - a trap-infested pyramid, an oasis with various factions, a sea of glass, pocket dimensions, etc.

What would probably be considered the tipping point is Tracy and Laura Hickman's Ravenloft. Published in 1983 the adventure was at the time incredibly revolutionary. It featured maps that to this day gamers remember with fondness. It featured a memorable villain with an extensive backstory - Count Strahd von Zarovich, a vampire who diverged from standard game stats And it featured a variable plot - usually playing cards as a type of tarot reading to decide Strahd's objectives, his weakness, where he could be found, etc.

While Ravenloft featured an important villain, I believe the adventure kept a reasonable balance - while the DM was encouraged to play him intelligently and keep him alive as long as possible, he was definitely designed to be beatable. It did have a regrettable ending which gave the PCs the opportunity to watch events unfold, something that would become more common with time.

However, this opened the floodgates into plot-based adventures. Shortly after came Dragons of Despair, the first of the Dragonlance adventures. It featured pregenerated PCs you were strongly encouraged to use, PCs and NPCs were protected from death by an "obscure death rule", and there were certain things players were just not allowed to do. This isn't to say people didn't play the adventures or enjoy them. But it did indicate that a change had indeed happened.

This isn't to say every adventure was a pseudo-novel. But truth to tell, some were. Looking back the biggest offender would be, in my mind, the Avatar series from the Forgotten Realms, featuring the PCs watching gods battle it out with one another.

I think that points to the danger of story-based adventures. Everyone has there own preferences and there are some who just don't care for that style of play - truth to tell I tend to prefer location-based adventures as they are far easier for me to adapt. But... if one is to make a story-based adventure I think the key is to make it without "one true ending" and to avoid at all costs making the PCs observers - the PCs need to be stars, not observers, not puppets.

One adventure I think did this exceptionally well was the an adventure published in the same year as Ravenloft - The Assassin's Knot. Sequel to the location-based adventure The Secret of Bone Hill had the PCs trying to unravel a murder mystery with the Baron of Restenford assassinated, apparently by someone from the nearby town of Garrotten (what in the world would an assassin be doing in a town called Garrotten...) There is no requirement the PCs succeed in their mission and the adventure covers what will happen if they fail. Heck there's nothing to stop them from making a deal with the people behind the assassination. Garrotten was a memorable town, with the suspects being interesting NPCs, useful for other purposes beyond a murder mystery. If you didn't want the murder mystery there was still a lot you could do with the adventure.

While TSR was producing story-based adventures for AD&D 2nd edition they would find themselves facing what I imagine was the first real challenge to their dominance in the gaming industry. 1991 would see the release of White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade. Vampire was a strongly story-based game - heck the entire game line was called the Storyteller System. The PCs were vampires with a humanity system designed to show how close they were to giving into the beast within them. Vampire typically assumed the PCs were at the bottom of the social ladder of the undead with limited ways of advancing - this allowed the PCs to find themselves as pawns of ancient vampires and could unfortunately turn them into observers - something I believe is the greatest danger of any RPG. That said to this day I'd jump at the chance to do a Vampire game. But as a wiser and older GM (err, storyteller), were I to run such a game I'd be certain to keep the PCs as the stars of the story.

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AD&D Reprints First Impressions

The reprints for the AD&D 1st edition rulebooks arrived at my house on Friday from Noble Knight Games.

If my memory serves, this is not actually the first time the original AD&D books have been reprinted - I seem to recall an Italian publisher got permission to reprint the books in an extremely tiny format back in the late 90s - I remember seeing them at Cambridge's Pandemonium Books & Games. They were more a curiosity, with each page being condensed to something around the size of a playing card. I didn't pick them up and to be honest it's not something I regret not getting.

These newest reprints are designed to be more useful, being back to the original size. I've read on Wizards of the Coast's website that a lot of work went into the reprints - there were no digital files beyond basic scans so apparently each page had to be redone. The effort seems to have been successful - comparing them with my original AD&D books you really can't see any difference in the way each page looks.

Regretfully the paper seems to have changed. The original AD&D books were products of amazing durability. My original books, despite being used for years of gaming, moves to college and back, soda spills, moves to apartments and houses, are still in reasonably good shape - better shape than books I bought twenty years later. (I'm feeling old now - though truth be told I actually didn't get the books when they first came out but rather a few years before they were redone with new covers.) These new books are printed on what I would characterize as a semi-glossy paper - not super shiny, but definitely of a glossy type. The white background looks very white - obviously I don't have new copies of my original AD&D books to compare it to but I'm pretty sure they were never that white. So I'd definitely have to give a preference to the original formats.

