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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6084072" data-attributes="member: 2067">Your post is interesting, but I wanted to tease this element out.Skills, so far in D&amp;D Next, are nothing more than bonuses to ability score checks. Everyone has a &quot;Stealth&quot; skill, it's called &quot;Make a Dexterity check.&quot; A Thief (or whatever) might have a +3 bonus to checks made to hide in shadows. Herpaderp, you have a skill.So how do you make a Thief without skills? Look at the D&amp;D Next rogue. Now take out all the skills (from everybody). That's still a Thief. It's still, by virtue of rewarding a good Dex score, probably better at hiding than anyone else in the party. Skills aren't required for thiefy abilities. Hide In Shadows can be a skill, but it could also be a feat, or a proficiency, or a power, or a ritual. Or whatever. And that brings me to the overall point, here. If &quot;skills&quot; in Next are just measures of what a character is kind of talented at, there's no real reason to bake them into a class. If you want your rogue to hide in shadows, don't make it a skill -- make it a trick, make it a maneuver. If it's part of a class's identity, it shouldn't be a skill. Then no one &quot;needs&quot; skills, but a game could adopt them so that characters can receive some extra granularity on what they're particularly good at.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 6084072, member: 2067"] Your post is interesting, but I wanted to tease this element out. Skills, so far in D&D Next, are nothing more than bonuses to ability score checks. Everyone has a "Stealth" skill, it's called "Make a Dexterity check." A Thief (or whatever) might have a +3 bonus to checks made to hide in shadows. Herpaderp, you have a skill. So how do you make a Thief without skills? Look at the D&D Next rogue. Now take out all the skills (from everybody). That's still a Thief. It's still, by virtue of rewarding a good Dex score, probably better at hiding than anyone else in the party. Skills aren't required for thiefy abilities. Hide In Shadows can be a skill, but it could also be a feat, or a proficiency, or a power, or a ritual. Or whatever. And that brings me to the overall point, here. If "skills" in Next are just measures of what a character is kind of talented at, there's no real reason to bake them into a class. If you want your rogue to hide in shadows, don't make it a skill -- make it a trick, make it a maneuver. If it's part of a class's identity, it shouldn't be a skill. Then no one "needs" skills, but a game could adopt them so that characters can receive some extra granularity on what they're particularly good at. [/QUOTE]

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