It is all about player skill. In a world where everyone is told what their character can do, it is rare to find inventive players. Video games, and most RPGs now, tell us that saving someone or talking to them, is often just a way to get stabbed in the back later. In game you kill them now and loot. Old school D&D didn't always favor that play type. Defaulting to a route answer got you killed more often than inventive solutions. Looking around often saved you much more than rushing through the place forcing doors...not that we didn't force doors.

I like your definition of Player Skill. I remember participating in a game as a player as the GM tried to explain a stone door that would slam shut behind us. All of the players assumed they were trapped. However, I knew one of us was a wild shaping Druid. I pestered the player about taking an animal form that could burrow through the dirt floor. The druid player looked to the GM in bewilderment, not knowing he could do anything like that. He was just treating his wild shapes as pokemon: throwing them into fights and nothing else. He never once thought to use his animal forms to solve problems like the stone-slamming door.

I fully resound your sentiment. I played in the late 90s, with a DM who was older, and had run games at gencon. We played 2e. But he house ruled a fair bit to hold true to the vibes he grew up on. As an older male mentor, as well as DM, he made a point to teach us through game, many lessons in forethought, preparedness, and how to read a room. These skills are invaluable as a real person, and more fun and safe to practice in fantasy than real life. Life skills, are a prerequisite to player skill. But can luckily be learned simultaneously, via simulation. To be fair... My limited play in 3.5, 4, and now 5e, have offered frustration, due to the systems getting in the way of my natural flow to solve problems organically. As you mentioned about 5e. It's a real thing. Like... If you don't have a tool proficiency, you can't even make a crap version of a thing? Breeds conformist play styles. 5e is smooth. With a good DM who "gets it" I imagine it could be very fun.

What you describe is precisely what is most interesting about D&D for me! That’s what the fame was built for, IMO. I look forward to an episode on the creative use of spells!

It's definitely very easy to get lazy, even us old schoolers, when it comes to characters with skills - A Thief checks for traps, Dm rolls, reports yay or nay, then move on. Where if a player actually describes what they're looking for, say a trap for isntance, and they happen to be spot on - there's no reason the DM shouldn't let them find what they're looking for., whether or not they're a thief.

Another informative and thought provoking video from Bandits Keep! I am mostly in agreement with the opinions expressed herein regarding "player skill" - creative or imaginative problem solving using the environment, resources and COMMON SENSE. Think about the game of Poker. Trying something not at all likely to work seldom pays off. Same can be said for D&D. Investigation also falls under the category of player skill. Players who take time to ask around town, visit a sage or consult volumes of lost history should find clues, riddles and some advance knowledge of both dangers and treasures. The riddle is what makes S1 so awesome. Well, that's my opinion. Cheers!

We see what you are talking about quite often in movies and books where the situation robs the Hero of some technology we have come to rely on --> no cell coverage, for example, or the only road into town is blocked by snow. Oh no! Now what do I do? Forcing the players to, in your words, remember how they used to do things before they had magic items and spells to do it is essentially the same thing. I do it from time to time in my scenarios. It is a good way to keep players on their toes. Also, a video on Treasure Maps would be great. Your content is always useful and provocative!

On the subject of illusions... back in the days of AD&D, the Unearthed Arcana gave magic users and illusionists the option to memorize four cantrips in place of a 1st level spell. There was an illusionist cantrip Two-D'lusion that basically created a phantasmal force image, but if it was viewed from an angle greater than 45-degrees then it was obvious as a two-dimensional image. I quickly discovered that this cantrip allowed me to avoid combat with groups of goblins and kobolds because I could cast the illusion in front of a wall that was facing the enemy, and I would do an illusion of a magical gate opening to another plane with monsters waiting beyond the gate. Low level enemies would see it, fail their morale checks, and run away. Further proof that even low-level illusions can be powerful when combined with player creativity and skill.

I really had a lot of fun with my Illusionist back in the day. Third edition really ruined the class for me. The spell rules became so specific that it crimped the creativity that is required to run an illusionist.

