Journalism in Eberron - craft or profession?

[vox]

The PHB is pretty straightforward on this. In game terms, journalism is a profession.

The three skills used to directly generate income are craft, perform & profession. Craft uses raw materials to make more valuable materials which can then be sold--so it's not a craft (ink and paper aren't raw materials in the sense the skill description uses). Perform is limited to physical performance. Singing is performing, songwriting isn't--so journalism is not perform. Profession is all that is left.

Of course, you can always rule zero it.

Also, for the people who suggest using multiple skills, I would not do that for my group. I know as a player I would not take any levels in profession: journalist if I was told that I also needed to take craft & perform in order to be successful.

Skills like profession: journalism are especially abstract since they represent competence at a great many different things--interviewing, writing, selling work to various papers, etc. In most campaigns I think you would have greater enjoyment if you use it as a blanket skill rather than subdivide it up. Of course if you are running an all-journalist campaign, you might need to vary the rules to fit the unusual circumstances you are in.

I would certainly allow a +2 synergy bonus to gather information rolls if someone has 5 ranks in Journalism. But I wouldn't allow journalism to substitute for gather info. Profession: journalism is a way to make money, for the most part.

Also, the idea that powerful writers are necessarily personally charismatic seems odd to me. History has no shortage of very influential writers who could move people's hearts and emotions but who were reclusive,socially awkward and unskilled or intimidated by live interpersonal situations.

 

[Argent Favrelauch]

As a player, I tend to agree with Destil. For any character I have that is supposed to be good in a particular field, I take multiple skills for it. As he stated, the writing itself is a Craft, making money off of it is a Profession, and there is Knowledge involved as well. For those who mention performance...news anchormen have Performance (Journalism), but not newspapermen. Performance requires one to actually be present, IMHO, for one's Charisma to come into play. How magnetic, attractive and intense you are has very little to do with how much I like your writing.

As a DM, I feel making a player get that many skills in order to play the character they want is cruel, especially since there are never enough skill points to go around as it is.

Not to mention that as others have noted, a successful Journalist also needs Bluff, Diplomacy, Gather Information, Sense Motive...almost the entire social skill miscellany.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Profession (Journalist).

Gather Information or Knowledge (local) of 5 or more ranks grants a +2 Synergy bonus to Profession (Journalist) checks.

As far as the Charisma aspect, I've turned the "Perform" skill into the "Art" skill, which includes performances, as well as writing, sculpting, painting, woodcarving, etc., etc.

Which is also a way in which Dwarves (valuing Craft) differ from Elves (valuing Art).

 

[Timeboxer]

As a player, I tend to agree with Destil. For any character I have that is supposed to be good in a particular field, I take multiple skills for it. As he stated, the writing itself is a Craft, making money off of it is a Profession, and there is Knowledge involved as well.

That seems a little overcomplicated to me. For one thing, if you insist that writing is a Craft, the Craft skill allows you to roll to make money for a week -- just like Profession does. Beyond that, the descriptions for Craft and Profession suggest that by taking a rank in it, you pretty much have access to all of the Knowledge you need. If you must insist on having multiple skills for something, I recommend synergy bonuses of some kind.

But to be honest, the general rule I usually follow is that jobs that produce "goods" are Craft skills, whereas jobs that focus on "services" are Professions.

 

[Driddle]

Profession it is, then!
Many thanks for the thoughtful responses.

(Now if I could just figure out the appropriate population density numbers to calculate his newspaper's distribution range ... )

Some of the United States' earliest "journalists" were sensationalist sequel novelists, who freely mixed fact and imagination in their entertaining "reports" from the Wild West to be published in the big East Coast cities. ... Seemed to be an interesting twist on the Master Inquisitive prestige class for my purposes in Eberron.

Did anyone answer the question who would most likely employ my PC for his efforts?

 

[Shadowdancer]

As someone who is a journalist IRL, maybe I can offer some insight.

There is a significant difference between someone who can write well (craft skill, IMO) and someone who is a journalist (profession skill, again IMO). There are plenty of reporters who are good writers, but lousy at doing the other things that go into the job -- working their "beat" and their sources for story leads, researching stories, doing interviews, checking facts, tracking down hard-to-find sources, writing on deadline.

On the other hand, there are plenty of reporters who are good at working their beat and finding stories, but the stories they write aren't very good. If it wasn't for a good editor to help shape their stories, their work would never be printed.

So a good reporter would have ranks in both Craft: Newswriting and Profession: Journalist.

Also, there is more to being a journalist than just being a reporter. A journalist can be a good copy editor, or good at doing page layout, and be a terrible writer and/or reporter. Not to mention in our world, a journalist can be a good photographer and barely be able to write his or her own name (I've seen it).

