Quote from: Daztur;620302What was interesting was that of my kids only the thief player (who's probably the smartest/best at English of the lot) treated the character sheet as a "menu of limited choices" so I'm thinking something about the thief skills or at least the presentation thereof needs tweaking and the rest really doesn't (was amazing how intuitive old school dungeoneering was).

Have you thought about removing the customizability of Thief Skills and hiding the % math on your side of the GM screen? That way the player only has a NWP-like title and their broad imagination to worry about. You'll handle the math on your end.

The only challenge is in % progression allocation.

I myself, since there's 8 primary Thief Skills and 60 extra points for 1st level, would put 10% in the first 6 skills: Pick Pockets, Find/Remove Traps, Open Locks, Hide in Shadows, Move Silently, and Detect Noise; leaving 5% for both Climb Walls and Read Languages.

And then instead of 30 % points each level I'd make it 40 % points. Then you could allocate 5% to each skill across the board for each level. With the thief's rapid XP progression it'll get high enough quickly.

I still think the low % just frustrates new players. Even if you explain that it's a "safety net" roll, it's a visual thing. Also using % when you mostly use d20 (essentially % in 5% increments) tends to confuse -- especially since anyone can tell it's mostly a singular d10 roll (the tens place) that matters. I think all of that can be put behind the screen when kids play the first time; the personalization and alternate roll system doesn't really help them creatively.

Yup, if I run an adventure with my students again I'll just write "You're a thief, you can do sneaky stuff" on the sheet and handle the rest black box.

For my son (who's 4 so I have some time) I'm writing him his own custom-made Retro clone full of dinosaurs and robots and ninjas because he's my son. For that I'll hack more stuff from the D&D baseline.