LACK of player skill cost me two PCs in an OSE game. Borsk, the Half-Orc had scouted ahead and we heard him die by a fire-jet trap. The party advanced, found the fire trap, still hot but now inactive (probably out of fuel), but Borsk’s body was gone. We saw it later, lying in the middle of an intersection. His pal Thigmon, the Thief rushed ahead to retrieve Borsk’s body. That was a rash decision! Kobolds had moved the corpse there and set up a little crossfire. They perforated Thigmon from three directions. It was a hard loss for me but a great moment for the game!

I love the idea of letting the players use creative and out of the box ideas for solving problems

I would love a video on Treasure Maps! There isn’t much content on there for creating an engaging treasure map which is strange because it’s apart of the treasure rolls in B/X. They don’t always have to be a physical piece of paper too they can take the form of a riddle or strange object.

The other side of this is DM skill and creating trust between players and the DM so players learn to try outside the box thinking. If this is lacking the players learn to only rely on the rules.

Excellent comments and examples. As someone that has played since 70s and the very first editon and all sets after you bring up some excellent truths about the evolution of players mindsets and experienced players.

Great video as usual, Daniel. Here are my thoughts. I would actually separate out what you are calling “player skill” from something else that you describe that I will most lovingly refer to as munchkin. Player skill to me is something the player does during actual play, such as the examples you gave towards the end with your players (using the shield to scoop away the gray ooze). Munchkin is a close cousin to meta gaming that is done outside of actual play, but greatly influences play. The example you gave for 3.5/Pathfinder of knowing how to combine Feats and skills and items to produce the most statistically beneficial outcome is an example of what I mean, as is a Rogue in 5E always standing next to an ally in melee to get the sneak attack benefit. Both player skill and munchkin are fine, both are beneficial, but I am not sure I would say they are the same. Another piece of data that makes them seem like different things to me is that at least in my experience, highly skilled players are not always good munchkins, and effective munchkins don’t always have a lot if player skill. I would, maybe incorrectly, think that if they were the same thing, these two activities would be more highly correlated within the same player. I know this is the “old guy” in me talking, and I know your play experience was similar to mine back then, but back in the late 70s/early 80s when we were playing AD&D and B/X after it came out we just interpreted the rules differently. The way we looked at it, the rules for things outside of combat were there to save the character when the player messed up. This also somewhat relates to why Thief Skill percentages are so low at low levels. By this I mean, for example, if a player was playing an elf in B/X and said the elf was searching for a secret door in a room and indicated that the elf was searching in the location where tge secret door is located, no roll was made. The elf found it because the player had the elf looking in the place where the secret door is and they were explicitly looking for a secret door. So they found it. However, if the player said the elf was searching in a room for a secret door but was not looking in the place where the secret door was located, that’s when we would roll a d6 to see if the elf happened to notice it even though they were looking in the wrong place because the rule says that elves when looking for secret door find them on 1-2 on a d6 roll. We interpreted that rule to mean they had this chance even when the player messed up and had them look in the wrong place. If they weren’t looking for secret doors at all, then no roll because it says they have to be engaged in the activity of looking for secret doors to get ghe roll. Same for a thief searching for traps. If the player said their thief was looking for a trap inside a keyhole on a chest and there was a poison needle trap inside the keyhole the thief found it, no roll needed. But if the trap was actually a gas trap associated with the hinges on the chest, not where the thief was looking from the player’s description, that’s when we would roll percentage dice to see if the thief noticed the gas trap even though they were looking in the wrong place. But the thief would get no roll if they were not searching for traps at all. I am not saying we were right in interpreting the rules in this way, but it does I think speak to a different view we had back in the day about player skill and what the “game” actually was. This particular elf character will find on average 1/3 of the secret doors if they look for them when played by a player who has lower player skill (for example not knowing typical locations for secret doors to be). But in the hands of a highly skilled player, that same elf character will find nearly all of the secret doors in a dungeon if they look for them because they will look in the right places and even when they don’t they will find 1/3 of those doors they miss on the first pass. And for us, this was the way it was supposed to be and made complete sense to us.

