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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FinalSonicX" data-source="post: 5895432" data-attributes="member: 63787">I'm all for Non-Weapon Proficiencies coming back! That comes with a few caveats though.NWP's were my favorite rule from 2e because it felt like they established further flavor and depth to a character aside from their class/race combo which mostly dictated combat and things like that. That said, it has similar issues to feats and skills in later editions because there really were better/worse NWP's. For instance, most mages needed to get spellcraft and most thieves got tumbling. Now obviously this problem still exists in later editions but it's something that exists in 2e as well, though it's a bit more obscured perhaps.Second, there's power creep from the handbooks published after the core in 2e. For example, thieves in 2e might get other NWP's that aren't immediately relevant to combat but after getting the thieves handbook they end up sinking all their NWP's into the new thief proficiencies because frankly they're better or more useful than the others. So in a lot of ways, NWP's experience power creep like feats do.Finally, NWPs were a little annoying due to their reliance on ability scores. This means that an exceptionally talented individual can use NWP's with incredible skill at level 1 while a level 20 thief with poor scores has a worse proficiency in their NWP. Basically, NWPs are cool but have a problem with representing an individual's ability to learn and develop skills, which skills represent well mechanically.The ironic part of all of this is that skills kind of replaced NWP's but IMO NWP's more closely resemble feats. Feats usually just specify something you can do rather than a numerical proficiency level that increased over time. So at some level I think Feats are the best way of replicating NWP's, but the problem is that they can't be placed on the same level as combat feats or that's all people will choose.So I think that we can bring NWP's or their effects back if they are replicated as feats, but feats are split into combat and non-combat feats, and players gain both (so players have to get the more flavorful but less immediately useful non-combat feats (NCF's!).</blockquote>

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