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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6507247" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I'm definitely not qualified to comment on BW. I haven't PERSONALLY run into a 'long skill list' system that didn't have basically all the same ills, but I suppose one is possible? I just don't know. I liked Traveler and in theory it has a long list kind of system, but in practice the designers stuck to a pretty limited ACTUAL list of skills, and then you could simply make up any others you needed (and sometimes various materials DID make one up, but they never seemed to keep some sort of canonical list). The result was generally in a given group there wasn't a plethora of obscure and ultra-niche skills.I think of it a bit differently. IME systems where you have a dozen skills each at some modest level of capability 2 more that you're really good at, and 7 that you have 8% on, doesn't make 'subtle character distinctions', it just makes your character's gist harder to understand and frankly you'd be better served by having just the 2 good skills, at least there's stark relief and focus. Now, maybe they could be 2 out of a long list, but that tends not to be workable because the party can then cover such a small footprint out of all the possible skills that might come into play.I prefer to think that 4e is giving you the sweet spot between scattered and nothing at all. Beyond that I think that, while the developers may not have really outright intended this, its very easy to use background or just DM judgment to interpolate in other things. So if you want your farmer PC to know a bunch about cows then bam, he gets a +5 to know specifically about cow stuff, and you can just throw that in when it actually comes up, not bothering to have a Boviculture skill written on someone's sheet. I think the generalized short skill list really facilitates that. Yeah, that's generally my analysis of RM, it wants to be a system with a sophisticated resolution system. Its just that its a VERY old system, essentially most of it was designed around 1978, and they simply hadn't figured out things like 'fail forward' or even gradations of success at that point. TSR's Marvel Super Heroes game was one of the first to experiment with non-binary success mechanics, and that was around 1983 IIRC. Even then it totally lacked anything on the order of failing forward, increasing stakes, or anything like that. Now and then back in those days you'd see some commentary on GMing that would have an inkling of those sorts of techniques, but they just weren't fully formed ideas. Games like Gangster! were the first ones to START to work on it that I recall.</blockquote>

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