I find that this works for players that started with OSR type games. On the other hand, I and others have argued that in some of these dead end scenarios that the players themselves cannot figure out that the character they are playing may in all likelihood be smarter than they are. So, allowing some sort of skill roll to figure out a frustrating situation seems to make sense. I do want the players to figure out clever ways to figure out sticky situations but if that grinds the fun to a halt, sometimes a "skill roll" is a better option...especially if it moves the game forward. What do you think?

Hi great video, in BECMI there are a suplement Gazetteer #1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos (Mystara) that gives you the choice to use skills

The training dungeon you're thinking of is Tomb of the Serpent Kings. My players definitely enjoyed it.

I think the kind of game you're describing with traps and obstacles that require problem solving is a lot more interesting than customizing a PC by choosing all the right features in a huge rule book. I feel baffled in my 5e group when the magic users hold up the game by looking up just the right spell and all the rules and components they should have brought for it to work. That's just not a kind of "skill" I want to be good at, like shopping for character feats & abilities that you simply roll for to solve the dungeon. I am way more interested in the situations you described!

Awesome stuff. 😊 Player skills are also relationship skills, and while generally consistent, will be to some degree specific to particular DMs, since their personal styles vary.

I think player skill is player growth which is the magic i love to see as a DM

Great video, and timely. I was just having a similar discussion with a friends / player of mine this evening; that is, the idea of player skill as you put it. Very poignant. Thanks.

Great stuff as always 👏

Great point, there is also room in the discussion for GM skill - the GM must recognize and reward the player skill. In your example with the hidden door, the GM could have easily said after you failed the hidden door check that there was no door regardless of the poking and prodding - due to the failed roll.

Very cool video. Very cool video. It sounds like you’re saying that player skill is being familiar with the old tropes of the game which is totally cool. It also seems like it’s just another word for creativity which is also totally cool. Very cool stuff, dude

It's always a pleasure to see you have made a new video! I hope to run my first OSE dungeon in a couple of weeks, I am going to trap my mom, my brother and my girlfriend in an ancient dwarf/giant peace memorial. I hope both me and the PC will grow up in skill as we go. Also, even though it's mostly 5e, I heartily recommend Baron de Ropp's channel, it's full of real-life inspiration for your games, and he's like the bard to your mage.

What a great video. Nice one.

I am voting YES for a vid on illusions!!

I'd certainly like to hear a vid from you on illusionist. I enjoy your style of videos.

i vote yes for an illusions video. my first D&D rulebook i bought was a second hand PHB for AD&D 2e and a character sheet was in there for somebody's 7th level gnome illusionist. id love to have some insight into using illusions as a player, and using illusions as a GM

We played ToH a while back. My players all knew it was a notorious "death trap" convention module. As a result, everyone played SUPER cautious and only interacted with things when they absolutely had to... It was quite dull as a result. Interesting video on player skill. I think there's definitely value in it, but also think just because your system has skills etc doesnt mean you cant have that same player skill approach too. On the other hand, very high reliance on player skill can devolve into "standard operating procedures" - ok, another door, we poke it with a pole, use wand of detect magic, we check it for traps, we get out the listening cone, etc etc"... Which defeats the purpose of creative approaches in the first place.

I had a similar experience in my B2 Campaign in Cave G where the Grey Ooze and Owlbear is the party tried to lure the Ooze in the path of the Owlbear. In that situation I rolled a Monster Reaction towards the Grey Ooze and the Owlbear, the Owlbear chose to ignore the Ooze the Ooze missed and the Owlbear went after the Party. If the Ooze would have hit lol, I would have a very interesting fight for sure on my hands.

Very nice video on a difficult and subtle subject. A reflection on my side: first comes in the player’s skills and then only in some instances the character’s. What I mean is that the player should think what to do in the circumstance (what you referred to as “out of the box” thinking) and if the action has chances of failure or is particular tricky a roll might be necessary to determine the outcome. A well targeted search for a secret door shouldn’t need a roll (the door is hidden by a tapestry and you explicitly look behind it), whereby some act of physical prowess to overcome a trap might require a roll. I like the different perspective you bring to the game with your videos!

