Profession skills

[aboyd]

If I choose Profession (herbalist) for my PC, would that have any use besides flavor? And if my friend choose Profession (fisher) would that be good for an aquatic PC? And have a use?

Ever since I participated in this thread:

Old Mac Donald Had a Farm (But No Ranks In Knowledge: Nature) (3.5) - Giant in the Playground Forums

...I have been of the mind that Profession & Craft should confer some unwritten benefits. It seems absurd that a commoner with skills in Profession (farmer) cannot recognize the animals in his care until he puts ranks into Knowledge (nature). If you have even a single rank in a profession or craft skill, I believe it should confer at least rudimentary knowledge of all that is needed to be successful with that skill.

If you have ranks in Profession (sailor) it probably should confer some ability to work with rope, tie knots, and climb rope ladders & masts. It might not be as good as someone who specialized with lots of ranks in climb & use rope, but you should be able to get by as a sailor with what you have.

What this means is that in my games, if you select a profession (maybe just for background flavor) and find you are stuck without a specific skill that your profession skill can cover, you can make a profession roll.

If the party encounters a plant that needs to be identified with Knowledge (nature), a check using Profession (herbalist) might also do it, in limited scenarios.

If the party encounters some gems that they would like to identify and get ballpark valuations, they could use Appraise, but they might also be able to pull off a valuation with a great Profession (miner) check. But I'd make it harder. If it's a DC 15 to get a reasonable valuation using Appraise, it might be a DC 20 to get the same ballpark number using Profession (miner). And it would only apply to gems that can be mined. For example, some of the grown living gem monsters in the game world wouldn't be the kind of thing miners would be mining, so they'd not be able to roll for a check like that.

A miner should also know pretty easily about some monsters from Tome of Horrors, such as the Cave Cricket, Cave Fisher, Cave Moray.

A sailor should know about whales, kraken, octopus, shark, squid, and other ocean creatures. Or at the very least, instead of needing a Knowledge (nature) check, sailors should be able to try Profession (sailor) checks.

Any time someone says something like this: "Are you kidding? The commoner/expert has ranks in Profession and STILL can't do it right? They NEED it for their profession!" I would consider that "needed" thing to be something that they could use their Profession skill for.

One last example. Someone with Profession (scribe) might "need" to be able to do rudimentary Decipher Script checks, even if they don't have ranks. They wouldn't be as good as a specialist, but they might get a roll that has a DC 5 points higher.

Stuff like that seems fair to me as a DM. Otherwise, lots of professions don't actually work. You end up with silly threads like the one I linked to.

 

[Celebrim]

If I choose Profession (herbalist) for my PC, would that have any use besides flavor? And if my friend choose Profession (fisher) would that be good for an aquatic PC? And have a use?

I had at one time been a big fan of profession skills and never accepted that the only use they had was making money during character down time. However, the more I worked with them the more difficult they became to manage with anything but DM fiat. Example problems where things like having high skill in Profession(Lawyer) and no ranks in Knowledge(Law), or high ranks in Profession(Sailor) but no ranks in Use Rope.

One day I finally decided to enumerate all the Professions that covered skills not covered by either some other skill or a combination of skills.

The list I came up with surprised me by how short it was and essentially came down to: "things to do with handling watercraft".

At that point I added the few skill sets that weren't covered by other skills (IMO), and dropped Profession from my house rules. If I really care about earning during down time, I'll use a more complicated GURPS like system but generally it doesn't come up that much and I just wing it when it does.

 

[humboldtscott]

What professions did you come up with that are not covered by existing skills? What new skills did you create to replace profession?

This has always bothered me, and I like your solution. Why is there say a Profession (Caravaner) skill (I run al-qadim) and how is it different from knowledge (geography), handle animal, use rope, and ride?

How is profession (butler) different than diplomacy?

It's always a struggle as a DM to figure out how useful to make these skills. At one extreme they have no value except to make small amounts of money during downtime. At the other, some DM's give 1-5 synergy bonuses, or let profession(whatever) take the place of another skill check (why have both?).

Sometimes I've given synergy bonuses to other skills for having a profession. That plus the money.

Other people can be diplomatic, but Profession (diplomat) makes you a trained one, granting +2 to diplomacy.

Use rope lets you tie knots but profession (sailor) helps you do so under distracting condtitions, thus +2 use rope.

Basically, I ask the player to define their profession and 1-3 synergy bonuses that it might provide. I've varied in the number, never sure I've gotten it right.

At times I've used the professions for knowing the trade lingo, and the social norms of the profession. For example, if you don't have enough profession (sailor) ranks, the guys down by the docks won't talk to you. I tend to assume that people will defer to other professionals with more ranks.

This would explain profession being a trained skill and allowing you to make money. Part of the skill is knowing the professional jargon, knowing how to make money, knowing how to interact with others in that line or work and potential customers, etc.

I've worked as a "professional" with the profession (what I was doing at the time) and I've worked in places where I had all the skills needed for the job but didn't have a profession skill appropriate for the job. Example: being a self-taught tech guy and working for a large corporate bank.

