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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4670043" data-attributes="member: 58197">The way I see it, there are really only three levels of skill that 99% of players care about. Either you don't care about a skill; or you want to be reasonably good at the skill, since it's appropriate to your character; or you want to be really good at the skill, since it's central to your character.4E recognizes this by having three levels of skill training: Untrained, Trained, and Trained + Focus. By default, everybody has some class-appropriate skills trained. If you just want to be good at things that your character would logically be good at, that's all you need. If you want to stand out, even among other trained characters - to the extent that you're willing to pay for the privilege - you pick up Skill Focus.(And before anyone asks, yes, I pick up Skill Focus quite often. My current character has Skill Focus in both Perception and Arcana, and after three gaming sessions the investment has already paid for itself IMO - I've spotted clues pointing us toward a traitor in our ship's crew, and my ritual magic has been a major boon to the party.  In a pirate campaign, Phantom Steed with 30+ on the Arcana check is a seriously awesome spell, especially if your DM lets you tie ropes to them and use them to pull your ship when you're becalmed.)I would argue that this is all the granularity the system requires for the vast majority of players. In my experience, the granularity of 3E is not merely un-useful but actively bad; it steepens the learning curve, lengthens the character creation process, and lures inexperienced players into making choices they will later regret.One thing that I have learned, painfully, from being a software developer: Not only is more options not always good, it is frequently bad. The cost of making decisions is non-trivial, as is the cost of people occasionally making the wrong decision*. Both of these costs must be counted against the benefit of having the option. Quite often, the cost exceeds the benefit.[size=-2]* In this case, the "wrong" decision is "the decision which will lead to the character not performing, in-game, the way the player wants him/her to perform."[/size]</blockquote>

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