That said, Wizards of the Coast has done a first-rate job with the reprints. They clearly took a lot of work to do, visually they look fantastic, and they appear to be well bound. Probably not as well bound as the originals but I'm pretty sure those books could survive a zombie apocalypse.

I'll probably get around to reviewing the AD&D core books at some point so right now I'm only giving first thoughts. The Dungeon Masters Guide has a ton of information in it though looking at it now it seems like could have done with a little better organizing. Though intended to be a complete game I have a hard time imagining what it would be like picking up the Players Handbook without some familiarity with D&D. In my own circles, the older players tended to start with the original D&D while the younger ones like me tended to start with the D&D Basic and Expert rules and then graduate to AD&D. I'm not certain what to make of the "Gygaxian Prose" - it certainly is part of the charm of the game while at the same time it makes the author sound a bit full of himself from time to time. "Again, a word of warning. Many products might purport to be satisfactory for use with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, but only those noted as OFFICIAL or Authorized AD&D items should be accepted. Do not settle for substitutes or second-rate material in your campaign; ask only for approved AD&D products only!" I've missed prose such as that. At the very least, Mr. Gygax expanded my middle school vocabulary amazingly well.

Overall, I'm overjoyed to see the original AD&D books reprinted (and that at least some of the funds are going to a memorial for Gary Gygax) and pleased to see a first-rate job was done. In the fall Wizards of the Coast will be reprinting the core 3.5 books. I think this is a good move on their parts - they are again making available what were probably the two most popular versions of D&D. I hope at some point they will make these books available in some digital form - I'm primarily a digital consumer now, with my eBooks, Audible audiobooks, streaming video and audio, etc.

I do find myself wanting to get some dice out and do a 1st edition AD&D game...

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Clerics, Blunt Weapons, and Christian Assumptions

One of the neat things about digging up many of pre-1970s works that inspired D&D is finding the origins of some of D&D's concepts and rules.

One items which received a lot of humor back in its day was the restriction of clerics only being able to use blunt weapons as they were forbidden from using weapons which shed blood. Anyone who has seen a medieval mace knows that a solid hit with one of those is going to shed a lot of blood, blunt weapon or not.

Recently I was reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. It included the following statement:

[The knight] also had available, either attached tio his saddle or carried by his squire, a longer sword for thrusting like a lance, a battle-ax fitted with a spike behind the curving blade, and a club-headed mace with sharpened, ridged edges, a weapon favored by martial bishops and abbots on the theory it did not come under the rule forbidding clerics "to smite with the edge of the sword."

This work is copyrighted 1978 so it was clearly not the actual source for the rule regarding clerics but it clearly does represent the reasoning used for a cleric's weapon restriction. I'm not certain if this is "true" or not - I've done some Googling and have seen people who do not feel there was any such restriction but either way there are clearly sources that support this restriction that Gygax and company must have encountered.

It is interesting to note how the early cleric class appears to have a high level of medieval Christian assumptions built into it. Beyond the restrictions on weapons, much of the early artwork, spells, and titles are indicative of a Christian holy order. For example the illustration show here from page 12 of the 1st edition Players Handbook is clearly indicative of a Christian holy order. Similarly artifacts such as the Mace of St. Cuthbert point in that direction as well.

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RPG Review: The Rogues Gallery

The D&D Basic Set had a spell known as "Floating Disk". It created a magical platform that would follow you around. Obviously its purpose was to provide a way to carry loot out of the dungeon - though you have to pity the poor magic-user who had that as his only spell. Congratulations, you studied magic for all those years to become a pack horse for a barbarian warrior!

When I purchased the AD&D Players Handbook thinks changed. The Floating Disk spell was changed. Now it was "Tenser's Floating Disk". And this wasn't the only named spell - you got all sorts of spells from the wizard Bigby to allow the creation of grasping hands, crushing hands, clenched fists, etc. There were spell immunity spells from Serten. It gave a glimpse of a game that was played by real people. Reading articles from The Best of Dragon Vol. 1 (which I encountered at a Brooklyn bookstore where I also purchased The Fellowship of the Ring) I got more glimpses of Gary Gygax's Greyhawk campaign. Though I was never able to find the Greyhawk folio which was advertised in the catalog that came with my copy of the D&D Basic Set - I finally acquired a copy a few weeks ago, though I did eventually get the expanded boxed set.

