Separating combat role from non-combat role

[loseth]

Conan's combat role was defender, but his out-of-combat role was rogue (thief, pirate, bandit or mercenary at various times), and his character flavour was 'Barbarian.' Fafhrd's combat role was defender, but his out-of-combat role was more like Bard (he was trained as a Skald [poet/singer] from birth and is rather rogueish throughout the stories), and again he was a barbarian in terms of his character flavour. Now, obviously, 4e did not go the way of separating in-combat roles from out-of-combat roles, but do you think it could have worked if they had?

 

[Elphilm]

Why yes, yes it would have.

You can do this fairly easily in 3E by getting rid of cross-class skills. For example, Conan's thief abilities are limited to Hide and Move Silently - I certainly don't recall him picking locks or disabling traps on a regular basis. Fafhrd's artistic abilities are represented fairly well with ranks in Perform.

Of course, the classes become fairly imbalanced in 3E after abolishing cross-class skills, so further tweaks are necessary. Whether the same applies to 4E remains to be seen...

 

[Green Knight]

Personally, I'm hoping to see some kind of system where you can take the skills useful for combat situations, and also take skills useful for social situations. I'd suggest simply increasing the number of Skill Points, but that'd just lead to people taking more combat related skills, and not taking any social skills, so I'd like to see something like this.

You have two sets of skills which you can choose from. The first is combat related skills, which includes things like Hide, Move Silently, Tumble, etc. You have a number of Skill Points which allow you to select a certain number of them.

The second set of skills are Non-Combat skills, and include skills like Knowledge, Diplomacy, Sense Motive, and Bluff. You've got a separate number of Skill Points to choose from that list. And thus every character will have some degree of Knowledge/Social/etc skills in addition to their combat skills.

I'd also like to see an option where every class can select two or three skills which normally aren't class skills as class skills. For instance, give the Fighter the option to pick Diplomacy and Tumble. Or give a Paladin the chance to pick Intimidate. That'd open up a ton of character concepts to players. After all, do you really need a "Knight" class when you can just play a Fighter? The only thing stopping you in that regard is that Fighters don't have Diplomacy and Knowledge (Nobility & Royalty) as Class Skills. But if they could add them as Class Skills, then they'd be set.

 

[Elphilm]

Yeah, I remember when the 4E 'siloing' of spells was first mentioned people suggested that you could 'silo' the skills as well. I'm hoping there won't be skill points in 4E, but other than that I think that Green Knight's suggestion of separating combat-related skills from the rest is a worthwile one.

 

[Jhaelen]

Now, obviously, 4e did not go the way of separating in-combat roles from out-of-combat roles, but do you think it could have worked if they had?

How did you come to this conclusion? In fact I'm pretty sure they've said that the four roles are to be understood as combat-roles only. The ooc roles might be completely different for two classes sharing a certain combat role.