Profession/Crafting skills: Why?

[Psion]

See, now my take on 3e profession is that it's useless. As written, the only thing it's used for is to generate a little money per game week. That's it. Sure, there are a host of implied uses for it, which also happen to overlap with other skills, but the rules-as-written offer no guidelines, advice, or actual rules regarding that.

Skills in general were a great opportunity in 3e that I generally feel was underplayed. Having played skills based games for years, I've always found the attitude that if there's not a printed use and DC for something you could do with a skill more than a bit baffling.

I'd like to say "the DMG says you can do this" to make it explicit, but I honestly don't know if it does. Generating your own tasks/DC is just something that is so obviously in the GM purview to me I never really looked for rules affirmation in 3e.

 

[Bluenose]

To take the sailor example;
Use rope does not mean you know how to rig a boat.
Diplomacy does not mean you know the difference between port and starboard, or the meaning behind other nautical terms and phrases. It's to do with getting what you want from someone without offending them.
Balance does not mean you're accustomed to sea travel (have sea legs).
Knowledge (geography) does not mention travel at sea, or navigation by stars.
And so on.
.

Profession (Sailor) doesn't mean you can do any of those things. It means that after one week working as a sailor you get:

Check

You can practice your trade and make a decent living, earning about half your Profession check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work. You know how to use the tools of your trade, how to perform the profession’s daily tasks, how to supervise helpers, and how to handle common problems.

If you assume anything beyond that you're going past what the rules say into GM discretion, which it's perfectly possible to do in any edition.

My personal opinion on profession as written is that it was one of the stupidest skills in the game. It doesn't give you any particular abilities you can use even when doing something that would be appropriate. And why would anyone assume that someone with Profession (Merchant Prince) and someone with Profession (Dirt Farmer) would have incomes that were within the same order of magnitude. Though it is a nicely communistic approach to income.

 

[Wicht]

If we read the “Character Skills” text that is broken out at the bottom of page 62 in the 3.5 player's handbook, we come across a quote that, to me, is very important here; “Performing routine tasks in normal situation is generally so easy that no check is required.” In this context what profession skills do is to expand the definitions of “routine task” and “normal situation” for the character in question. Is tacking against the wind or executing a gybe a routine task? For your average rogue, no, for one with profession(sailor), absolutely.

As far as the aforementioned “free skills” go, can the sailor tie exotic knots, climb through the rigging, and keep his balance on a heaving deck, sure. But that doesn't mean that he can scale a stone wall as if he had the climb skill, nor does he have any advantage at setting a grappling hook, binding an angry orc chieftain, or crossing a chasm on a beam three inches wide. The profession(sailor) skill grants him proficiency with climbing, uses of rope, and balance only in so far as they relate to the practice of sailing.

Good stuff. My main quibble would be that the practice of tying knots on ship actually makes one very good at tying knots offship. My Grandfather was in the merchant marines and his knot tying skills were always excellent, even if it was cows he was tying up.

 

[Fenes]

Sure. The thing is, though, every campaign will strike a different balance between - as Rel so succinctly put it - guns and butter. That means that if you're picking "gun skills" and "butter skills" from the same silo, there will be balance problems in most games no matter what. If I run a campaign that's mostly about guns, and you run a campaign that's mostly about butter, there is no balance the designers can strike that will work for both of us.

Why? In any decent group, people will know what comes up. Just as the DM tells the ranger that taking favored foe: Goblin won't be of much use in the campaign he can tell people that profession: Sailor might be a good or bad choice. In a long.running group, people know what to expect, more or less,a nd can spend their points accordingly. A system therefore can be balanced with offering different skills, the players adjust to the different specific campaigns by picking different skills for each campaign.

If guns and butter come from separate silos, the question doesn't even arise. Everybody has guns and everybody has butter; they're no longer in competition. My players may not use their butter-skills much, and your players may not use their gun-skills much, but nobody has to worry about trading effectiveness for character development.

Sorry, but I disagree. As I said, I consider those skills as important, so just as a character needs to decide whether to be a striker/defender/whaever, they need to decide how effective they will be in other aspects - they can't be good in all aspects.

Furthermore, a separate silo for butter-skills pushes all players to flesh out their backgrounds, which I think is always a good thing. You can't make rules to mandate roleplaying, but you can nudge people in that direction.

Craft, perform and profession are not "Background skills" in my campaign. They are as important as sword skills. They are much or little tied to a character's background as the combat skills and class and race choices.

 

[Mallus]

Hrrm. My daughter's wizard, having bought a tavern is making a pretty nice little income on those days she's not adventuring (100-300 gp+ a week).

