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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 9777086" data-attributes="member: 57112">Every thing you're talking about here is exactly what I'm saying. It's (a) anecdotal and (b) entirely self-fulfilling. Optimizers go out into the wild and tell stories about how GMs never call for these skills (never mind that skill usage is entirely on the players, if you want your GM to call for Performance or Animal Handling rolls then you need to be out there performing and handling animals) so you should never take those skills, and what do you know, players never take the skills so they don't take actions that would call for those skills so GMs never call for those skills so players never take skills and what do you know we're back in the vicious circle again.I desperately do not want to start an edition war here because there are lots of things I adore about 4e, but how it handled skills was probably the thing I disliked the most about it. Skills shouldn't be "chonky"; they are the purest representation of who and what your character is and how they interact with the world. For all that the various ways that 3.X&Friends skill system was extremely cumbersome and convoluted, it at least understood that much. Better than even 5e, if we're being honest. And the people who are saying to never take Performance or Animal Handling now are the same people who were saying you should never take a Profession skill. They were wrong then, they are wrong now, and it makes the game worse.I think Intimidation is an interesting example of a skill that does, genuinely, get a bad rap. I know I avoid it when I make my face characters, generally, but that's more to do with the kinds of characters I'm more likely to play. And I think there's a certain style of adversarial DMing that sees Intimidation as a great excuse to punish players, but that's ultimately a DMing problem, not a character build problem. And again, I think that framing it as a character build problem does more harm than good. It lets those DMs off the hook, almost like saying "you know what, that's fair, I shouldn't ever use this skill, sorry, won't do it again". And that sucks. Is there an Intimidation problem? Yeah, I think there is. Is the solution "just don't ever take that skill"? No, absolutely not.As someone who has been playing and DMing for decades now, I can honestly say that I can think of plenty of use cases for each and every skill from both a player and DM perspective. And that includes situations where Intimidation would ultimately be the best "social" skill to deploy. There doesn't need to be a skill ranking at all, with of course the notable exception of the game baking in Perception to so many things.</blockquote>

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