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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justin D. Jacobson" data-source="post: 3557727" data-attributes="member: 18946">Assuming by "better" you mean "more likely to see use", let me illustrate with a counterexample of a type of campaign where your absolute is false. Let's say we have a campaign the focus of which is solving the assassination of the king by poisoning. The entire campaign could involve tracking down clues, experimenting to isolate toxicants and reagents, etc. There might not be a single combat until the BBEG is finally identified (and even then, he could just be Mr. Burns  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ). In such a campaign, the Combat skill would see far less use than many Knowledge (and similar) skills.GMs should tailor their campaigns to what the players focus on. Take the ranger's favored enemy bonus; a GM who never presents encounters where the favored enemy appears is doing his players a disservice. Similarly, if a player invests in Knowledge (architecture), the GM would be well advised to include encounters in which a Knowledge (architecture) check would be helpful. If none of the players have ranks in Knowledge (religion), the GM isn't doing the best job possible by constantly calling for Knowledge (religion) checks. All Knowledge skills don't need to be used with equanimity--only the ones in which the players invest ranks.I wasn't saying that Knowledge skills are the same as Combat. They can be in certain types of campaigns (or, indeed, can even be more relevant). It did seem like you didn't like the level of granularity of the Knowledge skills. If I inferred that incorrectly, I apologize. There's a simple fix for that to. Namely, to decrease the granularity, e.g., Knowledge (hard sciences), Knowledge (humanities), etc.You seem to think I've escalated the heat of the discourse. If prior reply to you seems aggressive or rude, I fault the Internet. It certainly wasn't my intention.</blockquote>

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