Thursday, August 1, 2013

So, Castles & Crusades, Where My Mad Skillz At?

Okay, so we're all settling into this new Castles & Crusades game by our buddy Kaiser.  Since C&C is one of the now all too numerous spawn of the D&D old school revival (OSR) it dispenses with frivolous and complicated stuff like, oh, skills.  Instead it uses old fashioned attribute checks but introduces the idea of primary and secondary attributes.  Humans get three primaries, but demi-humans only two.  One of the character's primaries is determined by the class chosen, but the other(s) is chosen by the player.  Checks against a primary attribute have a challenge class of 12 and those against a secondary a higher challenge class of 18; these can be modified by the GM a bit for circumstances.  The player adds the character's level and the bonus of the attribute in question to the d20 roll against it.

Sadly this is as close as C&C gets to any sort of skill system.  For my illusionist, The Amazing Trevor, I made Dexterity one of the primaries so he'd be good at magic tricks, sleight of hand, etc.  But that's a pretty lame way to express character background.  Trevor is supposed to have grown up as a city urchin who ran away and joined a traveling carnival and became a magician.  By the start of the game he'd already have a few years of practice under his belt.  In Pathfinder terms he'd probably be multi-classed rogue/wizard or rogue/sorcerer with plenty of skills appropriate to exactly that background.  But in C&C all I can do to express all that is to make Dexterity a primary attribute.  It's kind of lame.

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