D&D 4E The "We Can't Roleplay" in 4E Argument

[Dannager]

But the other PCs have no meaningful distinction between the others. By rule, there is no skill to reference, thus there is no distinction between trained or untrained. All it is is a battle of stat bonuses. Literally, no skill is involved.

Except for all the skills that are involved, and were outlined to you in a pretty solid skill challenge earlier. But, y'know, aside from those, sure.

And considering the amount of skill it ACTUALLY takes to play an instrument well- indeed, to be good at any artistic or craftsmanship type task- that's pretty lousy...mechanically AND narratively.

And we disagree. In fact, I believe that pegging such background into mechanical skills harms the narrative.

If skill training is to be a limited resource- and I think that it should- then editing non-combat RW skills out of the game and relegating them to a nebulous "if it's in your PC's background, he has it, if not he doesn't" type of rule, then you're giving away skill(oids) for free. They are no longer a limited resource. Or, more accurately, they are a resource limited only by a player's willingness to write up a background.

Yes, but those skills will not provide the mechanical basis for any mechanical challenges the party will face. When those skills do come up in the narrative, the mechanical underpinnings of the challenge will be different (see: diplomacy, bluff, etc. for a musical performance), so it doesn't matter.

My PCs are all going to a well rounded art college, learning instruments, poetry, calligraphy, sculpting, painting and cooking- and will have gotten the money to do so by apprehending with the mason, tailor, Fletcher, weaponsmith and armorer- before taking up the mantle of Psion. Or Warlock. Or Ranger...

That's wonderful for your character, but is unrealistic for the same reason that saying "My character has fathered 8,000,000 children!" is unrealistic.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I didn't miss that.

However, if a skill doesn't exist in the game, a challenge to that game cannot be performed within the game's mechanics, end of story.

Your Bard and Bob's Warlock and Suzy's Warden are all musically inclined by background, while Marco's Paladin is not. All have been fully statted out with their trained and untrained skills.

At the crossroads, BBEG pops up with a challenge to win his Golden Bagpipes, all you have to do is beat him in a piping contest...you lose, your soul is his. Use of powers is vevoten- this is a test of skill, not mystical prowess. Who steps up?

By your caveat, Marco's Paladin is out. That's cool.

But the other PCs have no meaningful distinction between the others. By rule, there is no skill to reference, thus there is no distinction between trained or untrained. All it is is a battle of stat bonuses. Literally, no skill is involved.

Already rebutted.

My PCs are all going to a well rounded art college, learning instruments, poetry, calligraphy, sculpting, painting and cooking- and will have gotten the money to do so by apprehending with the mason, tailor, Fletcher, weaponsmith and armorer- before taking up the mantle of Psion. Or Warlock. Or Ranger...

In all honesty, I'm fine with that. Your character is very elderly by PC standards - and if you can make that into a coherent background I'll allow it. It'll be less useful to you in most games than a single additional trained skill would be and I've no problem with rewarding a creative background (as long as you don't repeat yourself).

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I'm curious, what defines a crappy craft skill. As I said in an earlier post I do believe skills are a means for players to communicate to their DM what they are interested in... so I don't know if I buy the idea of "crappy" skills. When you say they don't add much to the game are you saying for your group they didn't? Because I can understand that.

Crappy craft skills, plural, as in "craft skill system," is what I meant. The 3E skill system is ok--not perfect, but pretty good for the tradeoffs that it needs to make, and its design intent. The craft skills and profession skills, in contrast, are tacked on, poorly thought out, poorly implemented, and downright counter-productive. A superior implementation would have been nothing but flags on a character sheet, as many holes as that would have in the 3E model. In fact, there are several different ways that crafts and professions could have been handled in 3E that would have been superior to the way the were done.

I'm pretty sure someone, for whatever reasons, got too caught up in the idea that "crafts" and "professions" were "skills", and thus belonged into the skill system. And then since they weren't that important to a lot of people, they didn't worry too much that they didn't exactly fit.

You get a similar problem contrasting the way the core 3E designers saw prestige classes (a way to tie campaign-specific concerns into mechanics without messing up the core design) versus what they became (bloated fodder for char op and selling books). The difference is that with prestige classes, we know what the original intent was. I don't think an original intent was ever articulated for craft and profession skills, much less shared with us. When you have that situation, better not to do it at all.

 

[Greg K]

Already rebutted.

Glad it works for you. I find it a very unsatisfying way to handle it for the reason stated by Danny. I don't mind using some other sklls to reflect knowing a story, piece or recipe. Nor, do I mind an Endurance challenge to get through a strenuous piece or marathon activiy. However, reflecting the actual talent in playing the piece or baking the masterpiece cake to impress the king- the suggested method to falls flat to both myself and the gamers that I know.

 

[Dannager]

Glad it works for you. I find it a very satisfying way to handle it for the reason stated by Danny. I don't mind using some other sklls to reflect knowing a story, piece or recipe. Nor, do I mind an Endurance challenge to get through a strenuous piece or marathon activiy. However, reflecting the actual talent in playing the piece or baking the masterpiece cake to impress the king- the suggested method to falls flat to both myself and the gamers that I know.

I bet if you ran the challenge enthusiastically and in the manner suggested in that post, your players would think it's great.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Except for all the skills that are involved, and were outlined to you in a pretty solid skill challenge earlier. But, y'know, aside from those, sure.

