Hacking 2e: Skills and the Nonweapon Proficiency System – Part 3 (Animals, Art, and Feats)

The last post established the background feature – allowing the Secondary Skills system to directly interface with Nonweapon Proficiencies – and tossing all the other ‘career’ NWPs. I also took skills related to knowledge, scrapped language/literacy NWPs, condensed the list, and bundled it under a general Knowledge skill. I pulled Religion out of the pile to remain a separate skill.

Let’s move on to the animal stuff.

 

1. Animals

NWP	Slots	Ability	Modifier	Category
Animal Handling	1	Wisdom	–1	General
Animal Lore	1	Intelligence	0	Warrior
Animal Training	1	Wisdom	0	General

 

Animal Lore is just a Knowledge: (Nature) check. This makes it a little less specific, but the player can provide the specificity as needed. I do find it amusing that the NWP got locked into the Warrior group, presumably for the Ranger.

Animal Training only offers the ability to train or tame one type of animal, to later be used as a hunter, tracker, fighter, and so on. It’s a cool feature, but it doesn’t need to be its own skill; I’m all for just handing it to Animal Handling.

That leaves us with a single Animal Handling skill to cover everything related to animal interaction, which I’ll leave with Wisdom.

An extra benefit is that Animal Handling is a familiar skill for the modern D&D player – though 4e bundled it into Nature checks, because it just had to be different. I will always support anything that helps a 5e player acclimatize to 2e design.

Three skills into one. Sort of. Moving right along.

 

2. Art and Performance

NWP	Slots	Ability	Modifier	Category
Artistic Ability	1	Wisdom	0	General
Dancing	1	Dexterity	0	General
Juggling	1	Dexterity	–1	Rogue
Musical Instrument	1	Dexterity	–1	Priest, Rogue
Singing	1	Charisma	0	General
Ventriloquism	1	Intelligence	–2	Rogue

 

Dancing allows you to dance, while Juggling gives you a chance to catch a dagger in midair, and also juggle. There’s a minor power imbalance, so the first order is to strip these NWPs of their feat-like extras and varied caveats, and just take the skill at face value.

Next, there are multiple skills given here to represent various artistic acts. These can be consolidated, using 3e’s Performance skill as a template. This is another of 3e’s umbrella skills which neatly fold multiple skills into one. Based on the above, that’ll easily incorporate everything. Performance, it is.

As with Knowledge, I’ll just provide five examples, so I think we can toss the very weird Ventriloquism skill. I want to know the name of the 2e playtester who was using Ventriloquism so much that they felt the need to provide three paragraphs and a table. It’s just so bizarrely specific.

 

3. Feats and Abilities

NWP	Slots	Ability	Modifier	Category
Astrology	2	Intelligence	0	Priest, Wizard
Blind-fighting	2	N/A	N/A	Rogue, Warrior
Direction Sense	1	Wisdom	+1	General
Endurance	2	Constitution	0	Warrior
Healing	2	Wisdom	–2	Priest
Herbalism	2	Intelligence	–2	Priest, Wizard
Jumping	1	Strength	0	Rogue
Mountaineering	1	N/A	N/A	Warrior
Reading Lips	2	Intelligence	–2	Rogue
Running	1	Constitution	–6	Warrior
Swimming	1	Strength	0	General
Weather Sense	1	Wisdom	–1	General

 

The mother lode. These are the pseudo-feats, which outshine the other skills. They provide far more than what is written on the tin; they each have specialized rules which determine how these ‘talents’ shake out. It might be best to go one by one for this group, starting with the first half.

 

3.1. Astrology

Coming out of the gate strong, this NWP allows characters to predict the future. The book provides some guidance on how to be kind to your DM and not ruin their life with this. It also comes with a +1 bonus to navigation-based skill checks when you can see the stars.

This seems a bit much for a skill. It doesn’t have much application without a roll, and it is horrifically overpowered. It’s also impeding on the magic users’ territory. This shouldn’t be a skill; it should be a spell.

 

3.2. Blind-fighting

One of two straight-up feats, it reduces the penalties for fighting in the dark. This NWP has no associated Ability Score, because you never roll against it. It’s a completely passive feature.

