Dungeon Crawl Classics: Skill System

Appendix R of the Dungeon Crawl Classics rules tells judges to "expand the game to suit their own style." I don't mind if I do.

I can borrow parts from other games, such as the equipment lists, encumbrance rules, monsters, treasure tables, and magic items. I don't need to recreate the wheel; I shall if the game says to borrow it. Both Swords & Wizardry and OSRIC are excellent primary sources, and you can go right either way.

I alternate between OSRIC and S&W as my primary game, and I love both. There is no reason to limit yourself to just one, honestly. S&W is more 1974 and closer to the inspiration. OSRIC is the ultra-detailed 1980s first-edition game I grew up with.

But I am thinking of a skill system for DCC that is different from the horrid, exploitable, and complicated system that 3.5E and Pathfinder 1e turned the skill system into. In those games, you have a high INT and join a skill-generous class; you need to catch up; who cares about skills in this all-or-nothing system?

I don't want skill points, but I want players to be able to specialize or pick new background skills as they level. I like the system to work as it does, with occupation and class being the prime drivers for what your character is considered "trained" in, along with the unskilled penalty. Things should work precisely as they do but give you options to expand, specialize, or narrow the focus of your character's knowledge.

And it has to be simple.

It also has to leverage DCC mechanics and the dice chain.

But it should not blow the existing balance and challenge out of the water.

It should not replace the existing skill system.

It is so easy to go overboard with add-on rules that I could bolt on a complicated skill system that puts Rolemaster FRP to shame, but that is not DCC to me. "Great designer intentions" often make for horrible games, and I can't even count the games ruined by skill systems over the years. There is this "designer justification" for putting players through endless math, writing skills down, or pure hell in record keeping that just shows a lack of care and through on the designer's part, and a bull-headed ramming through playtesting of skill systems that should have been tossed in the garbage.

Yes, you already have a class system; why do you need skills on top of that? You better have a good reason, and you better not be invalidating or weakening classes to add a skill system that the class should primarily define. What galls me the most is a game presenting the idea of a class and then giving you a skill list of the class that the class has or is trained in.

Why did we need that class again? To make a few skills cost less? Why isn't this a skill-based system again? A game that uses classes as "skill containers," ain't it. Wizards always steal the worst rules to put into D&D, and it shows.

I am now typing up a beta for my rules and will test it on my next playthrough. I have a document I am keeping my expansion and optional rules, and if all goes well, I may publish this as a book of optional "Advanced DCC" rules that I use in my games.