The learned skills listed on Peter Gaylords character sheet are:
Horsemanship
Woodsmanship
Leadership
Flying
Seamanship
The presence of a skills list on a pre D&D sheet might
stir up a hornets nest of its own for some folks. Many a post has been written about how
“skills” ruin the game, so evidence of skill mechanics in the ur game of
D&D might not be welcome news to all concerned. I won’t presume to tell anybody their idea of
gaming fun is bad/wrong. I personally
think there are lots of examples of skills in the 3LBB’s as it is, but it’s
true there is no detailed system. M. A.
R. Barker’s Empire of the Petal Throne™ “corrected” that “omission” as some
would put it, but Arneson long contended that he had used a skills system “in
so far as what I originally wanted to do ….with the different classes and the
different fields you could learn. I
wanted to do that originally, but it was considered too complicated and people
couldn’t handle it. Well now that’s come
back, you can do that. You could really
make a unique character class with the variability; and I always wanted to do
that and I do that in my original campaign even today…. Because the players in
the original campaign could learn different skills and different
abilities....” Dave Arneson, Mortality
Radio interview, July 9th, 2004.
Arneson also claimed that “D&D at its start was a
simple system with guidelines that could be tailored to the players...Each having strong points and weakness... The
skills (Such as found in my AIF game.) allowed you to build your character…” Official
Dave Arneson Q&A Thread
« Result #30 on Jan 9, 2009, 3:25pm; Odd74 Forum
Of course, nobody familiar with AiF really thought Arneson meant to say, strictly speaking, that
AiF was exactly how it was in early Blackmoor.
Instead it seems more accurate to say that some of AiF builds on some of the
concepts experimented with in the pre-D&D era, often with new or more
developed mechanics. So while AiF, or parts
of it at least, may well be Arneson’s “original system”, at the systemic level,
it is not true of the mechanical details, which are mostly quite altered or new
altogether. Most gamers don’t show much interest in
tracing out all the stuff in AiF the way we do with D&D, and few people
besides oddballs like me have done more than skim through the game. Nevertheless, a closer look at AiF reveals some
immediate parallels with the skill list on Peter Gaylords’s character sheet.
As mentioned previously, AiF has an “Education”
sub-system. Briefly, this is a list of 26
“Courses of Instruction”, 9 of them being in individual weapons, and several of
the others being basic and advanced studies in the same subject or skill. The courses are learned by a character
through a “basic learning formula” taking into account time, intelligence, and
course difficulty. Among the 26 are:
Horsemanship (I, II, III)
and
Sailor
Flying, is, of course a spell in AiF, leaving leadership the only "skill" on the Blackmoor character sheet generally unaccounted for in the game. So we see that AiF carries a tradition of
learned skills that does derive from early Blackmoor play. That’s about as far as we can take the
comparison however. The AiF Courses of
Instruction each have different benefits and game effects whereas Pete’s listed
skills are pass/fail saving throw affairs. So a final point about Peter Gaylord’s sheet
we can make is that it not only illustrates an evolution of concepts found in
D&D, it likewise illustrates the roots of some of the unique features of
AiF.
