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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9656055" data-attributes="member: 7006">The real issue I've always had with the 5E skill system is that they originally made an interesting choice by moving a whole bunch of the lesser-used potential skill actions and turned them into Tool Proficiencies and Musical Instrument Proficiencies, and gave characters a handful of them in addition to their normal allotment of skills.  But then they screwed it up by creating skills that did the same thing that the Tools and Instruments should have been covering, thereby rending the Tool/Instrument system redundant.If you are going to have Medicine as a skill you don't need proficiency in a Healer's Kit (or vice versa).  If you are going to have Musical Instrument proficiencies, you shouldn't have Performance as a skill.  Have the system use Survival OR Herbalism and Poisoner Kits.  Deception OR Disguise Kits / Forgery Kits.I mean they went through all the effort to NOT include Thievery as a skill this time and instead move it over specifically to Thieve's Tools proficiency... but the designers should have gone further in that direction if they were going to really make Tools and Instruments a meaningful thing.  Cause right now they have to go through all the effort of making up new rules about "If you have both then you get proficiency AND Advantage' for no other reason that they realized that they made mistake by doubling up on things.It also doesn't help that they gave out proficiencies in these kits and tools and thus made people think they were meant to be important, but never actually made game mechanics attributable to those kits and tools.  All these items are really just narrative conceits-- "Your PC knows about poisons!"-- but there are no crafting systems in the game that actually allow you to make use of them and make it more worthwhile for a PC to "build it themselves" rather than just buy/get what they need.  Like a PC can be proficient in 'Smithing Tools', but are there any systems in the game involving weapon and armor degradation that would ask for and require someone with Smithing Tools to make an actual check to fix or repair them?  Nope.  So its only actual use of this Tool proficiency is when the story takes the character to a blacksmith shop and we want to roleplay the PC 'talking shop' with the blacksmith or spend X amount of time making their own weapons or armor.  But when the PC can just buy said weapons and armor instead and there's no crafting system in the game to make it actually worthwhile for the character to do it themselves... that Tool proficiency is mainly a waste.  At the end of the day... the player just selecting an artisan Background or even just saying in their character backstory 'I was a former blacksmith" might as well be all you need to get the same exact thing than the game designers bothering to create the Tool proficiency system in the first place.</blockquote>

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