Hey new sub here, love your calm and informative style, great vid. I do want to hear more about illusions because I want to have my players go through a forest they believe to be full of undead, but it's actually the illusion magic of a Faerie Dragon that's taken an interest in the party. Wanted to reply about the Tales From the Yawning Portal question (SPOILERS BTW?). I'm only 24 yo, started DMing over a year ago as a creative outlet, my friends obviously benefit from it a lot. I ran Sunless Citadel in 5e for them while still pretty new and it was my first experience running a singular, solid dungeon adventure. One main thing is they picked up on a lot of hints about the bad guy at the end, Belak, and used a spell scroll of scorching ray they found earlier to burn the Gulthias Tree, turning Belak's thralls against him and ultimately winning the big end encounter through player skill. What I noticed is that there were subtleties that they picked up on from the module that I didn't intend, so that leads me to think that dungeon held up at least OK in 5e. Obviously I'm fresh blood in this great tradition, just wanted to give you my input! Thanks!

Great stuff Dan! It is weird when you have very experienced players playing inexperienced characters. I find they either play them too intelligently, basically metagaming, or they try so hard not to be too smart, that they actually do really stupid things. I would love to see video on illusions! I think that is one of the most difficult and annoying thing for me to DM through.

Flour is better than chalk dust for invisible enemies, it can be used as an area of effect flame attack! In AD&D, illusions were great, but not as effective in the newer editions! My gnome illusionist had all kinds of illusions and each had a word to identify it to my teammates, so they didn't have to save vs my "fireball"! : )

It's hilarious how this video comes up as I decided to DM the 5E version of Tomb of Horrors 😂 but we have some house rules to counter perception rolls every 5 ft. Wish me luck Daniel 👍

Fred is spot-on, below! Nice video, Daniel! Page121 is indeed a great channel. 👍 What I generally mean by this subject is Non-character-sheet play... although you do refer to that sheet and utilize it along the way. 👍IMHO though...play the way that's best for you and your group.

The other week, running an ongoing OSE adventure. The players discovered a troll was attacking a ranchers cattle. So they made a plan. They hired a mining crew to dig a 13 foot deep pit (they hit bedrock about 8 feet down, so they couldn't do it anymore), and filled the pit with oily rags, and made sure the opening was smaller than the pit itself making a kind of oubliette. They covered the trap up, and the illusionist created the illusion of a steer standing on the pit trap, they also put a bunch of fresh cow patties on it to simulate the smell. Sure enough the troll ran over and fell in the pit, they lit it on fire, and discovered, oh no! The troll was still hanging onto the lip! So they fired arrows, and oil flasks, and sling bullets at its hands to make it let go. Eventually it fell in and cooked to death, it had no means of escape. They did their research on the enemy they were facing, made a good plan, hired experts to assist, and executed it! Great OSR gaming moment.

I DM'ed Tomb of Horrors once. The thief came in with knowledge that the entire place is a death trap, so he started out telling the group to stand back while he went forward. He would search for traps, move forward 10 feet and search for traps again, move forward another 10 feet and search again. Every single time that he came to the decision that "this corridor does not have traps" and stopped spending time on trap searching, he ended up stumbling on a trap 10 to 20 feet later.

Great video may share it to teh groups I am working at converting from 5ed over to my OSR system

I would love to see an illusion video.

i remember challenging my group to play tomb of horrors. I really hyped up how lethal it was beforehand. That dungeon is what taught me to telegraph and play in an OSE style way. Even though i only ever played 3.5 at the time, out of necessity, it kinda fell into place. I allowed them to bring in one magic item subject to my approval, and i gotta say, a portable hole and immovable rod helped a lot until that one player did something reckless and exploded the whole party with hellfire.

I think it’s the players game experience with regard to the method and mechanics of the game for problem solving/skills are a factor the GM needs to consider. My approach is to draw actions from players what are you going to do and assign a target number 10 easy, 15 challenging and 20 hard if the players has any sort of skill bonus or applicable attribute bonus l let them apply. D&D 3rd and 3.5 where heavy on skills and they where broad enough to capture most scenarios. I think the point of the video is to get the players to tell you what they are doing what resources they are consuming against the risk and then adjudicate, not simply rely on a perception check. On the flip side it can slow game play down. Another good video.