Not a DAMN one of those skills has anything at all to do with playing your instruments proficiently and/or with feeling- the bleeding heart of the challenge.

All that challenge describes is the process of finding the right piece to play and if you have the stamina to play it (if its a long one), not whether your performance can be described as "mechanical", "pedestrian", "soulful" or "brilliant".

That's wonderful for your character, but is unrealistic for the same reason that saying "My character has fathered 8,000,000 children!" is unrealistic.

Only part of it, since most of it is my own (I have no masonry, weapon/armormaking or metalworking skills). And all of it was accumulated before age 20. (I've improved since then, too.)

Already rebutted.

Rebuttal failed- see above, this post.

In all honesty, I'm fine with that. Your character is very elderly by PC standards - and if you can make that into a coherent background I'll allow it.

Again, see above: that background was an embellished version of my own teenaged years. Not exactly "elderly", and well within the age projections traditionally associated with many PC classes (at least, the more scholarly ones, like arcanists & divine casters).

 

[Dannager]

Not a DAMN one of those skills has anything at all to do with playing your instruments proficiently and/or with feeling- the bleeding heart of the challenge.

So? That's not where we've decided the challenge lies for the PCs as adventurers.

All that challenge describes is the process of finding the right piece to play and if you have the stamina to play it (if its a long one), not whether your performance can be described as "mechanical", "pedestrian", "soulful" or "brilliant".

It also describes how to lure the audience in, when to change the pace, how to cover up a brief error, how to cow your opponent into slipping up, and so on.

But, sure, you know, dismissing this whole example is fine, too.

Only part of it, since most of it is my own (I have no masonry, weapon/armormaking or metalworking skills). And all of it was accumulated before age 20. (I've improved since then, too.)

Cool. Sounds like your character will have a great background.

Rebuttal failed- see above, this post.

Ignoring more than half the post and then calling it incomplete is not only wrong, but borders on the downright disingenuous.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I think anyone who plays an instrument (like I do), or crafts things (as I do) or cooks (as I do) can take a bit of umbrage at this.

A game with a skill system is shortchanging the players if it can't come up with ways to reflect the workings of actual skills.

I play an instrument, do woodworking, and bake. I don't take umbrage at the idea of not all skills being "skills". The reason, is that there is an inherent tension in game model mechanics between portraying the difficulty of skills to match the simulated world versus giving skills an appropriate cost and scope to simulate good play versus useful complexity and handling time. And while this tension is certainly there when you want to balance skills, where balance matters, it is not merely a gamist concern. You'll get the same concerns with a simulation focus system. GURPS "defaults" on skills, for example, are nothing but an inelegant kludge meant to nod at sim concerns without turning the GURPS skill system into something ridiculous. I'm fairly certain a narrative mechanical focus has the same tension.

OTOH, that same tension causes me to acknowledge the thrust of your complaint, versus a mere handwave solution. This is why I have never been truly satisfied by any skill system in any RPG.

But if there is a way out (and boy is it a big "if"), then I think it must necessarily be through dividing "skills" into more than one mechanical category. In a heroic fantasy RPG, "stealth" or "sneak" is fundamentally different than "blacksmith".

Theoretically, you could also redefine the fantastical reality so that all skills were of roughly equal weight (however that mattered to a particular system), by making crafting and so forth more dangerous. Music is alive. Blacksmithing is inherently dangerous because of the fire and metal elementals involved. And so forth. I've played around with that some. It works, more or less, but it is fairly specialized in the fiction it can easily portray.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

So? That's not where we've decided the challenge lies for the PCs as adventurers.

Which misses the point of every instance this has occured in myth, legend and fiction.

The key to the challenge isn't whether you know what to play. Its whether you play so well you can beat the Devil (or his champion). It won't matter if you can pick the right piece if you can't play it. It won't matter if you make the audience laugh if they're not laughing at the right thing. In short, its about the performance- end of story.

That you don't get this reveals a gap in the way you and I are viewing this that may well be unbridgable.

Ignoring more than half the post and then calling it incomplete

I didn't call it incomplete, I said it failed. The supposed rebuttal missed the point of the challenge.

 

[Raven Crowking]

To determine whether a single swing hits or misses? Yes, a single roll.

<snip>

But unless you want performances or crafting broken down into note by note, paragraph by paragraph or each application of a woodworking tool to match the way combat is broken down, again I say give me the single roll, because most GMs don't have the math chops and patience to properly figure out how tough to make a skill challenge based on what they think the overall odds of success should be.

This is the fallacy of the excluded middle.

I find it quite possible to have a system that allows both for a single roll (when appropriate) and multiple rolls (also when appropriate). That some skill use is multiple-roll does not require that all skill use is so. In addition, the system I use is nothing like the SC system in one important respect -- the targets are static, the GM need not have any mathematical chops, and the player chooses the intermediate target DCs. The GM may impose penalties or grant bonuses, of course, if narratively appropriate.

Mileage varies, based on personal taste, obviously. If I have a character engaged in a year's research, I'd rather be making rolls every few weeks so that I have an idea whether or not to commit the whole year, or quit partway through.

But then, I am also using a system that doesn't assume that characters must take that sort of challenge. The GM need not prepare for them in advance; they generally arise out of play. IME, they arise out of play because the players choose to use that method in a particular case.


RC