Quote from: B.T.;514381I'm suffering from a bout of insomnia, so I figured I would reskin a wizard into a rogue.

Magic missile becomes a throwing dagger that always hits.  Ventriloquism, expeditious retreat, jump, invisibility, spider climb work as-is.  Disguise self involves a disguise kit and a cockney accent.  Feather fall uses a cloak to slow your descent.  Glitterdust is a flashbang.  Web is a really good tanglefoot bag.  Blur is you dodging really fast.  Fireball is potent alchemist's fire.  Hold person and slow are blowguns with poisoned darts.  Various mind-affecting spells are just really good uses of the Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate skills.

Obviously, this doesn't work with every spell, particularly not when dealing with higher-level effects, but you could get a fair distance with reskinning everything.

For short adventures, I like it! It emulates a character's "bag of tricks", and how little they can manage to fit in there. A higher level mage(thief) will be able to modify their equipment better, to jam in more items. The magic missile is especially good, a character can take the throw if they need to, but if they really want something hit, then they use MM and it gets hit.

Not sure how it holds up for anything needing a rest period, though, unless you model spell memorization as gear-scavenging and repair.

"Dispel" reskins to a "break concentration" effect really well - either breaking concentration while the caster is casting, and thus they fail, or breaking it while they sustain their spell, in which case it stops being sustained and goes away. It fails at dispelling continual effects that don't need to be sustained, though.

Quote from: Dog Quixote;514390If you keep the rules as is, and let Dispel Magic cancel out the Thief's supposedly non-magical climbing ability, then it's reskinning.  (And ludicrous, but maybe Darwinism will come along to offer us one of his "explanations")

Psychology. It's all about psychology. I remember that one.

Which would make Dispel Magic into a sort of Loss of Faith AEDU power...

Quote from: Opaopajr;514445Psychology. It's all about psychology. I remember that one.

On other thought, let's not go into 4e psychological analysis, it's a silly place.

I'd say that combining some spells from a MU and Thief class, without multiclassing as it is, would be a good adaptation of Arcane Trickster (my favourite prestige class) into AD&D

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;514418I'm pretty sure 3e requires you to take a feat to re-skin spells.

I wish I were joking.

Metamagic feat. Appeared in Magic of Faerun, IIRC.

EDIT:

And yes, it was egregiously stupid. One of the things I hardcoded into my House Rules was the ability for magicians to choose the look and feel of their spells. Stupid not to allow that.

Quote from: Dog Quixote;514373Choosing how you flavour your character is not the same as reskinning.

My hunch was that reskinning first became a thing with 3E with char op when people wanted to know how to build an effective character that would work in play and that people would tell them to take this feat, or this prestige class and ignore what it says it's supposed to be about and just focus on how it plays. 4E just seems to have given this practice the designers nod of approval.

You don't need to reskin anything in OD&D.

The OP's comment wasn't limited to reskinning characters though. Looking at monsters, 3e had a robust monster creation system that mirrored PC creation. As such, you could create whatever monster you wanted but the expectation was that this was done through the mechanics.

However, 1e, 2e and 4e don't have this same underlying mechanical approach. When I played those editions, you came up with the idea you wanted and often just reskinned an existing monster stat block, as that would be 80% of what you would do if you started from scratch anyway.

So, whilst I agree with your comment to an extent for characters in terms of older editions (4e's lack of mechanical definition outside of combat actually matches 1e's and 2e's), it doesn't really hold for all parts of the rules IME.

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;514418I'm pretty sure 3e requires you to take a feat to re-skin spells.

I wish I were joking.

It was part of the 3e's change of approach. It did get to a point where, if you didn't have a feat for something, you couldn't do it. 4e retained this approach in terms of combat, but pretty much dropped it for everything else.

Quote from: Dog Quixote;514390If you keep the rules as is, and let Dispel Magic cancel out the Thief's supposedly non-magical climbing ability, then it's reskinning.  (And ludicrous, but maybe Darwinism will come along to offer us one of his "explanations")

Unfortunately, yes, that is the consequence of reskinning.  Basically, avert your gaze when dispel magic comes around.

That may be one explanation for the 4e reskinning meme too. In 4e's homogenisation of effects and reduction in game changing effects, it was harder to trip up reskinning attempts.

Quote from: B.T.;514304People seem to think that 4e introduced reflavoring/reskinning monsters, spells, and other effects to D&D.  Didn't this exist in every single version of D&D ever?

Yup. You can see it in lots of early modules ("use the stats of a goblin"); I fondly remember Dragon #200 having an article on it; and the first issue of Dragon I ever owned (Dragon #162) used similar techniques for monsters.

More of my thoughts on reskinning.

Quote from: MonkeyWrench;514418I'm pretty sure 3e requires you to take a feat to re-skin spells.

I think you're thinking of the feat that let you change the elemental output of your spell on the fly. Although superficially similar to re-skinning, that's actually something very different: I don't have a problem with a guy saying "the flames of my fireball are blue" or even "I'd like to have iceball instead of fireball". But I do find "my fireball will always inflict whatever damage type my target is vulnerable to" is a lot more problematic.

QuoteIt was part of the 3e's change of approach. It did get to a point where, if you didn't have a feat for something, you couldn't do it.

Yeah. The later 3rd Edition supplements (the ones where they were alpha testing 4E material) were terrible in this regard: Lot of mechanics locked up in class abilities and feats that should have just been general rules for things that anybody could try.

And this was pretty much objectively bad design: Feats were always meant to be limited to things that require special training and/or doing something anybody can try a little bit better.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;514535And this was pretty much objectively bad design: Feats were always meant to be limited to things that require special training and/or doing something anybody can try a little bit better.

When we were playing Star Wars Saga Edition, we used to make a list of things our PCs could no longer do when every supplement was released due to this effect

Quote from: Skywalker;514537When we were playing Star Wars Saga Edition, we used to make a list of things our PCs could no longer do when every supplement was released due to this effect

I would routinely go through WotC's later supplements and rip the useful mechanics out of their feats and make them generally available. Lot of useful stuff; just packaged in completely the wrong way.

To be fair, even the core rulebooks didn't always get this right. For example, I understand the legacy reasons for trying to protect the ranger's tracking ability, but following tracks should not require a feat.

QuoteI think you're thinking of the feat that let you change the elemental output of your spell on the fly. Although superficially similar to re-skinning, that's actually something very different: I don't have a problem with a guy saying "the flames of my fireball are blue" or even "I'd like to have iceball instead of fireball". But I do find "my fireball will always inflict whatever damage type my target is vulnerable to" is a lot more problematic.

No, there's a specific feat that he's thinking of.  I can't remember it at the moment, but it imposed a -4 penalty on Spellcraft checks to identify your spells or something.

That's the one.  

It seems stupid now, but it was the first time I really felt constrained by 3e's rules.  Up until that point we'd re-skin all day long, but after that it felt like we needed permission just to house rule our own damn game.

Taking the orc from the MM, adding the fiendish template, and calling it an abyssal servitor is reskinning.

Describing a gnome wizard's spell effects in terms of subsurface agricultural products - magic missile looks like a carrot, fireball is an exploding hot potato, web is a mass of roots - is just fluff.

Quote from: The Butcher;514332Nothing to add here except a big giant AMEN.

Sometimes (TSR-era D&D in particular), I feel not having explicit subsystems to pull some crazy stunt, is an invitation to fast and loose on-the-spot houseruling, a system that rewards both players and GMs for thinking quick on their feet. And I like it.

And, yet, so many people on this board appear to have a hate-on for "Old School" grognards.