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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7357827" data-attributes="member: 29398">As I said in the post you quoted, nothing ever stops anyone from trying anything.  A non-Bard can try Acting if so desired...just much less likely to succeed, is all.  All Bards become Actors simply as a feature of thier class training at x level; it's up to them whether they go on to make much use of the ability or not.  And why can only Rangers (and Druids) auto-know which way's north?  Because on a cloudy or foggy day they know enough about how plants grow, how they are affected by the sun, etc. to easily find north.  Again, others can try; and in some situations e.g. you can see the sun success might be automatic anyway.  Conversely, there'll be situations e.g. suddenly appearing in the middle of an endless sheet of ice, where even a Ranger isn't guaranteed success.I'm not so sure.  It's on both the DM at the table and the designers in the PH to point out that anyone can try anything, to be sure.  But baking many of these things in as class abilities and completely removing all the rest gets away from the endless plethora of feats a player has to navigate through every time a character levels up.Even now, someone trying something for which they don't have the feat forces the DM to gauge all the details before determing success, failure, or a DC.  Nothing changes there; except in this particular instance TWF becomes a distinct feature of one or two specific classes instead of being open to all.This is assuming there's a roll-play problem that needs to be fixed.Exactly!  That's the intent here: keep the underlying mechanics nice and simple (and preferably as out of sight as possible) and let the fluff take over from there.If you want to be good at fighting with two weapons you'd have seen during char-gen that there's only one or two classes that have this as a feature; and you'd have had to make a choice at that point whether TWF was more important to have than, say, heavy armour use.More fundamentally, I am a proponent of each character - as reflected by its one class - being good at what it does and rather bad at everything else.  This way each character brings a few clear strengths and a lot of weaknesses to the party, with the strengths of one mitigating or cancelling the weaknesses of others.  In turn this promotes (but does not force) running as an inter-reliant party.Feats and multiclassing run counter to this: they promote the construction of jack-of-all-trades characters who can do a bit of everything and who eventually become one-person parties; they have no real reason to rely on anyone else and thus have much less need for the rest of the party other than simple strength in numbers.Lanefan</blockquote>

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