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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8955517" data-attributes="member: 82106">Sounds good, my Holmes Basic has a whole hand-written codicil that incorporates the LBB stuff and fixes the rules, lol. I guess I was a 14-yr-old rules lawyer!I'm happy to extend it to PP and ED too, though I think that won't add a ton. Feats may also help here now and then, and that might be a slight attraction for some of the more thematic but less substantive ones (but not much). I am liking the whole suggestion of Heroic Origin though, as a kind of fusion maybe of Theme and Background, with a bit of added story. HoML is supposed to be more about becoming a legendary/mythical figure, so it will fit in as a better version of background there, and I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it a long time ago now, lol!I do take your meaning on the 'all over the place' and things like Arcana are a bit less clearly in the 'approach' vein. Still, if I know a lot of weird esoteric secrets and stuff, I probably rely on study and superior knowledge as part of my toolkit. Plus knowledge skills never really fit well in the 'skill' category either! So my thinking was "well, knowledge and approach (or talent) don't fit together any WORSE than knowledge and skill..." lol. So, I actually called skills 'knacks' in HoML, but its all just terminology anyway, call them '4e skills' and leave it at that, hehe.Broadness is fine. I just don't necessarily see some things as really that closely associated at all. Thievery seems like a kind of classic 'technical' skill to me, and Bluff is much more of an 'approach' or 'talent', for instance. Mostly though, the 19 item 4e list is already pretty short, and seems really well-thought-out. I like short, but there could be TOO short! That's why I don't really hold with the idea of just having ability scores represent 6 'talents'. I mean, we had that in OD&D, but clearly it wasn't adequate.I think its pretty well agreed that in the real world there's no very clean divide between Strength and Agility/Coordination, they generally go together to some degree, and few tasks test only one and not the others. I just see the game as more of a 'depiction engine', it isn't trying to simulate how the world works, much, but is instead giving the player breadcrumbs and incentives (depictive characterization I called it in another thread). So, the purpose of the two ability scores is more to differentiate which characters are 'strong men' (OK, forgive the gender thing there, lol) and which are more 'quick on their feet'. At the same time I don't really desire the greater complexity of 5e's insistence on decoupling ability score from skill, because at the table it just slows things down and the plus side is marginal at best. In HoML if you want to say you achieve something due to your agility, well, you undoubtedly had adequate strength to pull that off. I guess if you REALLY want to play a super clumsy oaf or some sort of weird weak fast person, then maybe 4e/5e/HoML isn't doing it quite so well, but I think you can manage.I think most people simply looked at it and, like a lot of things, wrote it off without even bothering to dig. Getting access to cross-class stuff was always pretty nice though. Like I remember the Half-elf Starlock in my first campaign took Commander's Strike for his bonus 'use once per encounter' racial benefit power. He used that sucker in a LOT of fights too! At low levels it was a pretty good choice, as he could 'borrow' the Rogue when she was in a really good spot and hammer out a much nastier hit with her MBA. Later they tweaked the rogue so she could even benefit from that every turn, instead of every round, though by then that campaign was over. Anyway, there's a lot of those crazy things you can do, either with MC or Hybrid, though the lack of need to burn feats on it with Hybrid is a pretty big attraction in a lot of cases, and will usually make up for any 'watering down' of class features.Yeah, my first group mostly wrapped up before PHB3 came out, or at least they didn't try a lot of new stuff by that point as they were rocking their epic story. Oddly nobody touched a hybrid in any of my later games. They spent a lot of time playing around with Pixies and stuff like that, but honestly IME most players were pretty happy with the 2 core PHBs (1 and 2) and maybe a few Power book options now and then. There was one friend of mine that did run a Cavalier once, IIRC and had fun with that. They all seemed mostly happy to avoid PHB3 though! lol.</blockquote>

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