Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6487868" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I think we're saying the same thing, though I think there's a strong active component to every 4e skill (and at least potentially to pretty much any skill in most systems, including 3e). That is to say the majority of skill use IME in 4e and 5e (which is FAIRLY similar to 4e in this respect) is initiated by the player. In 4e you say "I want to look for traps" and you make an active Perception check. Even with Intuition you can say something like "What do I think the King's reaction will be" or something like that. I found the 4e type skills to be a pretty much first-class part of the system. Its true, class features and powers are 'stronger', the assumption being they're basically drawing from internal 'mundane' skill, where the other things are at least partly magical and thus logically superior, at least some of the time.I think the 4e skills actually might be better named 'knacks'. They represent areas of strength that the character has, types of things they do well. Having the 'Nature' skill means you have a great familiarity and comfort with animals and plants, and the environment. The character may know very little more formally about specific plants than someone who has the background 'profession: herbalist' or something like that, but they still are likely to know which plants are found in an area, which ones typically have medicinal or food value, etc. The herbalist OTOH will tell you this is 'Velerium Officianalis and it treats skin infections' or whatever. 4e doesn't really bother to have specific knowledge rules at that level of detail, but that's an area you could elaborate. I'm just not sure how having sub-categories of the Athletics skill for instance increases its 'active' nature in and of itself. I think if you wanted to increase the potency of skills, make them the core of the system, you'd want to make things like spells and class features invoke skill checks. 4e actually does SOME of that, but its not particularly consistent. Anyway, its interesting food for thought for me, since I have been working on my own skill system tweaks.</blockquote>

Verification