tomBitonti said:
The skills fail utterly in PvE cases where the player does not improve in a particular ability (or does not improve in a significant amount). A player only gets a little better at everything, but a lot better at only a few things.
I personally find this an issue in that PvE immersion suffers. That is important to me because PvE immersion (which to me is a big part of the "role" in role playing) is an important part my games.
I'd like to side-step the issue of simulationism: My goal is not to simulate the player / environment interaction. My goal is to produce results via simple rules that produce results that maintain my sense of immersion.
I think some people (like yourself) have a problem with one of the key conceits of Fourth Edition, and that's this:
"Adventurers gain experience at all adventuring skills by virture of adventuring."
To some of us, (like myself) this conceit is not problematic. "Sure," we reason, "it's reasonable to assume that the act of adventuring produces people who are broadly competent. That's just the nature of adventuring."
Moreover, it's consistent with the heroic examples from cinema and heroic fiction (and even some real people), like Indiana Jones, MacGuyver, James Bond, Robin Hood, Conan, and so forth. Take the example of Indiana Jones, and recognize that Indy is probably heroic tier, or maybe paragon.
Indy is frequently forced to fly planes - a skill he's NOT trained in. But, as a hero, Indy thinks (and says) "How hard could it be?" In
Temple of Doom, he seems to be doing "okay" but, naturally, they're out of fuel. In
Last Crusade, his dad says "I didn't know you could fly a plane." Indy responds, as he takes control of a plane, "Fly, yes. Land, no!" and proceeds to do okay (not well, but okay) in an air-to-air combat against a superior aircraft. Yes, it's not a smooth landing, but he and his dad land and walk away.
Similarly, Han Solo is no R2-D2 when it comes to hacking security systems, but he can still TRY.
Adventurers adventure. It's what they do. If you can accept that "adventuring" requires the "skill set" represented by the combat abilities and skills listed in the PHB, then "adventurers" who are worth their salt are going to end up being tolerably proficient at all those things.
Confine your concerns to heroic tier for a moment. At that level, the trained character has a benefit of +5 over his untrained counterpart (not counting attributes). A focused expert has a +8 benefit. Years of experience can give that character, or any other, a further +5.
That means that (again, attributes aside) the fighter who's been adventuring for years (10th-level) will be as good at picking locks as the novice trained rogue. By 16th-level, something that we can absolutely call "beyond normal human achievement," that fighter is as good as the novice rogue lockpick expert, who's taken skill training and skill focus (+8 for both).
Adventurers tend, by their very nature, to be "jacks of all trades." You can confirm this by doing research into some real-world adventurers, like Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Lord Byron, T.E. Lawrence, and others. Assuming that the characters take a reasonable amount of time to level up, their abilities in this direction are quite realistic - up to the mid paragon tier. Beyond that point, the PCs can hardly be held to "realistic" standards, because, by that level, their abilities
in general just aren't "realistic."
The pace at which characters "level up" (in game world terms) may break the system's "realism," but that's a fault of fast levelling, and the supremely
unrealistic concept of constantly adventuring, rather than the conceits of the system.
My two cents.