Before I managed to find the World Of Greyhawk boxed set I managed to get a copy of The Rogues Gallery. Looking back at the old TSR products it seems a lot of the earliest products were aids for Dungeon Masters - you had your Dungeon Geomorphs, Monster & Treasure Assortments, various types of record sheets, and products like The Rogues Gallery. Looking back I remember living in a world without easy access to photocopiers, printers, etc. There were no character sheets to download and print. With a supply of nickels you could make photocopies at the local library.

The Rogues Gallery was broken into sections. The first section was a list of characters (something like 50-100 per class, in table form) from all the classes in the Players Handbook, allowing a DM to quickly generate NPCs. In the middle were tools for generating sages, zero-level NPCs, NPC parties, merchant caravans, and more unusual monsters such as liches and ki-rin.

The final section is the section that is probably most memorable - it was a section of sample characters from various TSR campaigns. It had well-known characters such as Tenser, Bigby, and Robilar. They were presented in somewhat moderate incarnations - some of them were too low in level to cast some of the spells named for them or had ability scores too low to qualify to cast some of their iconic spells. It also had some less well-known characters such as the sinister Erac's Cousin and some characters who had been reincarnated as non-humans - a lizard man and centaur. Even more useful were the descriptions that accompanied the characters. You saw a fighter who used to be a ranger but couldn't handle the strict rules of the class. Characters who changed alignments, had odd motivations, etc. And their magic items were often customized - nothing approaching the power of an artifact, but rather non-standard versions of standard magic items with little variations from the standard rules.

How useful is this for gamers today? It depends on what you're looking for. If you are playing a retroclone that is extremely close to AD&D 1st edition (or 1st edition itself) then it does provide a utility which you might find useful. However I think its main use is its section of sample characters at the end of the book. The sample characters could be used as allies or villains for the PCs, they could serve as models or inspirations for NPCs, and offers some ideas for new magic items and possible adventure ideas. It's probably not something worth spending a lot of money for but

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RPG Review: Expedition to Barrier Peaks

Having just seen Prometheus this weekend science-fiction is a bit on my mind right now. This has me thinking about one of the odder 1st edition AD&D adventures, Expedition to Barrier Peaks.

Expedition to Barrier Peaks was, according to its preface, written for the Origins II convention as a way to introduce players to Metamorphosis Alpha, the 1970s TSR RPG about the inhabitants of a lost generation ship (who are no longer aware they are on a ship). In this adventure a space colonization expedition was struck by a plague. Attempting to stop the spread of the plague the components of the ship separated and went their separate ways. The one the adventure takes place on found its way through a black hole to the World of Greyhawk (obviously one could move it to another fantasy setting). Per the story worker robots cleared the cargo hatch and released various alien fauna, some of which prospered (providing an interesting explanation for some of the odder D&D monsters).

Of late local lords have been plagued by strange monsters - monsters discharged from this large alien ship at periodic intervals. Their source has been identified and the PCs dispatched to investigate.

The point of this adventure, if there is one, is to have a romp through a spaceship. There isn't much an overriding threat, though the local lords would surely appreciate it if the PCs could stop the monsters from  harrying them. The adventure consists of lots of memorable locations - for example there are crew quarters, control sections, 'tween decks, recreation areas, a huge park area, cargo areas, etc. There's all sorts of critters and gadgets. Some of the memorable encounters include a tribe of vegepygmies (plant-matter barbarians) and a mind flayer with a blaster.

As you can see, this adventure was also memorable for its illustrations, including an entire booklet of illustrations. It also had a "treasure" that every group I ran this through loved - high-tech gadgets! Blasters, lasers, needlers, powered armor. Tragically the PCs have no way to recharge these gadgets, so they get to play with them for a little while and then its back to "boring" magic weapons - though I can recall at least one player who used a wish to be able to recharge one of his gadgets.

How does this all work? In my experiences this was usually a neat adventure as a diversion. It is a huge "dungeon" so there is some risk of overdoing it, especially without a bigger purpose in the adventure and the inability to keep much of the treasure. There is one encounter where the ship's robots may give the PCs the boot and one time I ran this the players decided that that was enough for their expedition - they didn't try to batter their way back in (not that they didn't enjoy it). 

