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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GlaziusF" data-source="post: 4503249" data-attributes="member: 74166">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.</blockquote>

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