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Message: <blockquote data-quote="slobster" data-source="post: 6000165" data-attributes="member: 6693711">For me, it boils down to verisimilitude. A person becomes skilled at a task by a combination of practice and natural talent. D&D has modeled this by adding your ability score modifier (natural talent) to a number representing your character's practice and training (skill points, skill training etc.).Tools and special circumstances can modify this number as well. They have their place. But give a set of tools to a thief and to me, and he's gonna be better at picking locks. Even a thief who is in general less coordinated than I will be better, because he is more practiced. Take away a cross-country runner's running shoes and give me the best equipment in the world, and he's still going to outrun me.There are a million reasons why that is true in the real world, but the skill point system does a reasonable job of approximating it all. I think it works pretty well as-is (though I would like to decouple skill bonuses from particular ability scores, as they promised).Your proposal would seem to work all right in game balance terms. I think you've made some pretty interesting arguments to that effect, and in some RPG I think equipment based skills might work. But it's a pretty big mental disconnect for me that taking away a Roman historian's text book means that he can't recall any better than his friend the chemist who the first consul of Rome was.Equipment granting bonuses to checks makes sense to me. Replacing any sort of permanent, learned skill aptitude with purely equipment based bonuses doesn't.</blockquote>

Verification