Hacking 2e: Skills and the Nonweapon Proficiency System – Part 5 (Roguish Skills and Survival)

Last time, I threw most of the reviewed Nonweapon Proficiencies over the side of the ship. For this final review of the NWPs, we’ll look at Thief-adjacent NWPs and the Survival skills.

 

1. Roguish Skills

NWP	Slots	Ability	Modifier	Category
Disguise	1	Charisma	-1	Rogue
Forgery	1	Dexterity	-1	Rogue
Gaming	1	Charisma	0	Rogue, Warrior
Tightrope Walking	1	Dexterity	0	Rogue
Tumbling	1	Dexterity	0	Rogue

 

These are all the NWPs that seem squarely in the Rogue’s domain. We could quibble about Gaming, as the Warrior has easy access to it, though it feels right here. Also eligible for this table is Appraising, Juggling, Ventriloquism, and Reading Lips, though I’m fine with where I placed them before.

Let’s dig in.

 

1.1. Disguise

This allows you to disguise yourself as “any general type of person of about the same height, age, weight, and race” with a successful check. Disguising oneself as another race or sex is possible at a –7 penalty and as a specific person at a –10.

I like this skill. It’s a one-trick pony, but it’s an option that makes the player brainstorm a particular type of character. It’s also not easily represented by an Ability Score.

To keep it useful outside of testing the score, I’d just remove the check for ‘general type of person’ disguises. Let the character change appearance like a spy walking through a department store; if they want to look radically different or be recognizable as the Duke’s son, require the check.

 

1.2. Forgery

If I didn’t have duplicitous, ne’er-do-well characters in my current campaign, I’d probably have a low opinion of this one. Thankfully, they’ve been spreading false documents around the City of Doors, so I’m able to properly appreciate how fun this NWP is.

The NWP, as it exists, allows you to create and detect written forgeries on a successful check, with relevant penalties depending on the difficulty. I’d open this up a bit to include forgeries beyond documents, such as art, gems, etc. The ability to detect forgeries should be passive; we can leave the check for the attempt to create those forgeries.

 

1.3. Gaming

This gives you knowledge of games of chance and skill, allowing you to win on a successful check. It does provide the option to “play out the actual game,” if you feel like your AD&D session needed more Texas Hold ‘em. It also allows you to cheat, with a +1 bonus to the score and the threat of getting caught on a 17–20; how that’d work with the ‘play it out’ option is anyone’s guess.

The ability to win at games of chance using a skill feels a bit off; I get that you’d be more familiar with the rules, but dice are dice. It also uses Charisma as the associated Ability Score, which is fine for card sharking, but goofy for something like chess. This is a rare case where the NWP might be too general, as someone good at one game isn’t likely to be good at all games, nor have the ability to cheat at all of them.

Cheating, on the other hand, is a great concept for a skill. I can’t devise a method whereby such a skill would have a passive function. It’d have to operate only on a successful roll; you cheat well or you get caught. Therefore, it belongs in a skill that also has its own passive features.

Disguising, Forging, and Cheating all have one thing in common: they’re all attempts to deceive. For the time being, I’ll argue that these can all be smashed into a single Deception skill. As with other changes, this is one familiar to players coming from 5e. I think it would serve here.

 

1.4. Tightrope Walking

This gives you a plethora of specifics and modifiers for walking and fighting on narrow surfaces. Interestingly, walking on a surface one inch or less in width earns a –10 penalty to the score, meaning that a high Dex PC with the Tightrope Walking skill has a less than 50% chance of actually tightrope walking, unless they threw all their slots at this NWP in order to lower its penalties by one for each slot.

I like that the skill removes the Dex AC bonus, which just makes sense given the activity. I also like that this skill actually provides some passive ability: in this case, you always succeed on attempts to traverse a narrow surface wider than one foot, though I’d say that stretches the definition of narrow.

My modification would be to open the passive ability to traverse (at half speed) any narrow surface greater than 2 inches, and require the check for anything narrower or when trying to maintain balance after being hit by an attack.

