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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4476760" data-attributes="member: 40961">Its not dismissing roleplaying as secondary, its dismissing mechanical advantages gleaned from being a blacksmith as secondary.At least get the premise correct before you critique it.Anyways, if you are charging character resources for an ability, you are doing so because you think that ability matters.  And presumably you are charging an amount of resources that reflects some estimate of the ability's value.This is (relatively) easy to do for combat abilities, and doing so for combat abilities is necessary for the overall balance of the game.I used to think it was a good idea to do this for non combat abilities.  I have since changed my mind on this subject.  I think there are too many possible non combat abilities or backgrounds for one system to cover all of them, or even reasonably many of them.  I think that any system which purports to define and measure the relative in-game value of the wealth of non combat/confrontation/challenge options that exist in real (hypothetical) life will, by necessity, be incomplete and ultimately disappointing.And given all these things, I think its best to assign that job to the DM.  No list of rules is going to cover things like exactly what advantages one should gain from being the ninth son of a king sent out as a knight errant, or how much that should be worth in comparison to spending one's childhood on the banks of the Nile dodging crocodiles and collecting reeds to craft and sell papyrus.  Fortunately, we have an excellent decision-making device available in pen and paper RPGs, one that's designed and optimized to make judgments about fairness and equity and social relations, and one that isn't even available in computer RPGs.  We have human brains.And those human brains, while not 100% consistent or precise, are, in my opinion, always going to be miles and miles ahead of any prewritten system when it comes to considering the complex multivariate questions of social relationships and worth that are necessary to balance characters non adventuring related skills.The only flaw I see in 4e's approach to these matters is not spelling it out even more clearly.</blockquote>

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