D&D 5E Hooray for parts of speech!

[occam]

I almost forgot to mention one of my favorite things about the new edition: after years of suffering in English anguish, D&D finally has a list of skills that uses consistent parts of speech! No more weird mix of nouns (Diplomacy, Perception, Stealth), verbs (Heal, Intimidate, Listen, Move Silently, Search), adjectives (Streetwise, really?), and... either/or (Balance, Bluff). With the renaming of Search to Investigation from the last playtest, now every skill name is a noun!



...

What? Isn't everyone as excited about this as I am?

Harrumph.

Well, for those of you with me, it's on to the next objective: feat names! Onward to victory!

 

[Charles Wright]

Boo! Nouns suck! Pluperfect subjunctives is where it's at, man!

 

[GX.Sigma]

Having them all be the same part of speech is a good thing, and I suppose noun is the only one that makes sense. I think they tried verbs at some point in the playtest (Sneak, Spot, Search), but it got a little awkward (Recall Lore, Handle an Animal).

 

[Deset Gled]

If we're going to be pedantic, lets be pedantic:

Search can be a noun.

 

[JC99]

I like that the "similar threads" box has a post you made about 4th edition that's almost exactly the same.

 

[Bawylie]

Boo! Nouns suck! Pluperfect subjunctives is where it's at, man!

Well, they ought to be...

 

[Agamon]

Boo! Nouns suck! Pluperfect subjunctives is where it's at, man!

Sounds like some weird time travel RPG.

Player: "We're going to Investigate."

DM: "No, I'm sorry. If you had read the rules, you would know that you had already investigated."

 

[occam]

I like that the "similar threads" box has a post you made about 4th edition that's almost exactly the same.

Yeah, I was wrong about that one, though. Darn you, Intimidate and Streetwise!

So yes, this has been a long-standing pet peeve of mine.

 

[1of3]

Yes. Welcome back to world of ordinary speech. You anglophone guys are much too liberal with moving words from verbs to nouns and back. You even started clitizing some suffixes and got rid of most of the others. You are in serious danger of becoming an isolating language. Remember that!

 

[LostSoul]

With the renaming of Search to Investigation from the last playtest, now every skill name is a noun!

I like this because I think it has a nice but subtle effect on how the game is played.

It's pretty easy to say "I Bluff him" and have the DM respond "Okay, roll your Bluff." Then, maybe, the DM catches himself and says, "Hang on - what did you actually say?" It's a little harder to do that when the skill is called "Persuasion".

It doesn't go as far as I'd like but it's okay.