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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5006022" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't see them however as serving the same purpose, though I admit that the disguise/bluff skill divide isn't as coherent as I would like.  For one thing, you can roll disguise on behalf of someone else (to disguise them), but you can't really bluff on behalf of someone else.  So we might imagine someone who is a great actor (bluff) who depends on a great makeup artist (disguise) to aid him in his work.  In general, I believe that the divide between bluff and disguise ought to be mental/physical.  You use diguise in all physical situations of deceit and bluff in all mental/social ones.  To that end, under my rules 'feint' is undertaken with a diguise check - not a bluff check - in that a 'fient' is a physical motion you are trying to sell,  not a verbal claim.  I've wrestled back and forth over whether 'Forgery' ought to be bundled in with disguise because it is a physical deception or with 'Craft' because it the product of craftsmanship.  I've at the moment landed on craft, where crafting a forged document involves Craft (Caligraphy) or making a fake necklace involves Craft (Jewelry).   An argument can be made though that 'Forgery' ought to be a modifier to your craft check, made with disguise - representing particular skill at deceptive craft.  However, that awaits a more robust set of craft rules that I've never gotten around to making.Use Rope is the edge case here because its so narrow, but whether 'Appraise' gets used is entirely a matter of DM preference.  Arguably for most campaigns 'Appraise' ought to be used all the time.  For example, I'm not sure how you would know a masterwork sword from a regular sword (and thus be able to even buy one) unless you could appraise it.All opinions though.  The main thing is that however you divide the skills makes sense for how often they would be used in your campaign.Whereas, I don't see it used at all, but could imagine it being used if the DM had a certain sort of style (namely, that he liked handwaving interaction with minor offstage NPCs).I think Research is a legitimate skill, but the problem I have with it is that in my campaign large libraries are so relatively rare that I can't imagine Research being any more useful than Use Rope.  In a campaign where libraries and such are common and accessible to the public, then I can definately see adding Research in as an option.  For my part, the utility of breaking it out into a separate skill doesn't seem to be there, so I keep it bundled with 'Knowledge' (that is to say, you roll a check against your own knowledge of the subject to research it in a library).Conversely, I've actually consolidated knowledge skills into extremely broad catagories because I thought there were too many of them.  The problem you run into with highly specialized knowledge is that if you try to make a skill for every legitimate speciality, you quickly run into the problem you have in GURPS (or Chaosium CoC using all the introduced skills) where skills or so narrow that the end result is everyone is incompotent at most everything.  In GURPS they try to solve this with a system of complex defaults from similar skills, but this just gets to be really confusing and clunky.The available fields of study in Knowledge for my campaign are:Arcana – magic, the physical world, magical creatures, and the supernatural Architecture and Engineering – buildings, construction, machinery, and technologyArts and Literature – artists, criticism, folk lore, poety, and romance Computation and Ledgers – accounting, finance, logistics, and mathimaticsCustoms and Heraldy – culture, etiquette, manners, living rulers and the nobilityGeology and Mining – excavation, geology, hydrology, and mineralsHistory and Geography – events, people, and placesLaw – legal theory and practiceNature – animals, plants, meteorology, and oceanologyThe Planes – realms beyond our ownReligion and Philosophy – cults, deities, myths, organized religion, and theologyRiddles and Enigmas  – games and puzzles</blockquote>

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