This does remind me a bit of the situation in Andre Norton's novel Witch World, where there were technological aspects that had found their way into a fantasy setting (indeed, Ms. Norton wrote the novel Quag Keep which featured role-players from our world finding themselves in a D&D world). Were I to use this today I think I would add a rival from the PCs world seeking to secure (or gain more of) the technology in the ship. This is an adventure whose concepts are easy to adapt and would fit in especially well in a Dungeon Crawl Classics game.

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Speed Factors and Weapons vs. Armor

Back in the 80s my gaming group quickly "graduated" from D&D to AD&D. Though it sure would have been nice if TSR could have gotten out The Temple of Elemental Evil a bit faster.

In 1st edition AD&D I recall there were two rules we pretty much totally ignored (well there were probably more than two...) These were rules for weapon speed factor and for weapons getting different bonuses and penalties vs. different types of armor.

These were decent ideas in theory but in practice we really could not makes heads or tails of the rules. That's not entirely true - we couldn't make heads or tails of the speed factor rules.

With that in mind let's start with Weapons vs. Armor. This one is simply enough to understand. Any given weapon is more effective against some armors than others. This makes sense. Consider the medieval knight. He did not go around with a single weapon. At the very least he had his lance, mace, and sword. (As an aside, raise your hand if you ever saw a cleric accidentally carry a lucerne hammer, unaware of it being a pole arm...)  In the weapons vs. armor table a mace actually gets a bonus against an opponent wearing plate mail armor.

In theory this was a good idea. In practice it was a problematic rule. First of all the table was indexed by Armor Class. This assumed the AC was unmodified by magic, dexterity, etc., something that was rarely true. Secondly it required referring to the table every time a weapon was used, slowing down game-play. Thirdly it broke down when using monsters. Is a mace or sword more effective vs. a dragon's scales? And do natural attacks get modifiers? Shouldn't they?

This is something that I liked the idea of but I don't think AD&D got right (as I recall this is something that was also in the original edition rules, starting with Greyhawk I believe.) AD&D 2nd edition handled this better in my opinion. As I recall, every type of armor received bonuses and penalties vs. three types of attacks - blunt, piercing, and slashing. Each weapon listed what types of attacks it could make. Not quite as realistic but in my experience this was far more playable.

The best handling of this, in my opinion, is the way the Rolemaster RPG handles this. A large portion of the game is dedicated to tables of weapons vs. armor but cleverly it is the only table you need to refer to. You roll percentile dice, add your offensive bonus, subtract your foe's defensive bonus (which does not include armor), and refer to your weapon's specific table, indexing by your modified roll vs. his armor type to see the effect. This is largely building the game around the concept (much as the Chainmail miniature rules which predated D&D did). Rolemaster also gave each monster an equivalent armor type and included tables for various natural weapons. Back in the 80s I recall a lot of D&D groups used the Rolemaster Arms Law/Claw Law books for their D&D games - and the Rolemaster books encouraged such usage.


As far as speed factor goes... To this day I don't fully understand precisely how it was intended to be used in AD&D 1st edition. From some Googling it seems that its intent was in cases where initiative was a tie (which was reasonably likely given the use of 1d6 for initiative in 1st edition) speed factor would both determine who acted first and it allowed multiple attacks in a round (which was a minute long in AD&D 1st and 2nd editions). This is another area where I think AD&D 2nd edition improved things. There, as in 1st edition, you rolled initiative every round. However in 2nd edition you used a d10 and the speed factor was added to your initiative (making low rolls better). It added some complexity but was an optional rule that I usually ended up using.

Overall, I prefer AD&D 1st edition to its 2nd but looking back on it I can definitely see some areas where 2nd edition made much-needed improvements to the rules. Of course they also took away demons, devils, daemons from its monster list and removed assassins and half-orcs from the Players Handbook... (Boo...)

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Player vs. Character Abilities

On a recent Google+ conversation I found myself discussing what makes an "old school" D&D game. Part of the conversation involved whether throttling back character abilities is what makes something old school. For example, in AD&D your magic-user can cast a single 1st level spell once per day at first level. He might have as few as 1 hit point and can wear no armor nor master the weapons of a fighter. In the 3rd edition of D&D your 1st level wizard may have multiple spells per day with high intelligence, is guaranteed to start off with at least 4 hit points (barring low constitution), can wear armor if he wants to risk spell failure, can learn how to use fighter weapons, etc. Moving on to 4th edition this wizard at 1st level now has an unlimited amount of magic missiles available to him.

