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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5778628" data-attributes="member: 4937">[MENTION=54690]outsider[/MENTION]: I'm not sure you are following my argument.  I'm not at all claiming that mundane tasks are easy.  They may well be impossible for a person of merely average skill.  But it is one thing to say you have no chance of succeeding at an action and another to say you have no chance of attempting an action. So I may not be able to execute a gogoplata, but anyone - even a child - can attempt to choke or submit a foe in a grapple.  It doesn't require a sophisticated notion of grappling technique to try to choke someone, nor does it require a sophisticated notion of combat techniques to grab a weapon or weapon hand.  Maybe the chances of you succeeding without training are very small and maybe they are zero, especially if the foe is trained in defending themselves, but you can at least try. Suppose a particular combat maneuver required a DC 30 combat manuever check and 20 was not an automatic success.  Obviously, this manuever is ordinarily impossible for an untrained individual.   But impossible in a very different way than if the manuever is only available to someone who has a specific feat.  The former is almost always preferred to the later, because the former produces better versimiltude.  Maybe of DC of disarming a skilled opponent with a bladed weapon is 30, but what if you are trying to disarm a child who is holding a pillow?  Sure, the DM can always ignore the rules when they clearly don't work or when a task is trivial, but ideally you want rules that produce logical or at least believable results regardless of the details of the situation.   This is not a trivial point.  Holes of this sort in a rules system ultimately lead to general disatisfaction with the system - often by people who can't quite put their finger on what it is that annoys them so much.   They lead to table arguments between people arguing over the letter of the law, what is 'realistic', and what they want to have happen.  And plus, what you end up doing is taking good things away from mundane character classes like fighters and forcing your game system toward repetitious and unimaginative combat.  You end up in a situation where a 'fighter' must spend very precious resources to do ordinary things and where 'fighters' of great skill can't do ordinary combat manuevers simply because they haven't unlocked them by spending a resource.  In other words, it's a variation on 'fighters can't have anything nice'.</blockquote>

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