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General Tabletop Discussion
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Getting rid of bad skill proficiencies
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<blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8128477" data-attributes="member: 6937590"><p>Creating compound skill/tool proficiencies for medicine/healing kit, performance/instrument, animal handling/land vehicles, and sleight of hand/thieves tools makes intuitive sense to me. There is a lot of conceptual overlap between these skills and tools that makes each one individually less useful. Granted, these skills and tools are not conceptually identical--but for a PC adventurer, it doesn't need to be possible to be good at sleight of hand but incapable of using thieves tools or vice versa. They may as well share one proficiency so that all stealy PCs are good at both.</p><p></p><p>Similarly, survival/nature and athletics/acrobatics are more or less the same skill but for different abilities, i.e. you use nature to determine what type of snake poisoned the duke but you use survival to suck out the venom if you have been bitten yourself--it's the same substantive area of knowledge/expertise being applied to different types of problems. My preference is to have one skill--e.g. athletics--and use strength with it when it's a muscle athletcs-y thing but dexterity when it's a balance athletics-y thing.</p><p></p><p>If combining proficiencies doesn't make them stronger than perception, persuasion, or stealth I don't think it'll break anything.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I subsume history and religion into a knowledge skill, like the "lore" skill of some 3e CRPGs. History and religion are pretty similar areas of knowledge in most published settings, with timelines that include 20+ instances of "in year xxxx, god y did thing z".</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="squibbles, post: 8128477, member: 6937590"] Creating compound skill/tool proficiencies for medicine/healing kit, performance/instrument, animal handling/land vehicles, and sleight of hand/thieves tools makes intuitive sense to me. There is a lot of conceptual overlap between these skills and tools that makes each one individually less useful. Granted, these skills and tools are not conceptually identical--but for a PC adventurer, it doesn't need to be possible to be good at sleight of hand but incapable of using thieves tools or vice versa. They may as well share one proficiency so that all stealy PCs are good at both. Similarly, survival/nature and athletics/acrobatics are more or less the same skill but for different abilities, i.e. you use nature to determine what type of snake poisoned the duke but you use survival to suck out the venom if you have been bitten yourself--it's the same substantive area of knowledge/expertise being applied to different types of problems. My preference is to have one skill--e.g. athletics--and use strength with it when it's a muscle athletcs-y thing but dexterity when it's a balance athletics-y thing. If combining proficiencies doesn't make them stronger than perception, persuasion, or stealth I don't think it'll break anything. I subsume history and religion into a knowledge skill, like the "lore" skill of some 3e CRPGs. History and religion are pretty similar areas of knowledge in most published settings, with timelines that include 20+ instances of "in year xxxx, god y did thing z". [/QUOTE]
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Getting rid of bad skill proficiencies
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