Not sure how to translate that into DnD always. I've worked a lot on developing the social class, contacts, apprentice, houses, and guild rules from cityscape. I haven't changed much, but I've linked social class to a modified Station statistic (see Al-Qadim for the idea seed) I worked up, There are 5 social classes (Pariah, Low, Middle, Upper, Ruling) and people will generally deal with people at there social class, or one level up or down. So the low class thief can have friends in low places and the High class paladin can take to ruling class nobles would would never let the rogue in the front door. I need to think about how professions might interact with that expanded social system.

Anybody ever seen or made a big list of craft and profession skills that ARENT already covered by other skills? If there are many professions, then scrapping it seems a bad idea, but I can't think of any reason it is needed. Every time I try I think of a existing skills that cover it, or at worst, some combinations of feats, class abilities, etc (profession hunter = ranger, for example). Once a player tried to get around item creation feats by listing craft (magic item) and profession (magic item dealer) on his sheet, arguing that it DOES say the crafts and professions provided are just examples, a non-exclusive list.

 

[Celebrim]

What professions did you come up with that are not covered by existing skills? What new skills did you create to replace profession?

It sounds like you are on about the same page I was on 5 or so years ago when I was doing about exactly what you are doing now and asking the exact same questions.

My basic problem with the approach you describe was twofold: a) the game really doesn't need any more synergy bonuses, and b) if that's how I approach things then I'm going to have to separate out every instance of profession as a separate skill just so I can describe it.

In essense, the 3.0/3.5 system describes four different sorts of broad knowledge skills: craft, knowledge, perform, and profession.

I'm going to skip discussing perform for the moment and just look at the other three:

Craft: This is easy enough. These are skills for knowing how to "make stuff". Each skill describes a different class of things you can make. Now, there are some ambiguities here in figuring out what the divisions ought to be and the mechanics for making things are poorly thought out and need to be replaced, but at least there is no ambiguity over handling the skill or what it means.

Knowledge: This is also easy enough. These are skills for knowing "about things". Each skill describes a class of scholarly knowledge you are expert in. There are some ambiguities here as well, such as the meaning of Knowledge (local), and how large the list of specializations really needs to be to cover the entire breadth of human knowledge, but at least there are no ambiguities in handling the skill or what it means.

Profession: This seems easy enough at first. Subtracting Craft and Knowledge from the list of 'knowing how to do things' leaves us with knowing how to do things that are neither making things nor simply knowing about things. So these are practical skills that aren't about making things, and we would expect for the most part these would be professions that you might classify as 'service industries'. However, in practice, this leaves us with a great deal of ambiguity because a very great many 'knowing how to do things' are, as you pointed out in your example of a caravaneer, covered by all those other very specific skills.

If we suppose that someone with Profession (Teamster) can use Survival, Handle Animal, Diplomacy, and Use Rope where they pertain to the profession of moving wagons and other conveyances with draft animals, why wouldn't I just take ranks in a few broad professions in order to get lots of utility out of just a few skill points. To take an extreme and ridiculous example, if I take, profession (adventurer), can it substitute for search, climb, move silently, and survival among other things?

If you inspect the actual list of professions, you find other curiousities as well. The list overlaps with the other broad knowledge skills. In addition to service industries we find a lot of trades that seem like they ought to fall into our definition of a Craft. Why do we have Profession (Cook) instead of Craft (Food)? Isn't making food still making something? More subtly why do you have something like Profession (Scribe) and not instead Craft (Writing) or Craft (Caligraphy)? Likewise, we find in the list of service professions Profession (Lawyer). Yet it would seem that knowledge about legal proceedings ought to follow under Knowledge (Law), and the practice of a lawyer involving public oration and debate ought to fall under one of the specific social skills like Diplomacy or Bluff.

If you start moving the specific examples of professions into the previously defined Craft and Knowledge professions, a very large number of them go away. Even something seemingly like profession (barber) turns out to be equally well described as Craft (hairstyle), since this seeming service industry turns out to be about making something with your hands. It may not be traditional manufacturing, but it is a craft. And the remaining short list turns out be almost entirely professions that involve doing things that are useful as an adventurer and so have there own well defined skill.

Whenever I had been called to defend the Profession skill in the past, I'd always turned to Profession(Sailor) as an example of doing something - rowing a boat, steering a ship, keeping a canoe upright in rapids - that represented a concrete skill which had no obvious substitute in the skill list. Whenever I'd provided that example, I'd always been assuming that I could have provided lots of examples other than the obvious one. But when I actually took the time to think about it hard, I found that this was (at least for me) basically the only example. Depending on what skills you consider important in your campaign, you might find some others but I think that that list will prove to be very small and not broad enough to justify the Profession skill. Since the list is small, I think you are better of elaborating on the individual skills and assigning them to the class skill lists you consider appropriate.

 

[Greenfield]

I tend to treat Profession skills as something different from the related Knowledge or Craft skills.

I treat them as "You know how to do this for a living". For example, you may have Craft: Armorsmith, and Craft:Blacksmith and every other metalworking craft out there, but without the Profession skill, you aren't a ranked member of the Guild, and you don't know how to actually handle all of the business end of things.

