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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5888549" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'll devil's advocate the opposite point of view:There's little to be gained by complexifying the skill system in this way. Lets compare the 4e skill system to the proposed 5e skill system you outline (which AFAIK is pretty much what Monte is advocating).In 4e things are very simple and easy to handle. Every skill has a total modifier and there are 17 skills. The DM has basically one choice he needs to make for any given situation, which skill is relevant to that situation (or maybe he might pick a raw ability score instead in some rare situations). That's it. He tells the player OK, its an Athletics check! The player looks on his sheet, sees he has a +N to that skill, rolls a d20 and reports the result. The DM knows the situation is level X and a medium DC is N, he knows instantly if the check succeeded or not. There's no muss, no fuss. At WORST the DM might decide it is a hard DC or an easy DC or even that it is a higher or lower level challenge. So worst case he's got 2-3 choices to make, and the level of the challenge is probably global and those 2 extra choices have defaults that you can go with 99% of the time (medium DC of the PC's level). Now, lets look at the situation in the proposed case. In this case the DM has to decide which skill is relevant, which ability score is relevant and still has the level and difficulty decision to make. Now the player has to look at his ability score modifier, and his skill bonus (if any), add them both together, roll, and report the result. This is the BEST case. In reality there's a constant ambiguous decision that needs to be made WRT what ability score to use. This choice is open to debate in EVERY case and involves the huge grey area of deciding what each score actually means. The player almost always has a motivation to try to negotiate this choice, which opens up gaming the system and the DM, and at best a moderately arbitrary choice. Now, what does your system actually GAIN us? In most cases nothing really IMHO. The interpretation of ability scores is hair splitting and really adds very little to the game in the vast majority of cases. For the few corner cases where it might be nice to have this flexibility you can do it already with the 4e system (nothing stops you from saying that particular PC can't get additional or different bonuses if it makes sense to the DM). 4e allows for feats, themes, classes, races, and powers to potentially give bonuses or allow different numbers to be used if the player wants to decide his PC should be especially talented at a particular thing either. I just don't see where the cost/benefit analysis favors the more complicated system. In a case where there's no clear benefit and there IS a clear cost the best choice is the simplest choice, and that's basically the 4e type system IMHO.</blockquote>

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