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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 4758381" data-attributes="member: 54707">Oh, I don't know Umbran. It works out pretty easy when it is tried. Take, for instance, all of the time spent to learn the intricacies of your hobby (which is one of mine too), the proper terminology, the math, learning the rulesets, the time spent playing, the theoretical discussions, etc. All the effort spent learning to play the hobby, and involved in the ancillary support activities, is no more time intensive than it would take to learn how to free-climb (good practice is another matter), and learning the game is certainly far more time and effort intensive than learning to start a fire (given the proper equipment), set a tourniquet properly (which I unfortunately last had to do on Good Friday), or learn basic trauma first aid. I'll bet I could spend far less time teaching a person how to properly set a rabbit snare out of cord than in explaining D&D rulebooks to a novice, or in re-learning rules myself when a new edition comes out. If anyone can spend hours upon hours involved in a hobby then they can learn to shoot the sun, navigate by the stars, track a deer, or set a splint. It just depends on what you spend your time learning. And every you learn a new associated skill it comes a lot quicker because you already have an experience base. (For instance it was probably much easier for you to learn 4th Edition than to learn D&D on the very first time you were exposed to it. Similarly once you learn what a bear track looks like it becomes much easier to recognize a deer track by contrast.) And of course practicing already known skills usually increases fluidity and ease of performance. But if you or anyone else can learn a game of such intricacy as D&D and then pour hours of effort into further advancing those gaming skills then learning other skills is not that problematic at all.If you make skills acquisition part of the same basic idea as say rules learning and practice, then it's pretty easy to do. And if you couple that with the fact that the player wants to learn how such and such works then you don't really have to take any more effort than to say, "okay, you wanna know how that works, then put the same effort into learning about it as you do in learning about heroic tier progression." It's just a different subject matter is all. I think the real problem is not that it is beyond the capabilities of the players (or DM) at all, it's just that it is rarely encouraged. People are encouraged in the game to learn rule minutiae regarding skills, but they aren't encouraged to learn how those skills really work. However if players and DMs took the time that is used to learn rule minutiae and level progression stats and figuring combat probability assumptions of a given edition of the game and instead redirected that towards leaning real skills then different ends would be accomplished. It's just an assumed mindset that in-game skills means "no relation to real capabilities," it's not a law. Just, I suspect, a kind of usually unexamined paradigm. But that's just a paradigm, it's not a necessity nor a reality. I kayak, and track animals, and watch the moon through my telescope as hobbies also, and those hobbies don't prevent me from learning real world skills associated with those hobbies or from learning other, non-hobby associated skills. From watching the moon I've gone on to grind my own lenses, just as I suspect you have probably went on from playing D&D to learning to play other games. Now imagine that in-game you have a character who likes to manhunt. Why should the fictional game prevent you from spending time to learn how manning really works (I don't know that you would like manhunting, it's just an example), anymore than spending time playing D&D prevents you from learning other game forms? And if you could spend the time moving from D&D to other game forms then you could spend the time, or anyone else could, learning how manhunts are undertaken. And if manhunts aren't your thing then you could learn some other skill just as easily as could your character, as long as you were motivated to do so. But I suspect it is very unrealistic to say that someone can't learn some real skill because they are too busy to do so when they can spend hours and hours involved in an intricate hobby. For instance you wouldn't have to learn how to track a deer like the world's greatest hunter, you'd just have to learn how to track a deer successfully. It's just an assumption that one either precludes or is totally unrelated to the other.I think the game (not just D&D, but many role playing game forms) suffers from certain unrealistic and reflexive assumptions that aren't so much really true as just assumed by habit and practice. But the game doesn't have to suffer from those practices, it just does because it isn't looked at in any other way.Now am I gonna say I want somebody who has learned something about trauma medicine through study inspired by a game giving me a field operation to remove a bullet, over say, a trained medic who has actual experience removing bullets. No I wouldn't. But I'd probably prefer that fella, assuming they were sincere and honestly studied over somebody who knew nothing of the subject. I'd certainly though prefer someone with at least some familiarity with real world survival study (even if it was inspired by a game) over someone who knows nothing of survival other than what he learned just in-game. Die-rolling a survival skill is not practicing a survival skill, it's just practicing a die roll. However if that player decides he should learn how to really locate water and survive in a desert (because his character can) then I'd prefer his company in a desert to that of somebody who was never inspired to learn any such skill, for any reason. And the game gives no reason while anyone should not learn real skills. There's nothing preventing it other than assumptions. There's no preclusion or exclusion clause saying the twain shall never meet.But there is nothing in the game to prevent people from learning anything they want, assuming they are willing to put as much general effort into whatever they master, as they spend in mastering the game.</blockquote>

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