[MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]
Well, from the perspective of the entire party ALL skill are just color.
Example: Perception allows you to sense an ambush to avoid being surprised, or discover a secret door leading to bonus encounters/treasure. Neither avoiding surprise nor the bonus encounters/treasure are "necessary" to the adventure arc. Likewise, Athletics can be used to climb after the thief to encounter him without backup, get to a hard to reach perch to fire arrows, or swim to the bottom of a lake to gain a sunken treasure.
Ah, but the big difference here is that perception is a necessary antidote to an enemy's power -- if you DON'T have it, you might experience some penalty in any given session, because possible surprise is something that is present in almost every combat. Loss aversion!
Athletics/Acrobatics doesn't penalize you much if you can't do it (there's usually other ways to get your goal, and you're not going to take damage from NOT jumping around on rooftops), and it relies on DMs giving you special hooks to slot your skill check into. Two strikes!
Also, going a bit deeper, I think you've grouped skills into two distinct categories:"Plot changing/scene framing" and "useless color", or something along those lines. Could you articulate this more clearly?
The basic criteria I used (in no particular order) were:
- Ability to control the skill's use as a player (active skills like Persuasion trump reactive skills like Insight)
- Ability of the skill's success to be shared with the party (skills that allow you to share success, like Arcana, trump skills that are individual, like Slieght of Hand)
- Redundancy with a higher-ranked skill (skills that duplicate effects that more useful skills can do rank lower, like Intimidation duplicating the effects of Persuasion or Deception)
- Ability to accomplish broad goals in and of themselves (so "I want to figure out what this magic thing does" outranks "I endure a day without rations")
- Interaction with other game elements and frequency/impact of those elements (Perception interacts with Surprise, which comes up every combat and might save your life, but Performance is pretty much by itself)
- Negative consequences for the party as a result of a failed check (Don't make your Perception check, suddenly the healer must heal faster and the fighter might go down faster; don't make your History check, you can go consult a library or somethin').
Acrobatics/Athletics only come up with the DM puts something there for them to do (a pit or a tightrope), don't really interact with other game elements (damage if you fall, otherwise not much), have little in the way of negative party consequences (maybe you'll have to rest a bit sooner if someone takes a bad fall, but there's little reason not to rest whenever you want anyway if you aren't currently in a fight), cannot accomplish large goals by themselves (it'll take MULTIPLE checks to do much of anything of long-term significance), and are "selfish" in that they don't help the party with a success (congrats, you're over the pit, now about Tordek in his full plate...). They aren't very redundant, which is why they're high-ranked in the D-list, but their specialness depends on the DM making special accommodations for them, and in that respect they're not much better than Sleight of Hand or Performance.
Mistwell said:
I am really having trouble understanding your point here...how are any of these things different from any other things in the game?
Your character goes on if you don't swim to get the chest, but she doesn't if you get surprised and then critted
Mistwell said:
Yes and the guy with the skill gets over the pit, with a rope, as I already described, which helps the others get over the pit. It's not the only way to do it in the game, but it's one good way to do it. Sort of like every other ability in the game.
So lets all use a rope (maybe with a grapple or a crossbow bolt) and spend that skill proficiency on something that you can't duplicate with clever equipment choices.
Mistwell said:
You're entirely alone so far in that opinion on Athletics and Acrobatics. Which is fine, but you declaring them D-ranked in that factual tone seems dubious. The overwhelming majority of players seem to view this differently - which tells me perhaps they're not just color.
It just tells me that color is really valuable to some people. Valuable enough that they'll defend the color skills simply on the basis of personal affection for them. It doesn't matter if Athletics/Acrobatics doesn't do much, people really like picking them and putting them on their character sheet because it is empowering and helps define their character as a competent, powerful person. The fact that 3 GP (28 if you want a climber's kit, too) could make the skill redundant in some situations doesn't matter as much as the ability to look at your character sheet and say, "My character is Acrobatic! I am going to do backflips!" Maybe if Sleight of Hand was rolled into a more characteristic skill like "Ninja Hands" we'd see people valuing it much more highly.
Color's valuable. It's just not very functional. My list was targeted at a fairly functional ranking.
But of course it's just my list.