That's cool. I'm a big fan of adventurers with mixed mundane/heroic goals.

She also has her cooking maxed out and is continually eager to make her weekly check for profit.

Which still nets the character an insignificant amount of money, at least by the RAW (half her Profession check).

Her goal in adventuring is to finish making the payments on the tavern. Her goal with the tavern is to provide income to supplement her magical research and pay for new magical creations.

Again, great stuff.

Now, sure, I could handwave away the rules and just say, you're making 200 gp a week.

Aren't you handwaving it? Where did you get that 100-300+ gp income figure from?

If you feel that the craft or profession rules are stealing valuable adventuring resources, my own houserule before beginning to playtest the PFRPG rules was that each character was allowed one extra skill point per level but it had to be used in a craft, professions, or Knowledge (local, religion, nature, history, geography) skill. Problem solved.

It doesn't really solve the problem, it just alleviates it slightly. A real solution would involve a better costing of the various skills, with some being "expensive" and other nearly "free". Of course, this would be more cumbersome, and frankly, not worth the effort. I prefer to make do with a simplified skill list and some handwaving.

 

[Rallek]

Good stuff. My main quibble would be that the practice of tying knots on ship actually makes one very good at tying knots offship. My Grandfather was in the merchant marines and his knot tying skills were always excellent, even if it was cows he was tying up.

Thank you.

Yes, it is not 100% consistent to say that you can only tie sailing related knots, but it would seem to be a conceit of the system, and one that has to be reluctantly accepted as a kind of gameplay or balance issue.

At the end of the day I wouldn't think that it was any more game-world breaking than daily combat powers, or growing more slots for magic items.

 

[AllisterH]

Skills in general were a great opportunity in 3e that I generally feel was underplayed. Having played skills based games for years, I've always found the attitude that if there's not a printed use and DC for something you could do with a skill more than a bit baffling.

I'd like to say "the DMG says you can do this" to make it explicit, but I honestly don't know if it does. Generating your own tasks/DC is just something that is so obviously in the GM purview to me I never really looked for rules affirmation in 3e.

Here's where I agree with you.

I think there was short rift given to skills in 3.x but that wasn't because of Profession. Profession IMO, was one of the problems in keeping the skills from being used more....

 

[Set]

Yeah, one of the big flaws with the 3e system was that the resources you spent on being a blacksmith's son were resources you didn't spend on killing goblins.

The irony being that almost all of the non-Craft/Profession skills are equally useless at killing goblins. Diplomacy to talk them to death? Climbing to, uh, carry them up to a high place and drop them from? Move Silently to sneak around and avoid combat entirely?

But with a nice craft skill, one can whip up a suit of armor or masterwork weapon for half cost and end up being a more efficient goblin-killer.

Profession skills may not be great at goblin-killing, but Craft (alchemy) is going to make that Alchemist's Fire, that's going to kill a heck of a lot more goblins than your Knowledge (religion) or Disable Devices skills. The mechanical effects (half price goods) are better than almost every other skill, from a min-max perspective.

 

[Rallek]

Why? In any decent group, people will know what comes up. Just as the DM tells the ranger that taking favored foe: Goblin won't be of much use in the campaign he can tell people that profession: Sailor might be a good or bad choice. In a long.running group, people know what to expect, more or less,a nd can spend their points accordingly. A system therefore can be balanced with offering different skills, the players adjust to the different specific campaigns by picking different skills for each campaign.

I'm going to have to disagree with you slightly here. As the DM I only really know where the campaign is going to start, and where I INTEND for it to go... but no plot really survives contact with the players intact.

For instance, in the campaign before last, the players took a plot related trip across an ocean. As soon as they finished up their immediate business there, they promptly decided to fall in love with the sea and turn pirate for awhile. The next several months worth of sessions were spent running down merchant vessels, avoiding the law, hired mercenaries and other pirate ships, while seeking a safe port of harbor and trying to expand their operations. Great fun was had, but I had in no way intended for the game to go all mariner on me like that.

Every single character ended up taking ranks in profession(sailor), though I think it was re-skinned as profession(pirate).

 

[Psion]

Even before we had many other professions, theee were travelling carnivals so does this mean that I get to "cheat" out by not spending points on the skills like Tumble and Balance?

I'll reiterate The Gneech's stance here, as it mirrors my own:

Okay, to knock some silliness out of the way right off the bat:

If somebody with Profession (Sailor) wants to climb a rope, that person makes a Climb check. Profession (Sailor) is for things that don't have other skills already, like using an astrolabe.

If a profession is such that it's handled by the more specific skills, there's no need for the profession skill AFAIAC. I don't need Profession (Wilderness Guide); survival and climb pretty much cover it.