D&D 4E Handling things like Riding and Craft with 4E Skills.

[Euberon]

Hmm, I think I understand your position which is about as far as we're going to get, I'm afraid. Please don't insinuate agreement in that but I think I understand where you're coming from. Your answers show me your preference and reasoning along a certain linear path certainly, but that's about all we're discussing here.

Your answers sort of speak to an insistence that the current rules somehow provide for the skill/craft examples when they really show me we have to patch together a solution in most cases (minus hunting, that was my bad) and obviously (as patching illustrates) don't provide a real skill solution. To your point, 3.5 wasn't the greatest. I freely admit that.

I guess I can only state that these mundane skills we are weighing added much enjoyment to my previous games and were indeed very relevant to the social/cultural climate in our game, despite your insistence they cannot be and never were relevant. So since I can't make you "get" my previous experiences, you'll just have to take my word for it, I guess.

Happy Gaming, bro!

 

[DracoSuave]

I guess I can only state that these mundane skills we are weighing added much enjoyment to my previous games and were indeed very relevant to the social/cultural climate in our game, despite your insistence they cannot be and never were relevant. So since I can't make you "get" my previous experiences, you'll just have to take my word for it, I guess.

Happy Gaming, bro!

I suppose I should make the word clearer. "Relevant to the system" rather than "Relevant to the roleplay" which are different concepts entirely.

I happen to feel background stuff on a character sheet adds life to a character, but there's not a lot of room on the sheet to justify background stuff unless that translates into a tangible system-relevant choice. The game simply operates on the assumption that background stuff doesn't need representation on the sheet, so it doesn't try to do so.

But, background stuff also needs to have a small impact on character generation for balance purposes. 3.5 had crafting be a minor pittance that didn't do much, so it wasn't a major choice to make. Get a rank, fuggetaboudit.

Thing is, 4thed has NOTHING you can do that's minor on your sheet like that... so that means if you're giving up... say... Diplomacy... you better be getting something other than 'saves money on things you only buy during character creation.'


Moreover, I'm also a fan of abstracting skills and having the narrative means of using them be unique to a character. A warlock uses his dark magics to dismantle traps where a rogue uses cleverness and a set of hand tools. A bard sings a song about how the trap opens in mourning for its lost lover, the key.

Do these three things need three seperate skills? Do you invent a new Thievery skill every time a new class comes out that does things a little differently? Is it good for the game to have five different skills that accomplish the same effect? Or do you just take the effect, make that the game mechanic on your character sheet, and roleplay your character appropriate to what you envision?

Do you NEED a perform skill, or do you use performance to enact your Bluff, Diplomacy, Streetwise, and powers?

 

[Spatula]

Or think about it this way: Is there any stronger evidence that they are missed than the loads of conversations people are having about them?

Were having, perhaps. This thread hadn't been posted in for almost 3 years before you dug it up.

Role playing also does not impose limits to flex against, as does the rest of the game. I'm as good as I wanna be isn't really the spirit of any version of D&D.

Take a 1e AD&D character (or 2e AD&D using backgrounds instead of NWPs) with a background in blacksmithing. How good is the character at it?

The point isn't that craft/profession skills are useless. It's that if the skills can't let the character do anything extraordinary, having mechanics for them is mostly pointless. You don't need mechanics to have character moments or to add to the fabric of the game.

Anyway, I kinda like how at least one retro-clone that I've seen handles the issue, with background skill slots that can only be spent on craft/profession type stuff (and languages). There weren't any rules for their use, but having the skill name and a bonus written on the character sheet clearly matters to some folks.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I remember a discussion I once had about how it would be interesting to make an entire party of accountants in shadowrun, start the game with maximum money, and begin by telling the DM "we ignore the email from Mr. Johnson to come do an adventure, invest all our cash and start shadowrunning 10 years later with the extra cash we earn".

And then we realised that would be really boring and fairly pointless.

"to make stuff" isn't a good justification to have a craft system in an RPG.

"to sing well" isn't a good justification for having a singing skill.

Now there might BE good justifications for both of those. With a world where singing is particularly important (a status sign, a form of magic, a way to soothe raging beasts), you might still have a singing skill. But the justification isn't "to sing well".

Similar with crafting: good justifications are "to make better gear than is commonly available" or "to fix things in the field" or "to alter things that we find". However I still think that if you're going to make a system for these things, it either needs to be very, very simple ("fine, your 20 points in crafting give your gun a +1 to hit") or involved enough that the entire party participates ("you must quest to the peak of mount dragorogorn and slay the mighty pergerost, then bathe the blade in it's blood to bind the magic!")

One of those justifications is good enough that an entire class exists based around it (artificers). One is good enough that it gets a skill (thievery) and the third is simply a matter of how the DM describes handing out treasure.

Hell, even "I make stuff because I can" is covered. You make an item for the same price in time and money that it costs you to buy it. There's a reason you're adventuring for treasure after all.

 

[FireLance]

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