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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8145045" data-attributes="member: 82106">Here I disagree with you. I think what happened is that there was always a certain 'simulation' bent to D&D rules writing. The game originated as a tabletop wargame. With 2e they arrived at 'story teller GM' but with wargame-derived mechanics. This wasn't a 'design', it was just unanalyzed hackery, exigency piled on top of tradition to create an inchoate and incoherent 'system'. From a marketing perspective it has the clothing of D&D, which makes it quite salable, and of course you can play it. Its not a terrible game or anything, but it isn't 'designed' in any way shape or fashion beyond whatever is left of Gygax's original design.So, skills are just larded on top in a sort of simulationist reflex. There is no concept of how, when, why, or where they should be used. Go through the modules (especially the OA ones) and you will see what I mean. As RP 'background' signifiers they kind of DO work in OA, your Samurai gets 'Tea Ceremony' and this signifies he's cultured, etc. The other ones, derived from the DSG and WSG, are simply "we like the simulation idea of skills, every other game now has them, so we added a bunch of material to create some for these books, look it fills a lot of pages!" 2e just carried them forward. It is telling that all this happened right after Gary left TSR...3.0 simply carried on with that. There's no coherent design reason for it. Diplomacy in 3.x is not some coherent chosen design decision that indicates that anyone was thinking about anything! IMHO 3.0 was garbage. It was written by people who didn't understand classic D&D AT ALL. It was a mechanical rationalization of the already incoherent non-design that was 2e. In the course of creating it they broke practically everything that was left of the original design of D&D, and in every case those were bad decisions. 3.5 was needed because 3.0 was a HOT MESS. Half the classes didn't work at all, casters were so OP it was not even funny, and then fundamentally at the core there was simply no workable conceptual process, no principles of design. Thus 3.5 failed as well. 4e was really invented because the designers at WotC THREW UP THEIR HANDS, plainly seeing that what they had was unfixable and was a terrible design for a game! Now, what all this shows is that what works for game designers and what works for people just muddling through playing a game are a lot different. Still, in the case of skills people really were never getting their money's worth out of that in anything except 4e, where they have a design purpose and serve it fairly well. 5e is a bit in the middle, clearly Mike understood the problem, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to just improve the 4e approach (IE make a better SC-like system and keep the short skill list). So, now we have a lot of bad choices, but at least the list is fairly bounded. Skills are still kind of a 5th wheel without being tied to core resolution process, but at least they serve the 'RP signifier' purpose and some of them are pretty useful (IE the perception type skills and similar, and the physical skills basically do their job, the social ones are borked of course, but so it goes...). My point is, there's no point in discussing what D&D designers intended with skills, there WAS NO INTENT, except in 4e.</blockquote>

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