One of the things I always liked about early games, was that a character had to train (and sometimes find a higher-level mentor) in order to advance a level. It gave characters a reason to hoard and spend their hard-earned gold; created some downtime within the game; and sometimes provided adventure hooks and interesting NPC interactions as well. These days such things seem absent, or at least optional; a sign of the times I suspect, as much as anything.

Rather than force my players into doing this (most would turn their noses up at the idea these days), I think I can recapture the essence of it (downtime, adventure hooks, interaction) by creating a new, entirely optional rules, something a bit like feats or talents.

Imagine there are masters of certain arts and techniques, be it skill with a certain weapon style or a ritual of magic, who can be tracked down and paid to teach these techniques to the questing character. A fighter looking to specialise in a style that has been forgotten, or a magic-user looking for a particular spell or ability, or a cleric seeking a ritual to commune with the very gods; they can find a Master of the technique, a mentor to train and teach them, and come out with a new ability, which will give the character some benefit in game terms.

With this in mind, here is an optional ruling for Old School styled games.

Techniques

At the heart of it, a Technique is a skill, ability or low powered bonus that grants the character a certain benefit or limited power, beyond that granted by class or magic. Each has an associated cost, a prerequisite (a required Level, or minimum ability score, for example) and a benefit or power of some sort; they should be low or limited in power, and most should be available to anyone who seeks out the Master or Mentor (we’ll call them Mentors from henceforth) and can pay the price.

A character can also learn the technique themselves, but the cost is more, well, costly. Rather than simply costing them time and money, it costs them Experience Points instead; the price of spending time studying on ones own. Characters can also teach others the tricks they have learnt, so long as the new pupil meets all the requirements, and pays the price (in this case, it would also be in Experience Points).

As a rough guide, techniques should follow these rules:

Guidelines

It is easy enough to take a feat or talent from an existing d20 System game and adjust them to suit the guidelines above. A few examples of techniques for the main classes (cleric, fighter, magic-user, specialist/rogue/thief types) are under the ‘read more’ link.

All follow this basic format:

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