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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Turtlejay" data-source="post: 4512538" data-attributes="member: 70267">Since the OP mentioned wanting to 'know something about magic, I will use the Arcana skill to illustrate:A 10th level fighter could get between a 5 (-1 for ability, +5 for 1/2 level, +1 for minimum roll on the die) and a 24 (-1 for ability, +5 for 1/2 level, +20 for maximum roll on the die).  That is an average score of 14.5.  A 10th level wizard who started with a 16 int and bumped it at 4th and 8th gets between a 15 (+4 for ability, +5 for 1/2 level, +5 for trained, +1 for minimum roll on the die) and a 34 (+4 for ability, +5 for 1/2 level, +5 for trained, +20 for maximum roll on the die).  That is an average roll of 24.5.  That is 50% higher than the fighter. Of course, no wizard with his salt is going to start with a 16 in his major stat, and you can add skill focus, racial bonus, item bonus, etc. to that to bump it up.Why would a dumb fighter have an Arcana score only 50% lower than a wizard who clearly knows much more about Arcana?  Because using it untrained he is not getting much of the benefit from it.  Untrained, Arcana can get you: - Arcana knowledge (except about the far realms) - Monster knowledgeThat's it.  All the other functions of Arcana require you to be trained.  It represents your fighter experiencing something like 90 combat encounters and some other large number of non-combat experiences, many of which likely involved magic.  Even a fighter of Int 8 is going to learn some things over that type of experience.  Compare this to 3e where the fighter may be wearing magical gear head to toe, spend his entire waking life enchanted by spells and have witnessed countless castings of spells and yet not even be eligible to roll to identify magical effects, since he is not trained.Forgive my rancor at this, but one of the hard sells in getting people in my gaming group to even TRY 4e was their apparent misconceptions about the skill system and the 1/2 level bonus to skill checks.  I think when examined it bears out quite nicely, better even than 3e did.Jay</blockquote>

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