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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6102931" data-attributes="member: 1465">I agree. I think it would be best to remove all those bonus skills to non-Rogues. They are not really needed, but unfortunately every now and then both the gamers and the designers are carried away by thoughts such as "it makes no sense for a Cleric not to have Knowledge Religion". It is a reasonable thought, but it's not true enough. What happens if your Cleric doesn't have Kn:Religion? The Cleric still obviously knows about his religion, just like a Wizard knows about his spells, but he doesn't know about others. And should that be mandatory to all Clerics? In the real world, most priests are actually concerned only with their religion, not with others, they don't need to know the rites, festivities, hierarchy and rules of somebody else's religion. I have played at least a couple of Clerics in 3e without taking the Kn:Religion skill, and they worked totally fine. Giving Knowledge Religion to all Clerics means to take one common archetypal element of clerics ("being versed in all religions of the world") and change it from "common" to "mandatory". Incidentally, in some campaign settings this can even be detrimental, if the settings wants religions to be esoteric and hostile to each other.Wizard's mandatory/automatic Knowledge Arcana is a bit more understandable to me, at least because the Wizard class is based on the archetype of the arcane scholar who gets all her powers from books, and alternative archetypes are moved to different classes such as Sorcerer and Warlock.At least the current playtest packets offer some freedom, because you don't have to have exactly Religion and Arcane respectively, you can choose something else. But then again, why not just saying that Clerics and Wizards are generally more educated and have access to libraries, and therefore granting them any one Knowledge skill of choice? It would be better, although I still believe it would be even better to don't give them any bonus skill at all. They don't really need more skills than the other classes, and this creates only an escalation of "if Clerics get 5, why Fighters get only 4?". If we think that 4 skills are too few, let's increase the skills granted by Backgrounds to 5 or 6. I think 4 are plenty enough (especially considering that most skills are just bonuses, and can be used untrained), and it should be left to each gaming group to increase this number.</blockquote>

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