So what does a DC of say Profession (sailor) 15 mean then to the players?
Profession/Crafting skills: Why?
- Thread starter Rechan
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So what does a DC of say Profession (sailor) 15 mean then to the players?
No. It's not, and it never will be.
Gameplay is the dice you roll and the things you say, story is what your DM says in response. Your DM may assign some story responsibility to you, but he always has right of first refusal.
It's practically impossible for a game to survive where the dice the players roll and the things they say have absolutely no connection to any comment of the DM on the action. Even the combats take place in the story, since they don't have the luxury of suddenly shifting into an enclosed parallel dimension and then seamlessly back to reality with no time passed the way they can in a computer RPG. They have to take place in the world, Chrono Trigger-style.
Staying upright on a rocking surface is a balance check. Not throwing up on a rolling sea is a sea legs (profession sailor) check. They're not the same thing. Balance doesn't teach you how to tack, and knowing how to sail doesn't teach you how to walk on a thin ledge. They're separate skills.
Again, the profession skills are there to fill the gap BETWEEN other skills, not to be used instead. A sailor character would logically have use rope, balance AND profession Sailor, and use each in different circumstances. It's like suggesting that Survival (which allows you to hunt animals for food) allows you to cheat by not having Move Silently. This clearly isn't the case.
MOST sailors wouldn't have many ranks, as they'd be commoner level 3 at most. 3E assumes nearly everyone can read, this is totally at odds with our history, and is not specific to sailors.
Whereas the SRD defines a profession as "a skill representing an aptitude in a vocation requiring a broader range of less specific knowledge." Which is just a way of saying it 'fills the gaps' between other skills.
Again I disagree. Profession (sailor) doesn't at any point replace Use Rope, Balance, Climb or any other skill and no attempt should be made to use it when the more specific skills are appropriate.
ACTING? Acting might fool someone for a very short period of time, but it won't fool anyone who actually works in the field. I outlined disguise as something you'd use in ADDITION to your profession skill. To be a carpenter you need to BE a carpenter, you can't just ACT as a carpenter and expect to fool anyone. You cannot just act as a mason and expect to get into the guild of masons, they'll spot you for a fraud in an instant. The same applies to all other professions.
Yes certainly I'd allow it. And as above, it wouldn't be used where other skills are more appropriate. Being a Circus performer doesn't mean you don't need to take tumble, balance or jump. Each is a different task, and is applied at a different time. The skill Profession (circus performer) includes less specific tasks, such as knowing when to make a fool of yourself to get the best laugh, how to walk in clown shoes or how to interact with OTHER performers. To walk the tight-rope, you still need your balance checks, and no level of Profession skill will change that. Likewise being good at Perform (clown act) doesn't mean you'll know how much to charge for people to come and see the show.
Going back to the guitar example from earlier - You may be the ultimate rock star, but you'd better have profession (band manager) or employ someone who does, or you'll never get paid.
This seems to be what people forget about profession skills. At no point can you use profession INSTEAD of a more specific skill.
In many ways profession is closer to knowledge than to any of the physical skills. Knowledge (Music) doesn't reduce the need for Perform (instrument). Neither does Profession (x) reduce the need to spend ranks in skill
. If it helps to understand what I'm saying, replace the word Profession with Knowledge. It's now Knowledge (sailing) or Knowledge (Farming). So true.
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You're not quite grasping the problem here. Yes, that is the problem - it's being argued that the dice SHOULD have little to no connection to the in game story by the proponents of not having any crafting put into place; instead, gameplay shouold be sequestered away from storyline, and what happens in Veg-sorry, combat, stays in combat. Once the mechanics have been taken care of, you can switch into Story Mode and keep going there. This is why there this thought of "Crafting and profession are useless;" because they cannot understand why you would want mechanics that directly relate to the story.
Actually, yes- and I know because I work in the music industry (as a Lawyer and marketer).
Most successful professional musicians have some knowledge of how to market themselves before ever hiring an agent...if they ever do.
Its not until they've proven themselves to have a marketable brand identity that they actually turn to professional marketers.
Unless the campaign is bard-centric, that may well be the case.
OTOH, having the skills available means that someone MAY design such encounters.
Booking a show in your hometown may be something entirely routine, akin to climbing a tree with many limbs without making a Climb check.
OTOH, if you're a Drow Bard trying to book a gig in a Dwarven Bar, I can see that requiring a check.
Does that affect the game? It could- what if that's the only bar in town that has a stage for bards, and you're short of coin? Singing for your supper and lodgings might mean the difference between a good night's rest and being exhausted the next day (with relevant penalties).
Hussar
Legend
Hello, my name is Hussar and I whole heartedly concur with the above statement.
Yup. He's the son of a blacksmith. In all the Conan stories, REH or otherwise, how many times did he pick up a hammer and make something? How much need would there be for Craft mechanics to represent Conan?
Hussar
Legend
Covered in Disguise skill.
Decipher Script
Language skills in D&D are ridiculous, but, typically this is covered by a simple 1st level spell.
Improvised weapon = -4 to hit. How much craft do I need to pick up a stick? And, if I do decide to use the craft skill, where do I get the gold for the raw materials?
Wall of Stone is your friend here. I gotta admit though, if someone took Profession Stonemason, I'd probably give them the pass on this one.
The story is anything the DM says. Even if it's in combat! Combat takes place in the real world and not the mysterious combat dimension. The gameplay is the players rolling dice and stating intent. Even if it's out of combat! You're still working your skill and the associated modifiers.