One of my favorite things to do in 5e games is use mage hand to carry a torch about 10 ft in front of the party. Cantrips can be crazy powerful in that game with just a little imagination.

I would love a video about illusions

I feel like old school skill is something that modern, experienced players tend to lose. I run old-school style d&d games with my young kids and they are very good at it - they are naturally averse to combat and stuff like dropping food for monsters is just common sense to them. But that's because they have no notions of what a tabletop RPG is about, and I've tried to avoid going overly heavy on the die rolls and mechanics outside of the bare minimum. It does remind me a bit of video games. I've played video games for 35 years now and you learn a lot of what you usually can and can't do in one. When I watch someone new to video games try some they try all sorts of things that I never would have tried because it (usually!) just doesn't work. The interesting situations are when something they try does actually work.

I would love a video on illusions.

Honestly, I would argue that if you want to experience the Original modules from the older editions, you need to experience them with an Old-school character (Pre-2nd Edition AD&D) and find a DM who maybe has a copy of it and can run a good campaign for you and a group of friends. I never recommend any of these 5E proxies, they have lost something, and the characters are way too powerful for the adapted scenarios to bring the same "feeling" that was conveyed by the original modules.

This is the first time somebody referred to this as 'player skill'. But it's definitely more fun to solve in game problems with mundane means and out-of-the-box thinking, rather than relying on your character's 'deus-ex-machina' magic bag of spells and tricks. Not involving the environment, improvised actions, and creative problem-solving into the narrative of TTRPGs is a huge missed opportunity IMO.

I wouldn't call worrying about wandering monsters meta. Sure it *sounds* metagamey when the players say let's minimize wandering monster rolls; but on the flip side it's *very* in-character to be like let's do this as quickly and quietly as possible to avoid attracting attention. "We mustn't linger. "

It's not a game without challenge!

Can you remember the name of the "OSR thinking" teaching module?

Random question, what is the art piece in the thumbnail?

😫 Daniel, I was enjoying this video… and then you warned us about spoilers of the Tomb of Horrors, so I stopped (I appreciate the warning). I am eager to be a player in the Tomb of Horrors, and don’t want to spoil the experience with spoilers…. Please make videos without spoilers, Daniel… or at least tell us in the description when the spoilers end, so we can skip past the spoilers and listen to the rest of the video. 🙂

Our New Game at Better Games - Space Pyrates OSR shows lots of promise

I’m a new dnd player and can’t get a group to play and don’t like the idea of online play I’ve been trying to play a solo campaign of dragon of ice spire peak and I dislike how it switches to combat and it feels boring ? Any ideas to make it more fun

Looking even further back from B/X to O D&D, character stats had very little impact on the game. In keeping with player skill, I wonder if stats are necessary

I think that the idea that 5th edition players do not engage in this definition of player skill just isn’t true. I’ve been behind the screen for a while now and 5e players have accomplished the same kind of feats. They’ve used my traps against me, used the basic tools to climb into alternate entrances, manipulated multiple factions, by passed whole prepared sections by digging underneath places, and other countless examples of non magically dealing with a problem. And i think the idea that someone’s looking at their character sheet to hard isn’t a thing. Its never disrupted my game and they’re usually just brainstorming their next moves more than staring at the words uselessly. It makes me wonder about the kind of games people experience, and if the table that i run is just different than normal. Even my wizards have never been able to just “Lol magic” their way through everything.

I love how OSR folk always equate poking things with sticks with player skill. 90% of what they consider player skill is metagaming... "Well I know this module" "well traps are expected" "well always investigate every crack". I wanna make an OSR challenge that is 'one room with a bunch of irregular tiles and a door at the end' and watch then spend 2 sessions poking every tile with a stick while modern players walk across and leave.

You always sound like you're whispering. Like your wife or baby is trying to sleep in the next room and you're trying to be quiet.