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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5515734" data-attributes="member: 4937">It sounds like you are on about the same page I was on 5 or so years ago when I was doing about exactly what you are doing now and asking the exact same questions.My basic problem with the approach you describe was twofold: a) the game really doesn't need any more synergy bonuses, and b) if that's how I approach things then I'm going to have to separate out every instance of profession as a separate skill just so I can describe it.In essense, the 3.0/3.5 system describes four different sorts of broad knowledge skills: craft, knowledge, perform, and profession. I'm going to skip discussing perform for the moment and just look at the other three:Craft: This is easy enough.  These are skills for knowing how to "make stuff".  Each skill describes a different class of things you can make.   Now, there are some ambiguities here in figuring out what the divisions ought to be and the mechanics for making things are poorly thought out and need to be replaced, but at least there is no ambiguity over handling the skill or what it means.  Knowledge: This is also easy enough.   These are skills for knowing "about things".  Each skill describes a class of scholarly knowledge you are expert in.  There are some ambiguities here as well, such as the meaning of Knowledge (local), and how large the list of specializations really needs to be to cover the entire breadth of human knowledge, but at least there are no ambiguities in handling the skill or what it means.Profession:  This seems easy enough at first.  Subtracting Craft and Knowledge from the list of 'knowing how to do things' leaves us with knowing how to do things that are neither making things nor simply knowing about things.  So these are practical skills that aren't about making things, and we would expect for the most part these would be professions that you might classify as 'service industries'.  However, in practice, this leaves us with a great deal of ambiguity because a very great many 'knowing how to do things' are, as you pointed out in your example of a caravaneer, covered by all those other very specific skills.   If we suppose that someone with Profession (Teamster) can use Survival, Handle Animal, Diplomacy, and Use Rope where they pertain to the profession of moving wagons and other conveyances with draft animals, why wouldn't I just take ranks in a few broad professions in order to get lots of utility out of just a few skill points.  To take an extreme and ridiculous example, if I take, profession (adventurer), can it substitute for search, climb, move silently, and survival among other things?  If you inspect the actual list of professions, you find other curiousities as well.   The list overlaps with the other broad knowledge skills.   In addition to service industries we find a lot of trades that seem like they ought to fall into our definition of a Craft.   Why do we have Profession (Cook) instead of Craft (Food)?  Isn't making food still making something?  More subtly why do you have something like Profession (Scribe) and not instead Craft (Writing) or Craft (Caligraphy)?   Likewise, we find in the list of service professions Profession (Lawyer).  Yet it would seem that knowledge about legal proceedings ought to follow under Knowledge (Law), and the practice of a lawyer involving public oration and debate ought to fall under one of the specific social skills like Diplomacy or Bluff.  If you start moving the specific examples of professions into the previously defined Craft and Knowledge professions, a very large number of them go away.  Even something seemingly like profession (barber) turns out to be equally well described as Craft (hairstyle), since this seeming service industry turns out to be about making something with your hands.  It may not be traditional manufacturing, but it is a craft.   And the remaining short list turns out be almost entirely professions that involve doing things that are useful as an adventurer and so have there own well defined skill.Whenever I had been called to defend the Profession skill in the past, I'd always turned to Profession(Sailor) as an example of doing something - rowing a boat, steering a ship, keeping a canoe upright in rapids - that represented a concrete skill which had no obvious substitute in the skill list.   Whenever I'd provided that example, I'd always been assuming that I could have provided lots of examples other than the obvious one.  But when I actually took the time to think about it hard, I found that this was (at least for me) basically the only example.   Depending on what skills you consider important in your campaign, you might find some others but I think that that list will prove to be very small and not broad enough to justify the Profession skill.  Since the list is small, I think you are better of elaborating on the individual skills and assigning them to the class skill lists you consider appropriate.</blockquote>

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