Shadowdark has no Skills, Shadowdark needs no skills
Recently I thought about Skills. Some OSR games have them, some not. For people coming from D&D, this is something they find to be "missing". My group comes from WFRP and that game makes heavy use of a skill list.
But when we actually sit down to play, we don't really miss a Skill Table. It never came up during actual play, only as shower thoughts later.
So this morning I was thinking about something unrelated: How neat is that modifiers cap at +4. It means a difficult check (DC15) works out 50% of the time. Meaning, even if you're good at something, wether you can or can't do it comes out like a coin toss and is entirely up to luck.
Then I got to thinking how the chances of suceeding at something look like for other modifiers and came up with this:
On an initial observation, a character who rolled +1 or +2 in something comes out as quite competent in those areas with good odds. On the other hand, characters should REALLY avoid tasks where they have -1 or -2.
Now the best part about this table is how advantage interacts with it. Players who rolled +1 or +2 now have really good chances of doing something. If you're in the +3 or +4, it's almost guaranteed you'll suceed at everything but the hardest tasks. And even characters who aren't suited for something (-1 or -2) have a decent chance to just wing it.
And when I said this out loud I remembered that classes, backgrounds and ancestries give you advantage on certain checks. And it clicked: you don't need a Skill table, because Modifiers and advantage already cover it perfectly and non intrusively. You don't need to level up skills, because when you level up and pick "add 2 to attribute" you're efectively throwing another 10% on a skill you're not trained with, but 20-30% on a skill you ARE trained with. And if the GM allows you to train into new skills, a simple line: "You're trained in Chicanery and Buffonery, gain advantage on checks related to it" is all that is required.
It's so simple and elegant.
And then, because Shadowdark is even more awsome the more you look at it, I noticed that the disadvantage table creates a very interesting interaction with the Darkness.
If you're at a disavtange, Easy tasks get a bit harder, but still very much possible.
Normal tasks get a lot harder, and create an incentive for the player to NOT be in that position/try to change something before attempting the check.
And anything Hard/Impossible becomes so unlikely it will take 100 pounds of rock-hard Luck tokens to pull it off.
And that's my favourite part of DM'ing Shadowdark. I don't need 300 rules and modifiers to convey dsomething to the players. "Okay, but you're rolling at disavantage" is enough for them to understand it's a bad idea. "If you do that, you'll get to roll at an advantage" is enough for them to search for different ways to accomplisht the same task.
It's something so simple and, for me, the best part of Shadowdark.