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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9291447" data-attributes="member: 6877472">This brings to mind Lazarus Long's quote: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."D&D, like many games, has long rewarded specialization over diversification.  You pile all your eggs in one basket, you get amazing returns.That this leaves you with a crippling weakness when your strength is negated or irrelevant is not something the game usually protects against- 4e took a stab at it, but generally, if your class isn't good at a thing, it takes a lot of effort to shore up that weak point, effort that could be put to use making yourself better at your main thing.And that's fine, if we look at D&D as a team-based game, where every character has a niche.  Unfortunately, my experience is that party optimization is rarely a concern for players, beyond the basic "hey who is going to heal us?".  Lopsided groups can and do exist, and the system nor the rulebooks really tell you what to do about it as a DM (beyond the old-school approach of, "when they die, they'll figure it out", lol).Which is perfectly cromulent for some groups- but we live in an era where pick-up groups are a fairly common occurrence for some- I started playing 5e through Adventurer's League, and many online games are "4-6 people who don't know each other very well" (which, if you think about it, describes a great many adventuring parties!).The game could stand to make diversifying easier, since the amount of skills most characters are proficient can be pretty woeful when compared to we modern-day humans.  And you can't even say "well, D&D worlds are more like Earth's past with worse education standards" when we have wizard and bard colleges in many settings!  Even early D&D relied heavily on Sage NPC's who had vast knowledge when compared to PC's.The real thing that strikes me as interesting about all this is the fact that having multiple people trained in a skill doesn't really do a lot for the game.  Sure, that means there's more opportunities to take the Help action, I suppose, but the game isn't built to make that a huge benefit- there's lots of ways to get advantage, and even quasi-advantage (like adding a d4 or d6 to a roll) out there.And sure, maybe a player wants to have a weakness.  That's perfectly acceptable, but I think it's equally acceptable for someone to get tired of constantly falling down when trying to climb a tree, or always risking drowning when they come into contact with water like many video game protagonists!  And the game isn't friendly to attempts to overcome such a weakness, beyond snickering at you for deciding that taking Animal Handling or Medicine over Athletics, no matter how well it suits you character concept.Just to reiterate, you options are all optional!  Multiclassing, Feats, and Downtime aren't available by default, and I hear a lot of people like it that way!And when you look at fictional examples of fantasy characters, the kinds of people you might want your character to emulate, you find many veritable polymaths and most likely multiclassed individuals roaming about- Conan, for example, speaks a dozen languages and has tried his hands at just as many professions, if not more!I'm starting up a game of my own fairly soon, and I think I'll experiment with opportunities for characters to gain more proficiencies and see how that goes.  Of course, at the same time, I'll also have to make skills matter more- in my 5e experience, there's several skills that seem to be rarely invoked, which is another problem entirely.</blockquote>

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