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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5664718" data-attributes="member: 59082">A couple things. First, I don't think he's implying that they want to "do away with all skills." What he is saying is, as he states right in the beginning of the article, that a skill represents one of two things: ability to use a natural talent (e.g. climb) or a learned ability (e.g. detect magic). What he's doing is streamlining the system so that the former doesn't have an extra and unnecessary "filter" (e.g. athletics).To put it another way, what is Athletics other than the trained capacity to use Strength? Strength is natural talent, Athletics is the ability to use Strength in a specific way (or ways). I would imagine that the hypothetical 5E character sheet would be focused on the six ability scores, with their three components that Mearls mentions: the score itself ("natural talent"), the training rank ("ability to use") and modifier (gestalt of talent and training). Any "unique, learned" abilities would be in a separate category and may or may not be based on the natural talent of an ability score.The second thing I wanted to respond to was your interest in another level of granularity. If you take this article on its own, I can see what you mean, but remember that he's been talking about the now infamous "complexity dial." The scheme he outlines here could simply be the lowest setting: you have your ability scores, your training rank, and the resulting modifier, and you might or might not have additional unique, learned skills. If you want greater granularity, you up the complexity dial and you differentiate out the training of a given ability score. For instance, maybe you are really good at climbing but not so good at swimming. So we could have two versions, one "basic" and one "advanced":Basic: Strength 16 (+3); Journeyman (+4); Modifier +7Advanced: Strength 16 (+3)--Climb - Expert (+6); Mod +9--Swim - Novice (0); Mod +3--Jump - Journeyman (+4); Mod +7Et cetera. Your training rank gives an extra bonus, perhaps 0 for Novice, +2 for Apprentice, +4 for Journeyman, +6 for Expert, +8 for Master, +10 for Grandmaster, or something like that. A Basic character has a flat training rank in a given ability score, while an Advanced character can further differentiate as much as the player likes, while still evening out as the same overall value. This, of course, facilitates min/maxing, but I don't see a way around that without taking away player modification, which is part and parcel to the D&D experience. The nice thing about this approach is that you could play characters of different complexity in the same game, which is an aspect of the complexity dial approach that would be relatively new and even unique to "5E," as far as I know.I think you'll find broad agreement about those points, yes. But I don't see Mearls saying anything contrary to those points, at least not yet! If anything, he seems to be looking for feedback from the community through polls and comments. That said, there is only so much catering to the community that is possible or desirable, whether because of time or because when you open the dialogue it is very hard to close it without coming off as a douche <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />. But let's see how this unfolds before we write it off.</blockquote>

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