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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5632610" data-attributes="member: 4720">Perhaps it's my mistake, but you came off as rather condescending in the previous post, and not a little bit dismissive of many facts about 4e.  If I misread that, I apologize, but you haven't done anything to make that reading harder to justify since.I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous assumption on the face of it.  Dungeoneering, arcana, acrobatics, and thievery see as much use as athletics and endurance in my experience of physical hazards, and perception is almost never primary.  My current DM also has made religion and history useful at times with traps and puzzles that could have been very hazardous.  You could easily have bumped those challenges up to lethal.  And it is very common in my game experience and in reading published adventures to see "No more than 1 success/2 successes can be gained using this skill" or similar language.  You don't see how in a complex challenge, that heavily favors the guy with lots of trained skills?So, we're defining combat specifically and exclusively as engaging in melee with people and taking hits?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" />  That doesn't stack the deck too heavily in favor of your argument.  By that logic, the wizard is pretty worthless, too.  The ability to re-arrange battlefields, heal, enable allies, AND disable enemies... these are all just worthless fluff, I suppose?  All 4e classes, including the bard, can contribute immensely to a party's success in combat.  Keeping that fighter on his feet when he's in the thick of things isn't exactly unimportant.  Re-arranging the space so the enemies are bunched up for a wizard daily can work wonders.  Sliding an ally into a flank or the fighter into a position where he can better enforce his mark is a force multiplier.Sure there are differences.  But everyone in 4e is built to be effective in combat.  This is not merely a stated design goal, but also demonstrably true.  Classes are on a pretty equal footing in regard to combat effectiveness, which has a far broader definition than you are choosing to apply.  So why are different classes on completely unequal footing when it comes to non-combat challenges?If stakes are low, balance differences are not very important.  Your lack of capacity to affect the situation isn't harming the group.  When stakes are high, relative capacity to contribute to success (or even do something slightly meaningful) becomes important.  Powerlessness is not fun.  It was no fun being the 3e bard who was more effective sitting on a rock and strumming his lute than actually doing something in combat, but it went from "boring with a side of irritating" to "OMG I hate this class" when you were in a big fight and people started dying while you proved completely unable to affect the outcome.  Similarly, it's not very much fun running out of useful skills in the first 30 seconds of a skill challenge.  It's even less fun when that happens and people are dying.Why was fixing the one problem a design goal while fixing the other problem was not merely ignored but exacerbated?</blockquote>

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