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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5343186" data-attributes="member: 22424">Yeah, I agree that 4e has it about right on the balance-vs-customisation axis. I'm not a big fan of the Daily/Encounter/At-Will power paradigm, but do appreciate the way they have achieved their goal.Here we disagree. I consider it one of the great tragedies of 4e* that they removed so much of the non-combat material from the game (especially the Craft, Profession and Perform skills) at the same time as they introduced a Skill Challenge framework that seems tailor made for skills like these!At the same time, I do agree with the notion of consolidating some of the skills as has been done in 4e, Pathfinder, and elsewhere. I probably lean more towards the PF list than the 4e one, but would add to it an Athletics skill (in place of Jump, Swim, Fly and Climb, and also the Run feat), and there should be some sort of catch-all skill for Ride and also piloting vehicles (however, I can't think of a good name for it - probably stick with Ride, but explicitly roll in the piloting function).Your point about not needing to know Demogorgon's Craft skill is well made... at least for the 99.99% of campaigns where it would never come up. (Of course, there's always that one time...)However, what I'd do here is extend the notion that monsters/NPCs don't have to use the same rules as PCs... or rather that they should work at a much higher level of abstraction. So, I would suggest that creatures should list any specific skills they're noted for, and then have a 'default' skill modifier for everything else. As with the defences, these would work the same way as the PC modifiers for the same, but wouldn't need to be calculated from the creature's exact ranks/stat bonuses/etc.* IMO, the other great tragedy of 4e is that they looked carefully at the use of 3e monsters and concluded that they lived for 5 rounds on average and had too many powers (and especially minor powers). So, they bumped the hit points a lot, and removed a lot of excess powers. Unfortunately, the result is that monsters now hang around for ages, but run out of 'interesting' things to do after 6 rounds. Either of these fixes alone would have been great... together they are a major contributor to combat grind.Ick. Not a fan of such freeform systems. Too often, I find that one player chooses things that are very specific while another chooses things that are very generic, and keeping those 'balanced' in any sense becomes extremely difficult. Plus, of course, you then get the player who soon realises that there are half a dozen things that his character really should have been good at, but they didn't even cross his mind at character creation.Obviously, YMMV. (I'm not claiming that's bad design, of course... just saying I don't like it.)</blockquote>

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