In the first entry in this series, user Sam suggested that combat-related NWPs could be moved to weapon proficiencies, and that’s probably the best bet for this thing. Being able to fight without sight is a cool ability and should be retained. Just not in the skills section.

 

3.3. Direction Sense

A chance to know your direction, with some rules for getting it wrong and a 5% passive bonus to the getting-lost percentile roll subrule. The passive and active features don’t really work together. If you passed the check and know which way you’re going, why would you need the bonus to avoid getting lost? And if you failed and think you’re going a way that you aren’t, why would the DM need to roll again to determine if you’re lost? You’re going the wrong way; you’re getting lost.

I like this weird skill, but it’ll work better if you always passively know your direction, but need to roll for it when you can’t see the sky or have no view of landmarks, such as in a deep wood or the dungeon.

 

3.4. Endurance

This lets you perform ‘continual strenuous physical activity for twice as long’, in a game that only has length restrictions for long overland travelling and an optional set of jogging/running rules. It also doesn’t work with hunger or thirst.

This isn’t a skill; it’s a duplication of the Constitution ability. I think I can scrap this and leave it for the Ability Check to handle.

 

3.5. Healing and Herbalism

This Healing skill, and how one heals in 2e, requires a longer post somewhere down the line.

Healing does the following:

1. Roll to heal 1d3 per day per character
2. Roll to reduce a disease to its mildest forms (can only identify magical disease)
3. Passively grant 1 – 2hp per day of additional natural healing (based on activity)
4. Passively grant poisoned characters a +2 to their saving throw (only for poisoned wounds, not ingested or touched)

That second feature is interesting, considering that 2e appears to have no explicit rules on disease or the severity thereof. 1e has these rules if you’re in need, and of course they’re hysterically detailed. Looks like I’ll need to pilfer from that edition for a disease table.

There are also various requirements baked into these rules, such as needing to address the wound/poison within one round of the event, or having to tend to the character for multiple rounds.

Herbalism gives characters the ability to create nonmagical potions, balms, ointments, and so on, for ‘medical and pseudo-medical purposes’, with no guidance whatsoever on how these work. It also allows the creation of poisons, the strength of which is decided by the DM. Most of Herbalism’s extra features are found in Healing’s entry, as you need both NWPs to activate them. These are:

1. Passively grant an additional 1hp per day of natural healing when resting completely
2. Grant the poison saving throw bonus to ingested or touched poisons
3. Gain a +2 bonus when attempting to reduce the severity of a disease

Frankly, I don’t see a point in keeping these separate. Not only does it add complication, but all the things that the Herbalist does is everything I’d expect a Healer to be able to accomplish, at least in this pseudo-Medieval setting. So, they’re getting smashed together. The only thing lost here is the poison creation feature, which I’ll figure out another time.

Without heavily nerfing (or entirely removing) this new amalgamated Healing skill, it’s going to need to keep some of its feat-like features. I think it’s mostly good as is, as it provides benefits both passively and when testing the skill. It can be simplified a bit, though.

Let’s make the active healing feature a flat 2hp, similar to the Paladin’s Lay on Hands feature. I’ll keep the disease reduction feature intact, with no bonus. For the natural healing passive bonus, I’ll keep it at 1hp for travelling and 2hp for complete rest; we don’t need to include the extra 1hp that Herbalism would have granted, the current bonus is good enough. The passive +2 Saving Throw bonus for poison (Death, in this hack – see here) is fiddly but worth keeping, without limitation on the poison source.

 

4. Intermission

I’ve knocked enough stuff over for today. That’s fifteen NWPs, about a quarter of the total, smashed into four skills: Animal Handling, Performance, Direction Sense, and Healing. I’ve also added some to-dos to the ledger: a prognostication spell, the implementation of feat-like abilities to the weapon proficiencies, and some clarity of using Constitution checks to push oneself.

Performance is a bit of a cheat (like Knowledge), and Healing is definitely unbalanced compared to something like Direction Sense. All according to plan. Next time, we’ll finish the feats and look at riding skills.