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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DarkKestral" data-source="post: 4215936" data-attributes="member: 40100">Not all professions are equal. Is being a doctor equivalent to having lots of Endurance? Almost assuredly not. There's quite a bit of knowledge and required practical skills, but it's also useful in a game context enough that we decide that what doctors do is it's own skill. It's called Heal. So there's a bit of reason to break out skills and have them do their own thing if it proves applicable enough and they are dissimilar enough to other skills that they don't cross the dramatic streams too often. I'd say sailing, as a professional skill, is far enough away from other skills in general use and has enough applicability to a large enough set of campaigns that it deserves being broken out ala Heal or Thievery into it's own skill.There's quite a bit of knowledge and practical skills to learn as part of being a sailor; the average person would never be able to come in and know how to operate a sailing ship that doesn't use a motor. It requires several things which so far haven't really been shown to be covered by a skill in 4e, like sea navigation, some types of rope use (frankly, it sucked as a solo skill, but when a part of more generally useful skills, or as a weaker alternate to the "right" skill that can be used on occasion when appropriate and the right one isn't held by anyone in the party, it is OK IMO), knowledge of ship design, and some skill at repairing ships. Also, it might have a use for finding food at sea.I suppose you could use a combination of some random stuff to approximate it, but it seems to me to be something that is appropriate for consolidation into a skill under my earlier criteria. Think of it as a Dungeoneering for the sea. Without Dungeoneering, you go into a maze of twisty passages that are all alike underground and you have no clue where to go or how to survive once you are inevitably lost, and die an ignoble death from starvation. With it, you may be able to figure out that one of the passages has a distinctly "fresher" smell than the others, which is an indication that it leads close to the surface, and manage to survive by eating only the right stuff till you eventually break free. The Sailing equivalent situation is when you are out in the middle of the ocean, sun's beating down, and you're out of dried rations, but there's a small wind in one direction. Will that wind take you to shore? a non-sailor probably wouldn't know, but a sailor who knows how to read would probably be able to guess which way to go if he has access to a map. In the meantime, a sailor might be able to catch fish when the non-sailors can't, if only because he knows what seems to draw them, being around them all the time. Plus, the average amateur sailor won't know how to survive in a bad storm, however the pro sailor would probably recognize the best way to approach the waves to keep the ship intact and do so.If Dungeoneering is a skill in 4e even though it probably doesn't get used a lot in campaigns not focused around going into dungeons and coming out with loot, which is something I think is likely to be the case, I think Sailing is equally viable for campaigns with a significant portion of time spent on the water, but it is also clearly not viable for campaigns not spent on the water, so it's not a dummy's choice, as long as the GM isn't a total jerk and says "I'm not planning to have many nautical segments" if someone asks about taking it when the issue comes up. Would it be terribly useful in all campaigns? Not hardly. And we've already seen that Streetwise is a skill, and it will likely prove to be the equivalent to the other two (Dungeoneering and what will likely prove to be Nature) for cities. So I'd round out them out with a sea-based equivalent in a heartbeat, should my guesses be right.I would hesitate somewhat to consider a "planar" survival equivalent to the Dungeoneering/Nature/Streetwise/Sailing quad, but that's mostly because by the time the harsher areas of the planes show up in a game, players have been likely to have spells, and in 4e will likely have rituals, to counteract the effects of those planes plus have teleport and other abilities allowing them to skip to the areas they want to actually be, which kind of negates the primary uses of many of those skills. Plus, most of the areas players visit on the planes would be covered by those four anyway, and unfamiliarity could be easily emulated by penalties or increased complexity.</blockquote>

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