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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4113799" data-attributes="member: 2067">Sure, but that's not really the point I'm making. I'm talking about the shift from "Here is a skill. Here is what you can do with your skill." to "Here is your skill. You figure out what to do with your skill."I like the change, I think it's a cool element of creative thinking. "Okay, I'm trained in History. How can history save me from this situation!" I'd imagine there would be some static DC's for various things too, but your use of the skill depends more on how you use it than on the skill itself. There was no option to use History to escape a city in 3e because 3e thought about the things you would know if you had Knowledge (history), gave you a summarry, and told the DM to make stuff up. I'm famously not a fan of that tactic. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. I noted up above that Trip being once per encounter doesn't mean you literally have lost any ability to trip. This is one of the poster children for what I'm talking about: that 4e is about what you do (you trip no more than once per encounter) and that 3e is about what you are (you can try and trip whenever you decide to).So once more: Trip being a per-encounter power shows that 4e is more concerned with your actual use of the ability than your theoretical capacity to actually use the ability than 3e, where trip as an at-will power shows that 3e was concerned with your capacity to actually use the ability. Presumably, in 4e, you don't somehow magically in-character loose the ability to trip people. You just can't do it anymore on a narrative level in the same way. Don't be a jerk.I don't understand your point, here. You were responding to me saying telling MO that 4e isn't unqiue in the fact that each class has special things you can do with it. You seem to be trying to clarify his point to indicate that 4e has classes that contirbute more or less equally to the drama of the game. I'm back to my original point: 4e is not unique in this regard. 4e does some new stuff with specifically the capacity of magic to be a panacea vs. 3e, but that has almost nothing to do with the classes, and almost nothing to do with what MO said about each class having a unique capacity. And absolutely nothing to do with the narrative-character balancing act I'm talking about.I'm still not entirely sure I'm making sense of what you're saying. 4e rules say that characters influence encounters based on what actions they take -- you trip once, you power attack as much as you want, and at some point in your series of encounters you go nova and blow away the enemy. 3e rules say that characters influence encounters based on what actions they are capable of taking -- you can trip, you can grapple, sometimes you can cast a spell, you might be able to power attack, etc. 4e specifically gets rid of the 3e problem of accidental suck (at least, for now) in this, because it's designed around what you actually do. However, accidental suck was in-character, and you can get rid of or mitigate that problem without removing all of the in-character meaning from the ability, so I think it's a baby-with-the-bathwater scenario. And for clarity purposes:Accidental Suck = The phenomenon of building a character you want to play who is nonetheless frustratingly ineffective when it comes to doing what the game revolves around (such as building a diplomonster in a 3e game where another party member plays an enchanter, another a telepath, and where the play revolves around exploring dungeons, or building almost any LA +2 or greater monster character in 3e).</blockquote>

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