D&D (2024) What medievalesque skill name do you prefer, for machinery, architecture, math, physics?

[Paul Farquhar]

I've always used the modern terms (engineering, etc) but I don't like that at all. I voted clockwork, wrightcraft and artifex. I think I like artifex best.

Use Latin - something like Ingenium I think.

 

[GrimCo]

It is cool that term "engineer" relates to the same word as "ingenious" and "ingenuity".

Same latin root word, ingenium.

Use Latin - something like Ingenium I think.

Or Ars ingeniaria -Art of engineering. Machinamentum would be another latin word for engineering, more precisely for mechanical engineering, military engineering and machine/contraption building, with machinator (or modern english version machinist) being word for machine builder. Ingenium refers more to persons natural gifts and mental capacities.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Has Sapper and Bombardier been suggested yet?

 

[Lanefan]

Machinery: Artificer
Architecture: Engineer
Math and physics: Scientist or Sage

There's no one term that works well for the lot of them combined.

 

[Yaarel]

Machinery: Artificer
Architecture: Engineer
Math and physics: Scientist or Sage

There's no one term that works well for the lot of them combined.

Yeah, I am trying to get a sense of where the boundaries are.

For example, which skill is the go-to for mathematics?

I figure it is impossible to do physics without math. So, alchemy gets math? It always had very specific ingredients at precise proportions and processes.


Therefore, the Nature skill is "natural philosophy", whence mathematics along with the Five Elements being Ether, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth, that refer to the elemental states of matter, being "immaterial force" plus plasma, gas, liquid, and solid. Ultimately even matter itself is made out of immaterial forces. The science of force and matter is mathematical. But it can also be personal, where animism can have a friendship with a particular mountain, sometimes literally an Earth Elemental emerging from the mountain, or an other humanlike manifestation of the mind of that unique mountain. Nature includes knowledgeability about the Elemental Planes, including the Ethereal Plane. Despite the schematic representation cosmology map of the 5e multiverse, I prefer to view the Elemental Planes as aspects of the Material world and somehow pervading and inside matter.

Then the Engineer skill is a multidisciplinary specialization that focuses on machinery and creating ingenious constructs that coordinate many different kinds of moving parts. This is the clockwork concept, building architecture especially the wonders of the world, and all kind of machines, mechanisms, gadgets, and sometimes even living constructs.

One might want to use the "Nature" skill for the wilderness, plants and animals. But this sense of Nature is elemental, and doesnt. Instead, the Survival skill is about how "life finds ways to stay alive". It is all the life sciences of botany and zoology, medicine, environmentalism, ecosystems, symbiosis, and expresses well the D&D traditions of Druids and Rangers. Survival can relate to tracking and hunting, to understand animals and develop sustainable sources of food. But Survival is also the life sciences of agriculture, and flourishing farms to feed cities in healthy organic ways. While chemistry is molecular and mainly the elemental Nature skill, organic chemistry regarding building blocks of life, such as DNA and medical research often leans into the Survival skill. As a rule of thumb, if it is about "life" make a Survival check, and if it is about "matter" make a Nature check.

 

[GrimCo]

When it comes to skills, it all depends how broad or narrow one want's to go. D&D 5e, imho, works best when skills are broad areas, since you have limited number of them and you get all of them at character creation for the most part. As far as i know, there isn't really method to acquire skill proficiency at later levels (unless your class/subclass gives you one), unlike in 3.x where you got skill points every level and you could just buy new skill when you level up.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

There are so many branches of engineering and it covers math and physics and chemistry and uses many branches of science.

I’d originally chosen mechanics until I saw engineering. Engineering also covers mechanics.

 

[Tonguez]

The wizard summons a spirit: “oh spirit, can you explain to me how the Higgs boson confers mass?”

“The Higgs boson? Think of it as the ripple caused when the Loom of Reality is distorted by its weave. A brief distortion in the veil that reveals how form takes hold of the formless.

All things begin in boundless radiance, like the light of stars, but in this material realm that divine fire is forced through the Loom, becoming snagged and heavy with form and substance”