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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Philip Benz" data-source="post: 8504778" data-attributes="member: 6975782">A week ago, Thomas said this: "Well, I'm going to argue that a fairly limited number of people deliberately want to play a character who is incompetent at their apparent role.  They may not focus on competence, but I'm going to doubt "My character is bad at what they do" is an attractive focus to most people, over and above the group dynamic problems."This is spot on, IMHO, and one of the reasons I like games with a robust skill system, like PF2. It's quite easy to have a PC be highly competent in a couple chosen skills, and reasonably competent in many more, depending on how much effort you put into that.But a lot depends on how a given DM chooses to set the DCs for skill challenges. When I'm DMing, I try to base nearly all checks on the examples given under the "sample x tasks" given for most skill actions, and only use level-based DCs when a PC is struggling directly against some other NPC or creature. I recall flipping through book 5 or 6 of one of the early Paizo PF2 APs, and seeing a DC in the mid-40s to discover some clue that had slipped down under some pillows. IMO, that is simply poor and misguided design. Once the PCs gain a few levels, many mundane tasks should become trivial to them, and there's no reason to set artifically high DC just to make some simple thing challenging to them.I like having skills so much that on the few occasions when I get to take off the DM hat and play a character, I very often choose a rogue, just so I can go to town on skill selection. There are also a few archetypes that are very skill-friendly.We used to play PF1, and before that DD3.5, and I always liked having skills to define what a character could or couldn't attempt. Those systems were more fiddly, with a pile of skill points you had to keep track of and allocate, but they still worked, even if they were far too open to abuse and option maxxing for my tastes. I think PF2 strikes up a reasonably good middle ground.</blockquote>

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