DCC doesn't really use skills in the sense that a lot of modern tabletop gamers would recognize. Its partly class-based and partly occupation-based skill system largely removes the need for things like proficiencies. Do you have a relevant background? Then you're trained, you get to roll with your full d20, hooray! This is even true for Thief skills, the only difference being Thieves get given an extra bonus to those.
"But that’s not the only difference with Thief skills," you say? I'll get there.
This system is awesome because it means we don't have to fiddle around with skill selections, bonuses, background options or whatever at character creation. It takes out the min-maxing and number crunching and instead adds improvisation at the table, encouraging players to explain why their cheesemaker-turned-warrior has some niche expertise that'll save the day. It makes backgrounds relevant without having to do much work.
It gets a bit wonky the other way around though... What if your warrior with no cheesemaking experience takes up said activity during a week or a month of downtime between adventures? The game's rules give you "trained" rolls at a d20 and "untrained" rolls at a d10, so what about a character who doesn't have a background in the skill, but has since dabbled? Are they to suddenly jump up to a professional level? Well, we do have one example that can help us answer these questions: the Cast from Scroll Thief skill.
The Cast from Scroll skill is seriously weird when you look at it through the lens of the rest of DCC. It breaks so many conventions around how to handle skills, yet it all makes sense when you stop and think about what would happen if you just gave a Thief fully trained rolls and the usual skill bonus: suddenly they'd almost be better spellcasters than Wizards - as long as someone else writes the spell down for them first. And besides, spellcasting is the prime candidate for this sort of variable dice size given the variable effects of magic. It's not hard to see why they broke convention in this case to make Thieves into circumstantial, intermediate-level casters, but I think this happens to be an obvious solution for other kinds of intermediate skill levels too.
A Thief can become an intermediate spellcaster, but what if a Warrior practiced lockpicking in his spare time? He won't be a master thief, so he gets no Thief skill bonuses, but surely he can achieve a flat d20 roll with a lot of practice? A locksmith could do that with no class levels at all!
I am far from the first to suggest using the dice chain for skill levels, but here's my take on how to do it.
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Dice Chain Competence
To improve in an untrained skill, a character must do one of the following:
- Succeed in a skill under pressure. Lockpicking while dungeon crawling counts, so does performing most tasks while in battle or being pursued, or under a time constraint. It should be fairly easy to judge whether something is under stress or a leisurely distraction.
- Train under someone who is trained for three days. This likely costs gp or requires questing.
- Practice alone for a week.
- For an occupation, work for a month.
The last one warrants some explanation. Rather than only being able to train specific skills, a character could also opt to take a new occupation. Eventually, they'd be skilled in everything related to that occupation too - but they don't just get it right away. It takes a lot of work to learn all the skills of a new job. Leaning into the occupation system in DCC, an adventurer who has settled for a while and taken a second occupation could effectively become a carpenter/cheesemaker and get to use the trained skills of either. 0-levels are assumed to have a significant background in their occupation; it's the only thing of note they've done in their lives so far.
When a character rests (at least long enough to get the usual day's worth of healing) they get the opportunity for their proficiency to increase. For "succeed under pressure" this means making notes of which skills you used while adventuring and resolving all the increases on a rest, for the other options resting is simply implied by the elapsed timeframe unless something prevents it.
Upon resting, make an INT check. The DC of the check is equal to the max roll of the die you are moving towards: for a first-time lesson (an untrained d10 to a dabbling d12) the DC is 12. Because this is an ability score check, all characters use a d20 which gives decent odds at beginner levels and low odds at expert levels - though intelligent characters are significantly better at reaching the expert levels. Somewhat elegantly, this also softly caps the amount of training you can receive in a skill to the d20 level because even with 18 intelligence, you cannot naturally succeed on a DC24 check (just barely).*
Then, simply mark on your character sheet "Lockpicking: d12". Anything not specifically mentioned on your character sheet is a d10 as usual. Anything covered by your class or occupation is a d20 as usual. And now we have a whole gradient of possibilities between, creating room for granular improvements outside of XP and Levels and something else for characters to do in downtime.
*There might be something to be said for the possibility of allowing this under extraneous circumstances, but this feels like a whole can of worms and leaves less space for on-the-fly dice-chain advantage later. So let's make this soft cap a hard cap - no training past d20, which is already considered "trained" in DCC.
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Of course, this gets wonky again when we go back to the roots of this idea and compare it back to Thieves casting from scrolls… now we might expect Thieves to improve at casting every few times they do it. Well, that's a fair point, but I think we can equally argue that magic is something that takes a whole lot more knowledge and effort than that, though, hence why spellcasting as a feature is restricted wholesale to certain classes. This is something that requires class features to do, much like Mighty Deeds can't simply be practiced by a Cleric. Thus, training through practice in a magical skill is only possible as a Wizard, and the Thief partially bypasses this restriction.
Further applying this system to magic is absolutely an idea I'll be revisiting, though.
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