From the time he showed up until he was eaten by trolls, Gort of the Shining Force was a very amusing NPC to have in my game.
He was cast as a retired former adventuring hero with a lot of experience but badly deteriorated skills. But it was fun to have him blurt out all sorts of "Back in my days with the Shining Force" reminiscences that could potentially be useful. After all, he was a been-there, done-that, back-in-my-day type of guy.
So I added a new, one-character-only skill to his sheet:
Hidden Lore (Dungeoneering)
This skill covers oddball bits of knowledge and experience picked up by an extremely (but randomly) experienced delver. It involves little bits of monster lore, professional knowledge about how to coil rope, hammer in iron spikes properly for keeping doors open or closed, how to tap for pits properly with a 10' pole, what monsters might like to eat, how it was done back in the Palace of the Silver Princess or that time in Felltower, etc. If these are covered more specifically by another skill, roll against that instead - this is more like Jack-Of-All-Trades for dungeons.
On a successful roll, you know how to do the task at hand in a "proper delving fashion," or have some tidbit of possible useful knowledge. On a failure, you have a useless piece of information or have some not terribly helpful way of accomplishing the task.
Why not a Professional Skill?
Because it's not just knowledge about the ways and means of doing a specific job. It's a catch-all category of:
- dungeon lore
- professional knowledge
- monster lore
- reminiscing
- everyman skills for dungeoneering
Is this a serious skill?
No, not really. It was an excuse to roll against a 10 or 11 or less and have Gort chime in with some information or be able to accomplish some "basic" delving task that is probably not that trivial (like, tap for secret doors, or spike doors open, or tie up prisoners). It was just a "Is Gort going to say something useful or useless?" roll.
I wouldn't allow a PC to take this. It's potentially too broad, and turns from "What does Gort know?" into "GM, tell me how to solve this problem." I hate those kind of rolls. I prefer people to come up with solutions themselves, and then use Knowledge skills to determine if the solution is a good one . . . not assume their guy has a hidden stock of GM-provided answers at hand. How to, not what do I know.
But "What does the NPC know?" is a really valid concept for the GM. So if there was another Gort-like NPC out there, I'd use this again.
Wildcard or wildcard lite skills can be appropriate for NPCs sometimes even if they aren't available to PCs. It's less for the GM to keep up with and gives you a handy, unified skill level to roll against.
ReplyDeleteYes, and that would also have been a good way to go. Delver!-10 or -11 for Gort would have done just as well.
DeleteA major difference between giving a PC that skill and giving an NPC that skill is that the player is free to think up ways to do things, whereas in Gort's case, the roll is as good as it gets. Also, he won't pump points into it.
ReplyDeleteOn HL vs bang!, if we were talking about something on a template, Hidden Lore generates data and advice, whereas a wildcard skill can actually *do stuff* - as a unique skill on an NPC it's obviously whatever the GM has in mind, though.
Yeah. This was about 75-80% knowledge to do, and 20-25% ability to do trivially specialized things. It never replaced a better, more appropriate skill, but rather acted as a hyper-specialized and yet really vague set of "experience." So making it IQ/VH and 3x cost would be overkill for an NPC who was basically giving the GM a mouthpiece for "common" knowledge and to keep small problems ("Do we KNOW how to use a torch to burn a dead troll's bits properly?") from becoming a 20 minute digression in the game session.
DeleteFor a PC, the same "Generic Dungeoneering Skill" would probably be a Wildcard, and be more useful - it could actually replace real skills, not fill in where real skills don't even seem to have a place.
A major difference between giving a PC that skill and giving an NPC that skill is that the player is free to think up ways to do things, whereas in Gort's case, the roll is as good as it gets. Also, he won't pump points into it.
ReplyDeleteOn HL vs bang!, if we were talking about something on a template, Hidden Lore generates data and advice, whereas a wildcard skill can actually *do stuff* - as a unique skill on an NPC it's obviously whatever the GM has in mind, though.
Well damn, I did not know other people played Shining Force too!
ReplyDeleteOne of my players was re-playing it, and then the son of one of our gamers started to play during the session. So when I needed a name for the dwarf veteran I thought up, I grabbed Gort. That's why he was Gort of the Shining Force.
DeleteGah, hit Publish too soon.
ReplyDeleteBack in D&D days, the Dungeoneering skill was always the butt of jokes - most people in my group somehow assumed it was the skill of constructing dungeons. Rolls against it weren't usually even needed - everyone had copies of the MM, so they already knew everything anyways. Blast!