3e renamed this ability Balance, which I think was a solid change. 4e introduced the Acrobatics skill, which combined balance and tumbling. This is foreshadowing.

 

1.5. Tumbling

You’re flippy. In comparison to Tightrope Walking, there are less situational rules and more direct feats. It has two passive features: Instead of attacking, you can bob and weave to get a –4 improvement to your AC, and if you’re in unarmed combat, you get a +2 to your Attack Roll. The check is used to reduce fall damage from less than 60 feet.

This is okay. Its restriction on use only when unencumbered is a good choice. It meets the sniff test of providing passive and active uses. However, I think the unarmed combat attack bonus is superfluous (why only unarmed attacks?) and the roll shouldn’t be required for a fall of less than ten feet.

This skill was bundled into Acrobatics by 4e, which was continued in 5e, and for good reason. Sure, tightrope walking and tumbling are both different actions, but they do bleed into each other quite a lot. Both acts suggest a type of internal calibration, a sense of body and balance. It just seems like someone that can walk across roof beams should be able to tuck and roll. Therefore, I’m throwing these both into an Acrobatics skill and bundling all the features with it.

 

2. Survival Skills

NWP	Slots	Ability	Modifier	Category
Fire-building	1	Wisdom	-1	General
Fishing	1	Wisdom	-1	General
Hunting	1	Wisdom	-1	Warrior
Navigation	1	Intelligence	-2	Priest, Warrior, Wizard
Rope Use	1	Dexterity	0	General
Set Snares	1	Dexterity	-1	Rogue, Warrior
Survival	2	Intelligence	0	Warrior
Tracking	2	Wisdom	0	Warrior

 

Did someone say wilderness adventure? A collection of general NWPs and a few for the Ranger, these all provide some type of overworld utility. These could do with some bundling, too.

 

2.1. Fire-building

This is a common one that people will point to when deriding the Nonweapon Proficiency system. “In 1e you were just the type of person who could build a fire; in 2e you needed a special skill to do so.” This isn’t entirely inaccurate. While you could rightly point out that this skill gives you the ability to build fires without a tinderbox, and gives you a check to do it in extremely adverse conditions, the truth is that even these ‘advanced’ efforts at starting a fire probably would have been provided to earlier characters. “Oh, yeah, you’re the kind of person that often sleeps outside, so you’d know how to rub two sticks together to make a fire.” Now, that’s for the proud owner of the Fire-building skill.

Frankly, the only purpose of gating something like this should be to build towards class uniqueness. Yet, this NWP doesn’t even do that; it’s in the General column. This is getting thrown into an eventual and inevitable catch-all Survival skill geared toward Warriors. If the Wizard wants to know how to start a fire without tools, they should need to pay a few more slots, while getting access to other survival-like skills they would have learned along the way.

 

2.2. Fishing and Hunting

These are boilerplate: roll the dice and do the thing. They have no passive functionality, but they do have a collection of mechanics to calculate the number of fish you catch and the distance at which you spot game, along with modifiers for nets and non-hunters in the party. I’m surprised that the entry on hunting ends by declaring that the animal you find is at “the whim of the DM” instead of dropping a full table into the column.

These are, like Fire-building, just things your woodsy character should know how to do if they take the “I’m good at outdoors stuff” skill. None of this should require a check, unless they want to do these things in adverse conditions.

 

2.3. Navigation

This is sea-based Navigation only, and does nothing more than drop the chance of getting lost at sea by 20% if you make the check.

This doesn’t belong here. It should have gone into Backgrounds. Mea culpa.

 

2.4. Rope Use

You are the knot whisperer, a wunderkind of the sheepshank and the double fisherman. You can use this ultimate power to escape from bindings with a check at a –6 penalty. You’re also granted a passive +2 to attack rolls made with a lasso and a +10% bonus when climbing stuff with ropes.