Clearly character abilities, especially at low levels, is something that has increased with newer editions of the game. I'd argue that is certainly part of what one finds in an old school game.

Another part of the equation I would venture is the difference between games that test players vs. those that test characters. In newer incarnations of D&D your character's abilities are far more spelled out. Any character can search for traps or sneak around, it is a simple matter of rolling his or her skill vs. a difficulty. In original "white box" D&D there are no general skills. With AD&D 1st edition we see the introduction of secondary skills. This was very basic - the Dungeon Masters Guide had a table of possible former professions for player characters to give an idea as to the types of things a character might be able to do outside the bounds of his class. The 1st edition Oriental Adventures book expanded on the AD&D concept of weapon proficiencies to double as a rough skill system with non-weapon proficiencies, an idea which was made a bit more formal with the Dungeoneer and Wilderness Survival Guides and made a part of the core rules with the 2nd edition of AD&D. Personally I found the non-weapon proficiency system to be rather mediocre - you received only a small number of them and improving them was something you could only do every few levels. With its 3rd edition D&D moved to a full skill system where many character abilities became linked to skills. In my opinion the skill system developed in 3rd edition is far superior to the non-weapon proficiency system introduced in later 1st edition books.

However, I'm uncertain if D&D always needs a skill system. This isn't to say skills are some newfangled idea that we must huff at with disdain. After all Chaosium's RuneQuest, introduced in 1978, and Game Designers' Workshop's Traveller, from 1977, both had skill systems. So skills are far from a new innovation, even if it did take D&D until the year 2000 to really fully integrate them.

What I've observed in my own experience is what a difference a tightly integrated skill system makes in the way D&D is played. In older versions of D&D it often seemed to me the goal was to challenge the players. There were devices, traps, dungeons, etc. whose challenges were primarily directed at players. In newer versions of D&D a large part of that challenge has been siphoned off to the characters run by the players. I don't want to give the impression that I'm saying all games of 3rd edition or later are simply exercises in dice rolling with no player creativity to be found. I've played and/or DM-ed all versions of D&D except for the original white box and I've found ample opportunity for player creativity. But what I'd see in later editions is a lot more looking at character sheets to see who will perform a given action. Bob thinks of an awesome bluff to get past the guards but Mary's character has a higher fast-talk skill so Mary's character goes to talk to the guard. Mary thinks of a way to solve a puzzle but Bob's character has a better disable device skill. I know a lot of people reading this will say "that's not a bug, that's a good thing". And I can see that point. I'm not a believer in such a thing as badwrongfun or "one true way".

However without such a strong skill system I've found players often do a lot more out of the box thinking. And to be honest, this requires game masters to also do a lot more out of the box thinking as well, which I tend to view as a good thing, despite usually being GM - the way I figure it, it's only fair if I too have to react to a changing set of circumstances. There's such a thing as taking this too far. A common argument is that a character will often have knowledge that a player won't and I tend to agree with this. If my character has lived in a medieval village all my life chances are my character has better wilderness survival skills than I do, even if he's not a ranger or druid. I think the key to handling this in an older school game is having the players leverage their character's knowledge. This often involves a give and take between the player and GM as they discuss what is reasonable for a character to know or be capable of.

There are issues that can make this model work less well for some groups - it requires the GM to adjudicate rulings on the fly very frequently, something which can be tricky to do, especially consistently. But it can make for a very different style of gaming experience and one that I feel is worth trying out.

One of the things I've enjoyed about many of the newer "old school" games is how they deal with the issue of character skill. Dungeon Crawl Classics takes a hybrid of 1st edition's secondary skill system with the 3.x skill resolutions. Adventurer Conqueror King System gives access to a very basic proficiency system which gives characters access to abilities that are somewhere between feats and skills. Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy formalizes the "x in 6" task resolution implied in the D&D Basic/Expert rules into a skill system, making its specialist character the only type who can readily improve such skills. None of these skill systems are so extensive as to preventing the give and take that I described above but they provide a basic foundation which avoids everything falling into "GM fiat".

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