With the Profession skill, you know how to buy supplies cheap, how to prepare and preserve them, you have the appropriate permits and permissions, and you have a reputation that lets you sell for more than it costs you to make the item.

Further, you know how to train apprentices, and can direct them well enough to take advantage of their help to get Aid Another bonuses on your work.

In the middle ages, many trades required not only Guild recognition, but formal sponsorship from a nobleman before you could set up in business. The King or Queen may have granted monopoly rights on certain goods to specific nobles, so if you don't have the right permissions you can't legally sell certain goods at all. Profession takes care of some of these issues, or at least informs you of the trouble you could get into if you don't get them.

As a note: To this day, real world, if you run afoul of a Guild in England, be they the Saddlemakers or the Glove Makers, they can legally enter your home or place of business, seize all of your tools, materials and work, and burn them on your front doorstep. Admitted, it's unlikely that they'd do such a thing, but the authority is still legally in the books.

 

[Celebrim]

I tend to treat Profession skills as something different from the related Knowledge or Craft skills.

I treat them as "You know how to do this for a living". For example, you may have Craft: Armorsmith, and Craft:Blacksmith and every other metalworking craft out there, but without the Profession skill, you aren't a ranked member of the Guild, and you don't know how to actually handle all of the business end of things.

I have issue with this in several ways.

First of all, it makes the Profession skill incredibly narrow and virtually useless to anyone who doesn't live a mundane life. It becomes a skill with no real purpose to a PC in 99.9% of all games.

Secondly, it attempts to treat some thing that involves social resources and social standing as a skill. So what happens in your game world if I go out and do the role play of obtaining my membership in a Guild, using my diplomacy skill, in game choices, and good standing in the community (as a local hero) to become a ranked member in the blacksmith guild and so forth. Do I gain virtual Profession skill ranks, or do you just ignore the fact that I've obtained the thing you say the skill represents?

Thirdly, it's not at all clear how this works mechanically. If I roll against Profession to obtain my money for blacksmithing, does that mean I can be a really profitable blacksmith without knowing anything about blacksmithing (no ranks in Craft(blacksmith))?

With the Profession skill, you know how to buy supplies cheap, how to prepare and preserve them, you have the appropriate permits and permissions, and you have a reputation that lets you sell for more than it costs you to make the item.

And fourthly, suppose I have ranks in Craft (Blacksmith) and ranks in Knowledge (Mathematics & Accounting) and ranks in Appraisal and ranks in Diplomacy, shouldn't I be able to do all the things that you say are covered by Knowledge (Profession)? Yet, if I have Profession (Blacksmith) but no ranks in Craft (Blacksmith), Appraisal, Knowledge, or Diplomacy does it stand to reason that I'm a good blacksmith and businessman?

And fifthly, your model assumes self employment. What happens if I hire myself out as a craftsman in a larger trade, say working as a blacksmith in a ploywright's shop or as a carpenter in a shipwright's shop? Should my income now be dependent on my Profession skill or on my Craft, Knowledge, Diplomacy etc?

Lastly, if your Profession skill means what you say it means - good reputation in the community, knowledge of how to run a business and so forth - shouldn't all that knowledge at least in part transfer from one profession to another? Is it reasonable that I know all this about being a blacksmith, and then I put a lot of ranks in to Craft (brownsmith) that I couldn't take what I know about running an iron shop and apply it to running a copper shop?

 

[Greenfield]

Consider the real world situation of a man who runs a restaurant, but isn't a cook.

Or the merchant who owns many ships, yet isn't a sailor.

A business person with the right knowledge and connections might do well in a business, even if he has to hire others to do all the craft work. I've known and worked for more than a few people like that.

In the real world, middle ages, the wife of a master craftsman might well inherit his business even though she has never practiced his trade. She was simply the one who kept the books, took care of the apprentices, and handled stock and inventory. She would keep Journeymen in her employ to handle the labor, and life would go on. This wasn't at all unheard of.

Now, can you take various knowledge and craft skills to build this package, a piece at a time? If we ignore the guild member requirements, yes. Not exactly an efficient use of skills, but yes.

The reason I took this approach is because there was very little reason or function for the Profession skill otherwise.

In practice, it works fairly well. To sell things at full market price requires that the item sit in a store or shop for a while until the right buyer comes along. Adventurers seldom want to sit and tend a shop to sell off their loot, so they sell it to a licensed Guild member who runs such a shop, and he pays them what it would cost him to get it from any other source, be it his own workers or his own hand. (1/3 cost is materials, 1/6th is for labor, 1/2 is profit.)

So in that sense, yes, the Profession skill is really a skill for mundane, non-adventurer types who have the time to build and maintain a business. At least that's how I see it, and how it plays out in the games I participate in.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Consider the real world situation of a man who runs a restaurant, but isn't a cook.

Or the merchant who owns many ships, yet isn't a sailor.

It seems like you have a Profession (businessman) thing going on, rather than anything else.

 

[Celebrim]

It seems like you have a Profession (businessman) thing going on, rather than anything else.

Or simply Knowledge (Business).