This survived into 3e with the Use Rope skill, but was buried in later editions. Using rope became one of those events where the DM would just make a call, choosing the skill that worked best. This is, I believe, the right answer. A familiarity with knots doesn’t seem the type of thing you should require your players to invest into. How often are the characters encountering situations where intricate knots are the answer? If they have rope and want to tie it off, and failure would matter, then a Dexterity check or applicable experience from a Background should be sufficient to adjudicate it.

 

2.5. Set Snares

This is presented as primarily for trapping game, with a synergistic bonus from Animal Lore. That’s lame; anyone who sees the title of this NWP is immediately thinking of ‘man-traps’, but that is restricted to the Thief, and at a –4 penalty.

This skill can be split up. The process of trapping game goes with Survival. Setting up the tripwire crossbow trap can be given to the Rogue’s Find and Remove Traps skill, since it was only for Thieves anyway. I guess that makes it “Find, Remove, and Set Up Traps,” which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. We’ll come back.

 

2.6. Survival

This anemic excuse for a survival skill forces you to pick one terrain type – arctic, woodland, desert, etc. Within that terrain, it allows you to know the effect of weather to avoid exposure, and it allows you to find food and water on a successful check. Departing from the over-explanation of other NWPs, it doesn’t provide any rules for how much food you find or how avoiding exposure affects your character.

Just to make sure these fantastic abilities don’t unbalance the game, the NWP dedicates a full paragraph to explaining how this skill doesn’t free you from the “horrors and hardships” of the wilderness. “At best it alleviates a small portion of the suffering.” Well, that’s great for the chump who picked it. Why they developed a skill that makes you only sort-of-a-bit-better-but-not-really at surviving outdoors and then titled it “Survival” is beyond me.

The first step in hacking this is to remove the terrain restriction. This makes it more generic, but surviving in adverse conditions is really what this skill is about, and I’m fine if the woodland ranger can still use their experience to find shelter in the tundra.

Next, let’s throw all the previously mentioned skills into it. Hunting, Fishing, and Fire-building all square with Survival, so in they go. Direction sense could go here if I wanted to remove it as a separate skill. I chucked out Weather sense earlier, but this skill seems to already cover that; this overlap means I need to be specific if Knowledge: Nature checks are a thing.

With Survival, you should be able to hunt your food, build your fire, and erect your shelter without a check. If you’re building a fire with damp wood or hunting particularly dangerous game, then it can be tested.

 

2.7. Tracking

Is it almost done? Is this actually the last one?

Our final NWP takes up a full column and is accompanied by two tables. Basically, it’s all granular modifiers to the proficiency check (Table 39), along with requirements for making the check, situations that require additional checks, follow-up rolls for failing the check, and distance restrictions based on the modified score (Table 40). The entire thing is built for the Ranger, as everyone else gets a hearty –6 to the roll.

This could definitely be shoved into Survival, but I think it’s worthy of its own skill. In order to strip the tables and multiple paragraphs from the thing, let’s make it so most tracking attempts are passive: if you have tracking, you can track. If you’re attempting to do so in the rain at night, roll for it.

 

3. Final Intermission

I’ve beaten down the final 13 NWP into four skills. Disguise and Forgery were merged into Deception, while tumbling and balancing were rolled into Acrobatics. Skills that help you Survive were packaged into one Survival skill. The man-trap part of Set Snares was handed to the Thief’s Find and Remove Traps. Tracking retained its independence, Rope Use got the boot, and Navigation wasn’t supposed to be here.

Okay, that’s all 65 Nonweapon Proficiencies. I’m exhausted by them; I’d say I never want to see the words “Nonweapon Proficiency” again, but I named my stupid blog after them.

At this point, I’ve carved the final list down to nine, which is shorter than any skills list from any edition. To mitigate this egregious streamlining, Animal Handling, Knowledge, and Performance are all expandable, and the separate Background skill covers a lot of ground. For the final entry, I need to actually put this all together into a ‘final’ set of Hacked Skills.