Thasmodious
First Post
How many times have you seen it be mechanically relevant to the outcome of the story? Has the grizzled old veteran hero ever seen the farm boy roll a 1 on his milk the cow check and decide to move on rather than tap the young farm boy to be the next epic hero? Does it often matter to the story how well the young princess performs her needlework, or is it merely a detail of her mundane life before she discovers that ancient tomb?
Rechan isn't arguing that no PC should ever craft anything or work as a bartender in his own tavern between forays into the Forbidden Swamp. He is arguing that crafting SKILL, not crafts themselves, is not a relevant or necessary mechanic.
The real problem in 3e, though, was not the inclusion of mechanics for such, it was that such choices limited a characters abilities to be good at their core skill set. The 3e mechanic was not a useful tool for expanding the game and RPing, but a limiting mechanic that restricted freedom and forced unsound mechanic choices onto players. Your dwarf fighter could be decent at Brewing or Jumping, but not both. The fighter had to sacrifice half his skill points a level to become a good crafter of something and it made him a poorer fighter. That is a poor mechanical system.
4e's design philosophy makes sense. There are a million ways to play the game, but at its core the D&D game is about killing monsters and taking their stuff. You don't have to play that way, but there are better systems to choose if you prefer to romance the monsters and buy them stuff, or if you prefer no monsters at all, or a game where artists live in a colony and compete to sell their artwork.
There are players and groups who enjoy utilizing a craft system. There are players who enjoy resource management, heavy political games, extended wilderness survival challenges, spending hours and days plumbing the depths of libraries for forgotten knowledge. The problem is all that can't, and shouldn't be in the core books. Many of the corner cases that lit fires the 3e staff spent so much time trying to extinguish existed because of the interaction of these subsystems with the core rules. 4e was designed with an awareness of the success of the OGL experiment and the willingness of 3rd party publishers to make all kinds of specialized content. When 3e was designed, it was unknown how well the experiment would work. With 4e, the designers were free to focus on the core system and produce a much more elegant, streamlined ruleset and relegate many of these subsystems that are only used by a smaller subset of D&D gamers to future sourcebooks, Dragon articles, or 3rd party publishers and community forums like this one.
If your group needs crafting rules, make them. Rel has a simple and elegant system. I'm sure probably more than one 3rd party publisher will tackle crafting IF there is enough player interest in it. WotC did their own research into how the game was being played and they arrived at their design philosophy in part through that research.
Myself, I find 4e very freeing. I can play my dwarf master brewer/fighter and not have to choose between being a good brewer or a good fighter. My players are free to design the characters they want to play working with me as the DM to flesh out details of their lives and skillsets before adventuring and what it means that the eladrin wizard was a musical child prodigy and how that plays in the game. He never has to roll to successfully play a song no more than the former farm boy turned cleric has to roll to help an old man milk a cow. Most expressions of those wonderful background details are best handled through RP. Why is it mechanically relevant if a PC enjoys working a loom? He just does. It's an RP detail, something for the DM to work in by having it curry some favor with a Lord who rose to the nobility from humble beginnings and whose father spun wool for a living.
Those rare times that it becomes mechanically relevant how well the PC is doing something related to his background details, a skill challenge handles it much better than a check to see if he succeeds. Take a showdown between the PC musician (that elf prodigy) and a local minstral who isn't going to stand by while the PC draws his regular Tuesday night crowd to the other tavern. He challenges the PC to your standard dueling banjoes competition. What do you want a roll to represent here? Successfully strumming notes? That's not very interesting or realistic. If you play an instrument, how often do you fail at playing songs you already know how to play? Sure, you might be flat on this note or not nail that complex guitar solo completly , but is that how such a contest is judged anyway? A skill challenge is a much better mechanical representation of the encounter that is unfolding. You have room to define success and failure and their consequences (perhaps success has a small monetary reward from the crowd or the tavernkeep for filling the house, along with a +2 boost to the parties streetwise and diplomacy checks while in town). The relevant skills aren't perfrom (wind instrument) and (lyre), but rather things like -
Insight (to read the crowd and play off their moods, picking the right type of song, something upbeat and danceable, or a funeral durge to wet their eyes)
Diplomacy (to understand their ways and customs to avoid picking a bawdy song in a community that would see that as terribly innappropriate)
Streetwise (to figure out what types of people you are dealing with based on urban clues, like understanding that this is the poorer tavern in town, by the docks, and that the room is full of sailors and their wives, so a lament about the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald would endear you to everyone in the room)
Intimidate (directed at the minstral, to throw him off his game with an especially skillful display)
Acrobatics (to weave a floor show with your song choice), etc.
You end up with a vibrant encounter with a lot of options that never requires a skill check to determine if you manage to strum a series of notes in the right order or somehow muck it up.
Having a game system that gives me what I need to adjudicate challenges and gets out of the way for the rest of it is something I find very freeing as a DM and a player.
