NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DSRilk" data-source="post: 4258287" data-attributes="member: 35212">Any rule set that makes you choose between the two ("RP" and combat) or that allows your success to be based entirely on whether or not the DM picks to apply scenarios that play to your character's specific skills is in part to blame.If you played a game with mostly combat, spending skill points and feats on "flavor" abilities could be crippling.  If you spent them all on combat and no "flavor" abilities and your DM ran virtually no combat and required cooking skills in order to impress people, you were in trouble.The argument is not only valid, it's essential. There are simply some things that you need to make up in this type of game.  In 3e, you had to make stuff up in order to make all those profession and crafting skills seem useful in an RP setting.  It's not like NPCs had a "hunger" attribute against which the profession (cooking) skill would be used and 3e lacked the "no tastebud" feat that would give someone +5 to their save versus profession (cooking) when used in an attempt to sway their opinion of you.The difference is that in 4e the designers seem to have decided that because there was no system fully supporting a librarian skill or cooking skill, and no system supporting the "12 hours a day of WoW" feat, that those subsystems were outside the scope of the rule book.  It's not like they WERE in the scope of 3e -- that system simply provided you the ability to spend your skill points in ways that made it so that you were sub-optimal in all the systems 3e DID have rules for.As a hard core RPer myself whose weekly games rarely see more than 3 combats a year - you know, the type of player that loves making up stories, plots, character personalities, and doing the whole closet-actor thing - I am truly baffled by the claim that others of my ilk need or even desire a massive suite of rules that require rolls, stats, and systems for character interactions like that.  In my group of RPers, at least, the idea of rolling dice in these kinds of scenarios is an interruption of RP and in no way helps it.  Even in 3e we never spent skill points on those kinds of skills - we developed character backgrounds and the DM applied responses based on what we said, how we said it, the backgrounds of our characters, and how we presented our characters to the world.  It had nothing to do with dice.  If someone wanted to impress the king with his cooking, it would happen if that PC had a background in cooking, often made references in game to making savory dishes and other stuff like that around the campfires, and if their background was that they came from an orphanage and ate rats, well... the king would respond... in an interesting fashion to the gourmet rat soup.</blockquote>

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