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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5663817" data-attributes="member: 54877">Scaling can include: How effectively you do something, how fast, how you hold up under pressure, how this interacts with other related things, and so forth. When all of that has to scale under a single roll + modifier, you can get some strange results.  If you have a simple system not mainly focused on skills, as are the various versions of D&D, then you can often get away with that. You just simplify to say that time is the same for everyone. And then you decide that the guy with a 20 Dex versus the 10 Dex Trained Acrobatics have no functional difference in balance checks, and it more or less works if you don't squint at it too hard.  But there aren't any good levers to adjust this. If you are wanting more simulation, then there isn't a good, core way to show that some people don't do things well. So you might keep expanding the skill list, but you run into all those problems that we know so well, like the 3E "Use Rope" being rather narrow. You just made the system not so hot for someone who wants it simple and the people who don't care much for simulation focus. If you put in some kind of Burning Wheel type of fate points for skill advancement, you just embedded into the game a dynamic that the non-narrative folks won't care for. You could also just go back to the earlier versions and make this ability checks, or ability checks + gloss, or even DM-fiat. But those systems aren't easy to change in meaningful, stylistic ways, either. So for things to be easily tweaked, they have to be designed to be easily tweaked. 3E skills are not easily tweaked, and 3.5 and 4E skills aren't much better in this regard.  As for mulltiple ways to be good at something having costs, I agree. But if done full-bore (i.e. not half-heartedly as a sop), then can often be much more transparent and balanced than the single way.  If you want to do a dictionary, you can't get away from the fact that you are talking about words. Every word is a word. A dictionary is merely a giant list. Sure, you can organize, classify, etc. to make it easier to manage. But it is inherently a single thing, and should be modeled as such. If you want to model a three dimensional grid, it is far easier to do with X, Y, and Z axes. Sure, you could collapse every point onto a line (if the grid is coarse and small enough), and show it as a list. That's how the data from a grid is stored, of course. But a thing that is fundamentally three dimensional is far easier to manage and visualize with the axes. BTW, if you start letting the stuff in Z affect the stuff in X and Y direction, instead of simply being an equal third of the point, then you will get the kind of trouble you reference.  Fake 3D system (aka 2.5D) that used a pseudo Z-axis did run into all kinds of such trouble.  This is why letting the skill rank of journeyman modify the actual roll instead of being sharply limited to what can be accomplished, is a red flag for me.  Once you start blurring those lines, you probably will get those characteristic troubles, and probably will be better off to collapse back down into the single dimension. My contention is basically that skills are at a miminum either two or three dimensional. That is, the thing being modeled in its important details are at least two or three dimensional. (Reality, as with many things, must always be somewhat sacrificed to ease of play.) Games like 4E shrink the skill down to one dimension by constraining this universe so that it can be a list, and then by making all kinds of trade-offs. Some of those trades make rather large assumptions about the model and how it will be used that aren't born out in practice.</blockquote>

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