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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EvilDwarf" data-source="post: 6200030" data-attributes="member: 46843">Having spent most of my years playing AD&D, I have a bias against skills. We did just fine with the DM judging the relative difficulty of a task based on class, character specific experience (Oh, yeah, Homer the fighter has fought liches before, so he would know something about this puzzle/maze/trap etc) and then we'd roll d100 lol.I'm ok with skills, but there's so much challenge to implementing them correctly: what skills do you include, the cleric with high wisdom out-spotting the ranger problem, the flat math problem, the DC problem, the should DCs increase with character level like monster AC problem, and so on, ahem. Not trolling here,  but I think 13th Age (and even early Next packets) got it closer by having broad backgrounds that would forgo the need for specific skills and make sense in why a character has skills, etc. Now, you might say this introduces the DM may I problem, but hey, the DM is in charge of the game and the world already, or should be.And...well, Mearls said it himself when Monte was still around. Monte had a really interesting idea with the Trained and Expertise idea--and now we see it implemented very well in Numenera. In this system, the character reduces the DC of the task depending on Trained or Expert in the skill. This takes care of some of the wonkiness of the d20 and accounts for flat math and eliminates the problem of how much a bonus should be the bonus. I guess you could say that reducing the DC by one step is the same as a +5 bonus, and reducing the DC two steps is a +10 bonus, but it's not, really, if you think about the flat math and the upper bounds of what should be possible for a PC. So, I don't like how skills are implemented thus far. They still feel very much like they are in beta, which I guess they are, lol. Having said that, the skills in 3 and 3.5 seem like beta versions, too. Can't say about 4 because I didn't get to play it much.</blockquote>

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