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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salamandyr" data-source="post: 6743493" data-attributes="member: 40233">EzekielRaiden,Sal's always been my pen name, but Snarf is a generic Enworld avi, so a few people have it.  I usually use the Dave Trampier salamander elsewhere, but I've never gotten around to updating my avatar here.  Plus, I kind of like Snarf.Agreed on the rather artificial Str/Dex divide.  It's funny; in real life, almost any deficiency in actual dexterity can be overcome with practice, but you've got to have that strength--the opposite of most roleplyaing games.  I would say Parkour actually requires more strength than free runners give it credit though.  They need enough strength to support and move their bodies, and the smaller their bodies, the less strength they need.  Plus there's a diminishing returns that strength exercising has for parkour.  You've got to move those big muscles, so free runners tend to abjure powerlifting.  I've had an interest in Parkour, but at over 100 kilos, I need a lot more strength to do the things those 50 kilo guys can do with similar levels of strength as I currently have.  So in my case, if I want to do parkour (and I do), I need to first be really strong (about a third more strong than I am now-working on it).In game, if I was putting together a 4e style skill challenge for parkour it would be about 50/50 athletics and acrobatics.  Clearing obstacles-going over, under tables and other obstacles as well as taking long falls without damage is the tumbling aspect of acrobatics.  Long and high jumps, free climbing walls, and such is athletics. Also agreed on your last point about most campaigns.  Most DM's let acrobatics poach most of athletics stuff (RAW, acrobatics lets you keep your balance, and that's about it-well tumbling, but there is no mechanical effect to tumbling unless the DM allows it) like jumping, and climbing.  But they shouldn't; not only is strength/athletics the correct skill to use in those situations per RAW, it's the right one from a real world standpoint as well.That's not to say that Dexterity is not, in general, superior to strength in game; just that, in the kinds of games I try to run, with lots of physical obstacles to overcome, there is a very real opportunity cost for dumping strength.**Caveat: as always, magic can and often does negate many of these challenges, but in 5e I notice they can usually only do so for themselves, rather than for the entire party.  The wizard in our party manages to get by usually with well placed misty steps.  Personally, I find that a feature rather than a bug.  There should always be multiple ways to accomplish a task, and misty step uses a resource in a way that Athletics does not.**Thinking about parkour got me thinking about more about the str/dex divide.  It occurs to me that that thing about little guys needing less strength than the big guys is pretty common to things like climbing and, well, any activity that involves moving ones body through space.  And that's probably where we get the idea that Dexterity is more important to those activities than strength.  A 150 pound guy who can lift 160 pounds can do a lot with is body that a 225 pound man who can lift 200 pounds cannot do, simply because his strength exceeds what it needs to move his body, even though the bigger guy is undoubtedly stronger.  But the 225 pound man who can lift 300 pounds can do all the things the 150 pound man can do, plus a whole lot more.   One other real world complicating factor-heavier bodies stress the joints more in high impact exercises, so lighter guys don't hurt themselves as much doing things like Parkour, but I think that's sufficiently occult that we don't really need to simulate that in game.</blockquote>

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