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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4503756" data-attributes="member: 2067">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.</blockquote>

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