The reason Craft and Profession are mostly useless is that they're part of 3E's skill system, which was itself mostly useless.
Seriously.
I mean, like 40 or 50 things you could possibly be good at but maybe 15 points a level to devote to them? How do you choose which 25-35 things you won't improve at? How do you judge the relative worth of 1 rank of Swim vs. 1 rank of Tumble?
Possibly by how useful they might be in the future. So let's say you have 2 skill points and have the decision down to three skills: Climb, which works on any vertical surface, Balance, which works on any difficult terrain, or Profession: Shopkeeper, which works in any shop you run. Now, which of these three are you most likely to hear? "No, there are no vertical surfaces", "no, there is no uneven terrain", or "no, you are not currently running a shop"?
Some skills had implicit hooks. Jump worked on any vertical or horizontal gap, Disable Device on anything with moving parts (including most traps), and Bluff worked on anything that could understand your language, or at least your body language. But the DM had to explicitly place or allow hooks for Craft, Profession, often Perform, and about half the extant types of Knowledge.
4E moved on to a model of skills that represented very general and very broad categories of action, so most of the explicit-hook skills got taken out behind the barn and shot. You can't spend 1/4 of your trained skills to reflect that you were a shopkeeper or could play the trumpet or whatever, but that doesn't mean you can't still say that you were. How could that affect gameplay, aside from affecting what you say? Well, here are some ways. They're not RAW, but I don't see why they couldn't work.
The Past Is Prologue. When the warlord left Slugg Backfist's Boxing Arena And War Academy But Mostly Boxing Arena, he was trained in Athletics. He got this through extensive practice, but what he practiced was mostly climbing ropes or palisades and jumping distances on flat ground. Does that mean he can't climb a rock cliff or jump a yawning chasm, just because he didn't specifically practice those? Of course not! Similarly, a former shopkeeper turned adventurer may have learned how to stretch the truth about more than just cabbage and cabbage accessories and thus start with training in Bluff. Your background doesn't give you any extra skill trainings, but it can explain in part or in whole how your trained skills got trained.
Skill Training Or Equivalent Experience. When you're in the narrow situation your background prepared you for, you're just as good as somebody with general training, though your general training doesn't help you any more specially. If a sailor is on a ship at sea, his sea legs let him take advantage of the motion of the ship to make Athletics and Acrobatics checks to move around as though he were trained. A former smith is trained in Religion for purposes of answering the booming question posed by the large iron dwarf with the large iron hammer, namely: "Recite the virtues of the good smith or I will smith you and it will not be so good."
It's Binary, Baby. There are some things your background lets you do that people without it just can't, though training in general categories can help you do it better. So if you want to make a decorative glass vase to give to the king tomorrow, and you're the only one in your party who's a glazier, when the skill challenge starts (8 successes before 3 failures, lose a healing surge to negate a failure to simulate staying up later and being tired tomorrow) you're the only one who makes checks to reflect the blowing and shaping of the glass. Endurance for steady breath and Thievery for fine manipulation, respectively. They may not be hard checks, so you can make them even if you're not trained. What are your other party members doing? They're pumping the bellows with Athletics, coming up with a design the King might like with History and Insight, and using Streetwise to track down a bag of rare gem-sand that fell off the back of the wagon.
Let's Party. If the entire party shares a background - you're all sailors or all musicians - the DM can create a skill challenge using the general-interest skills to represent circumstances that might challenge people of that background. Sailors taking a ship through a hurricane, or musicians rocking out hard enough to wake the dead and well enough to convince them to move on to the next world.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
But combat mechanics have no express game-world effects. This is an example of the division in 4e between mechanics and effects. That division is between "game" and "story," between the dice you roll and the effect that happens in the "real world." If a power lets you trip someone, you can use it to "trip" an ooze, because the mechanics don't relate to the the story (they are separated by the wrought iron fence made of tigers).
Obviously opinions differ. The OP suggested that you never need a Craft or Profession system for any game, regardless of 3e or otherwise. The central reason for this was because Craft and Profession, in their experience, didn't actually affect the game. It just affected the story.
To which the big response was: some people want it to affect their game.
My collaborative point was: The story and the game should affect each other.
I like this aspect of 4e's siloing. The way that skills are handled in 4e is pretty good, and fixes a lot of the problems I had with 3e's skills.
But 4e then fails to provide anything to support what they removed.
So in 3e, I could say I was a shopkeeper, and have mechanics (however flawed they were) to support that.
And in 4e, I can say I was a shopkeeper, but I have no mechanics to support it, flawed or otherwise.
If having mechanics to support my fluff is important to me (and for me, it is, because I prefer a game where the story and the mechanics support each other), 3e is better than 4e. Because 3e might be a 2 or even a 1 on the 1-10 scale, but 4e is a 0.
The suggestions down there aren't bad (though they're a lot lighter than 3e's system, which might mean they're not "enough" for some), but they're not something 4e gave us. A lot of this thread has just been people debating about whether or not it was OK that 4e didn't give us anything, from "No game needs Craft/Profession skills aside from the DM's say-so" to "Craft and Profession subsystems are vitally essential to my games, and I need them more than I need combat," and hitting mostly the places in between.
I'd just argue that it depends on one's style of game. For the people who never use it, 4e is fine. For the people who would always use it, 4e blows the goat. 4e's non-system won't work for everyone in every game, though there is a solid chance that it will work for the biggest slice of the bell curve, given WotC's generally canny market research.
roguerouge
First Post
Yoink! I'm totally doing a battle of the bands side quest for my Chronicles of Dior campaign now.
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