AD&D 2E, like its predecessors, is a You Can Try System. You think of something to do and you try it. As the DM, I adjudicate using the rules as is. It's actually better since it doesn't put you in a straight jacket of If You Don't X You Can't Do Y. That's all modern editions of DANDINO do.
For example, I had an Elven Swashbuckler Bard that was 1st level with the max of 6 hit points. This is the first session so the entire party is in the tavern. My character is on the second floor looking to see a prostitute. Down below in the main drinking room, a fight breaks out between a group of rowdy drunks and the party. My character decides to climb on the railing to leap onto the chandelier. He was going to cut the rope after swinging the chandelier back and forth to get momentum then use the chandelier as a ride to land on top of a few guys threatening the party mage. DM tells me to roll under my Dexterity of 19 because there wasn't an Acrobatics skill. I got a 20...
I don't know, I hear a lot of this stories, but I've been playing recently a game with skills, ran by a DM with good "instincts". If you want to do something that anyone can reasonably attempt, you'll just make a correlated ability check as you did there, with a reasonable difficulty level. Otherwise you'd enter the realm of specific skills. But generally everyone can try everything (unless it's something you absolutely can't do without training, such as speaking a foreign language or playing an instrument).
It all rests on the DM's wisdom and common sense
in any case. But skills are useful to give more depth to the characters.
And I wasn't talking just about skills, but rather about mages being able to cast at least cantrips all the time, fighters having special abilities and moves to make them more interesting, and so on, things were AD&D felt a bit lacking.
As such, if you can think to do something and want to try it you can. It's not my place to sit there and say you can't do it because you don't have x. Thus, mechanics are not necessary in a properly run game.
Aknowledged... then again, you wouldn't need the
other rules either, if we apply this kind of reasoning everywhere.
Why do you need a mechanic when you can put that into your character's background and personality? See it makes sense with Hero System and GURPS because there is a mechanical benefit to do so. In AD&D there is no such benefit other than role playing.
I wasn't talking about backgrounds, I haven't read that part yet. I'm talking about the mechanic that allows to retry a roll and pick the best result (or force you to use the worse one, if you have
dis-advantage at something).
I had a 3rd level Blade Bard that had just started in the new Dark Sun campaign. All characters start at 3rd level in there. In the first tavern we were in my character decides to have the party mage, a female, be my assistant as I put on a show. The very first dagger he threw hit next to her head as intended. The next two daggers missed their targets around her body and struck her in the chest and right arm. She nearly died. The crowd was outraged and chased my character out in the desert. He was forever banned from that town due to an honest mistake. That doesn't need a mechanical benefit.
Agreed, it's something that happened and you shaped the rest of the story around it, as you would probably do with any game system after all.
This doesn't really have much to do with rules, and it's not like the ones from AD&D, including those that make no sense (like, for instance, the rules for dualclassing), improve on this in any way.
I don't think it's heresy to say it, there are several things in AD&D that just weren't completely thought through, and I felt this way even 2 decades ago.
What's NWP? Additional rules I suppose?
NWP are AD&D skills and stand for Nonweapon Proficiencies as you have Weapon Proficiencies. They were first introduced in AD&D 1E and weren't well done. In AD&D 2E, they are a lot better in how they're done. Every class gets a base amount of skills that is modified by their Intelligence. The higher your Intelligence the more skills your character has.
Ah, ok, I didn't remember.
Oh, and don't get me wrong, I'm just debating for the hell of it here.
Again, I love AD&D. It's been the game of my youth. I just think it was far from perfect rules-wise.
