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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5500609" data-attributes="member: 82106">See, for us, it is not that. It is, ok, my character had time to pick up a little bit of training and experience for a few other skills (e.g., Disable Device and Bluff) on an adventure (urban or dungeon) which is represented by a few ranks in those skills.  The character, then, does not use them a couple of adventures/ levels, because they have been in the wilderness away from civilization during which time he learned more about Survival and Move silent (puts a couple of ranks into those).  When  they finally  go back to an urban environment, the character than gets to put the little bit of training and experience to use. Afterwards, the ranks  can be increased to  reflect the use and experience. It is the player getting to control the pace of the bonus to reflect thier interpretation of the character's training rather than the system telling us, you are level x so you have this bonus in these areas that your character never encountered and  knows nothing about. Now, someone is going to say, just to apply the bonus. However, there DMs and players that are going to consider that a dick move! I have seen it happen. Yet, they wouldn't say anything in a skill point system when no ranks are applied.Then, for myself and those I know, a key part is exploring the setting and developing the character along the way to reflect the growth and changes.</blockquote>Meh, no skill system is going to entirely realistic. The 4e skill system, if you were to actually analyze it, allows PCs to improve in everything, true, but only to a limited extent. A character at high levels interacting with a level-appropriate challenge governed by an untrained skill on an off stat will be quite a bit behind the 8 ball. He won't at all seem like an expert in these random skills. Sure, at 30th level he's going to be on a par with a highly trained expert 1st level PC, but that's really irrelevant because there's no challenge he's going to face that is relevant to a level 1 PC (and NPCs etc can have any arbitrary skill bonus the DM cares to give them, but again there's no reason a level 30 PC would be interacting with low level NPCs and not expecting to trivially dominate the encounter). So this "4e PCs are good at everything at high level" argument falls completely apart with even the most superficial analysis. This is on top of KD's point that highly experienced epic level heroes will logically have a good deal of expertise purely based on general experience.You're also ignoring a vast amount of 4e mechanics here. Even an expert level 1 PC will have to dedicate some amount of resources to maintaining (or attaining) mastery of a skill as he levels up. Having a +15 (very high) skill bonus at level 1 in say Arcana makes my wizard quite expert in that field for a greenhorn. Heck, he may even now and then be able to come up with epic lore. OTOH the same PC wizard at level 30 will have a +30 skill bonus. This is still fairly good, but where at level 1 he can pass a hard check on a 3 at level 30 he will fail that check on 12. To maintain his skills he's going to have to do some work, like picking up Skill Focus, selecting a Skill or Utility power to give him a bonus to some checks, acquire items that have Arcana item bonuses, etc. So again, mastery is not automatically maintained. You have choices as to which skills to excel at, which to be competent with, and which to be poor at.Finally there are a wide variety of other mechanics in 4e you haven't looked at. If a character wants to be familiar with a particular mundane topic all he need do is put it in his background at character creation. Specific techniques are covered by practices or sometimes other game elements. Beyond that most 3.5 skills actually had no meaningful mechanics attached to them anyway. I can build a character in 4e which is just as well detailed and fills a theme, evolves organically, etc as you can in 3.5. The difference is the skill system is vastly easier to use, doesn't require degrading of necessary adventuring skills for trivia, and is much easier to incorporate into adventures. Really, if the 3.5 system was so great then why in fact did Pathfinder do something very similar to 4e? The answer is that the 3.5 skill system was unwieldy at best and inhibited creativity at the worst, AND it was hard to write adventures where any but the most basic adventuring skills mattered anyway.[/QUOTE]

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