keterys said:
But don't make people choose between taking Power Attack and Skill Training, because that 'improves roleplaying'. It shackles and inhibits it.
We heard this argument about fireball and phantom steed. That issue was fixed, was it not?
Power Attack : Skill Training :: Fireball : Phantom Steed. I mean, seriously.
Oh, wait, or is that needless symmetry? Ha, silly me and wanting a rules system that covers more than stabbing things and stealing their phat lewtz.
Fallen Seraph said:
It simply, is, those skills aren't needed. They can be shown perfectly with things like, ability rolls, using other skills, giving circumstantial bonuses, having more chances to fail and needing less success in skill-challenges, etc. to replicate such things.
Athletics isn't necessary. Insight isn't necessary.
This is fun. We could probably go on for days this way.
You could do away with those two skills and do exactly what you just mentioned. So why do they get to exist, and Craft doesn't?
PeterWeller said:
That's not really D&D, is it?
Or, is it?
You play the game one way, I play it another. There's no reason both those particular methods cannot make use of the same system.
The books actually devote quite a bit to out of combat activities. Heck, the adventuring rules precede the combat rules in the PHB, and a discussion of character background, personality, and motivation precedes the rules for rolling race and class. What the books actually say is, "you don't need to devote resources that could otherwise be spent on making your character better in a fight towards making your character more flavorful," and, "hey, DM, make sure your characters personalities and backstories are relevant to the game; reward them for developing these things."
You make a valid point, and perhaps the only vaguely valid point against my position. I responded to this idea earlier in this post.
O RLY? Because I'm pretty sure that I just described D&D, except that I switched the mechanics combat resolution with skill resolution and vice-versa. Seems like a totally valid approach to me.
You can't tell me that that is an invalid approach, nor that that is not D&D. Also, I'd really appreciate it if you didn't use the "that's not D&D" argument, because that'll lead us to a bad place of philosophical meanderings and discussions of just what, precisely, D&D is, and the nature of the game is such that pretty much everyone's definition is going to differ. I'm not trying to belittle you here, it's just that that discussion is going to be long, tedious, and probably not get us anywhere.
3.5 did not support a wider style of play than 4E does. They promote the same breadth of play that every edition has ever promoted. Combat has always been presented as central to D&D. It has always been devoted the greatest amount of rules. Whether or not combat has been the central portion of your D&D table has always and still is up to your individual table, though I suspect many individual tables feature a good deal of combat. If they don't, they're probably playing a different game.
Really? Because the utter lack of craft system in 4e kind of implies, to me, that that's not the case.
Is combat the focus of each edition? I would argue that it's the primary mechanical focus, due to the history of the game, as well as the nature of combat. And again, there's nothing wrong with having a heavy mechanical focus on combat - but the system
can support other things, and there really is no reason to not support those other perfectly valid approaches to the game.
Your preferred system (4e, presumably) has holes. If I have to admit that 3.5 has holes (and I freely do, because it does), then you have to admit that your pet edition does, as well. There's nothing wrong with that, but it needs to be acknowledged.
Fallen Seraph said:
That is why you make it a Skill Challenge, to make it more interesting actually you could have different Skills (or Ability) Rolls for different people competing.
Why not have an actual Craft skill, or Brewing skill? Why have all those other skills at all? Why does Craft get cut, but not History?
hectorse said:
Solution: Skill Challenge with moderate DC with int based checks...
No.
VBMEW-01 said:
The thing that makes me happiest is that there aren't 300 pages telling me that I have to make my party's master brewer fail his check due to some minor bit of chance (the die hits a crack in the table, for instance).
The thing that makes me irritated is that there are 300 pages telling me that I have to make my party's awesomesauce fighter fail his attack roll due to some minor bit of chance (the die hits the bag of cheetos, for instance).
I've always thought that the older editions ruled things to death rather needlessly, and that the only things that needed real clarification was combat and its related materials.
And I personally thought that they ruled combat to death, since it can be relegated to opposed skill checks. I mean, seriously, who wants to sit in combat for three hours? How droll. Just roll opposed checks and be done with it. We've got things to craft and drinks to brew! I don't need to know how many times you poke the orc with a pointy stick!
Resolving life and death situations seems more important, dice-wise, than who bangs out the nicest set of silverware.
Perhaps banging out that silverware is a life-and-death situation.