This also doesn't take into consideration the different types of newswriting -- hard news, news features, editorials, sports, entertainment, lifestyles, analysis and critiques, columns. Some people are good at more than one of these types of writing; some are good at only one; some aren't good at any of them.

For D&D terms, I would say a reporter would need ranks in both Craft: Newswriting and Profession: Journalist to be an effective reporter. Craft would be the actual production of the finished product and Profession would take into account all the other necessary abilities needed to be a good reporter.

For purposes of earning money each week, let them roll a check using the skill they have the most ranks in (unless the job they are doing is strictly editing and/or layout, then use Profession). If they have 5+ ranks in the other skill, give them a +2 synergy bonus.

 

[cdsaint]

It just seems punitive to require a PC to take ranks in both profession (x) and craft (x) to be good at (x). Does being an herbalist require both a craft and profession skill, one to make a concoction and one to market it? and should said herbalist have to also have ranks in knowlege (nature) and survival in order to use his profession and or craft skills? I realize in RL that arguments can be made for separate craft and profession journalist skills, but in game terms it's just punitive.

After reading through this thread the idea of playing a bard / reporter sounds pretty good, up until the point that I have to put skill points into craft, profession, and knowlege (journalism) along with perform (writing). If I only have a 10 intelligence human that's more than half my skill points before I ever even get around to gather information, diplomacy, bluff and sense motive. That's not even taking into account skills like open lock, search, spot and listen. Throw in hide and move silently as other useful skills, and it quickly becomes an impractical idea.

I just think that cool character concepts like this should be encouraged, not discouraged, and that's exactly what you end up doing by requiring too many skill points spent to be effective in craft / profession.

Chris

 

[Shadowdancer]

After reading through this thread the idea of playing a bard / reporter sounds pretty good, up until the point that I have to put skill points into craft, profession, and knowlege (journalism) along with perform (writing). If I only have a 10 intelligence human that's more than half my skill points before I ever even get around to gather information, diplomacy, bluff and sense motive. That's not even taking into account skills like open lock, search, spot and listen. Throw in hide and move silently as other useful skills, and it quickly becomes an impractical idea.

I disagree with requiring a Knowledge (journalism) skill -- that would be covered by Profession (Journalism). If your reporter has some area of expertise, such as Breland politics, that's where the Knowledge skills would come into play. And there should be no such thing as Perform (writing). Writing is not performing.

I don't think requiring a reporter to allocate skill points to two skills in order to be good is punitive, nor is it impractical. Say you wanted to play your classic bard, a singer/musician/songwriter of renown. In order to play that character, you would need to put skill points into three different skills: Perform (instrument) in order to play, Perform (singing) in order to sing, and Craft (songwriting) to write songs.

Besides, you wouldn't really need to put any skill points into Profession (journalism) after second level anyway, which is the earliest you can have five ranks in any skill.

 

[Driddle]

For D&D terms, I would say a reporter would need ranks in both Craft: Newswriting and Profession: Journalist ...

I would normally agree -- especially in a game system like HERO (no tangent rants, please!) -- but in the D&D environment it's easier to lump those clustered skills under one heading and be done with it.

Because the same could be said of a lot of other professions as well when it comes to theory vs. practice and output. And, really, do we need that amount of 'realism' to roll dice one more time?

Anyway, good feedback.

 

[Goobermunch]

I'm going to make an argument for why journalism shouldn't be a craft.

Craft skills, as others have mentioned, deal with the creation of a finished product for sale. I know of no journalist today who actually produces his or her finished product. There are a bunch of other people involved in that process, printers, editors, and layout artists.

In the context of the discussion so far, a journalist is more like a reporter (one might argue the terms are synonymous). By looking at the Profession skill, we see that apothecary, boater, bookkeepers, brewers, cooks, drivers, farmers, fishers, guides, herbalists, herders, hunters, innkeepers, lumberjacks, millers, miners, porters, ranchers, sailors, scribes, siege engineers, stablehands, tanners, teamsters, and woodcutters are all kinds of professions. While Journalism may seem like it fits well within this rubric, most of these are skilled professions that requires use of specialized equipment and business models. A scribe doesn't do the writing, instead, he or she takes the already existing expression and copies it neatly. A bookkeeper doesn't make the sales, instead, he or she tracks the expenses and income of a business.

Arguably, you could make journalism a profession skill. It certainly appears to fit within the rubric.

However, I submit that Perform is a better basis for Journalism. Because really, what a journalist is after is the expression of unbiased facts in a compelling and clear narrative format. More than either Craft or Profession, Perform deals directly with the task of expressing something.

While you may argue that Perform doesn't include anything like writing, all PCs are literate. Thus, Journalism is an application of the Storytelling form of Oratory reduced to writing. That's my .02 GP.

--G