D&D 5E Some thoughts on skills.

[Vaalingrade]

How do you mean? 4e already killed the "call up your deity to get spells" thing, and 5e didn't bring it back. This isn't "blue sky," it's the state of affairs we currently have.

Oh, but we're going to have everyone prep spells now, so the Bard is going to be calling up the Columbia Record Club every morning to make sure their subscription is still valid.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Instead the 5e skill system tries to pretend it can meet all of those preferences simultaneously just by doing a little here a little there but instead of being easily tunable you wind up with an unstable morass of never ending one off rules & tweaks needed to account for all of the edge cases just to make it be any preference

Where does the skill system pretend to meet all those preferences simultaneously?
One needs to keep in mind that the game is 50 yrs old trying to accommodate the greatest number of playstyles.
I believe 5e is easy to tune.

 

[Pedantic]

These two things are so far from each other in TTRPGs that they aren't even 50 degrees of Kevin Bacon from one another.

You could maybe look at the rest of the post, where I explained the rationale, provided an example and clarified the kind of thing I was talking about it.

I nearly put "realism" in scare quotes, because it's vague and usually inflammatory, but I figured the context I provided would....provide context.

 

[tetrasodium]

Where does the skill system pretend to meet all those preferences simultaneously?
One needs to keep in mind that the game is 50 yrs old trying to accommodate the greatest number of playstyles.
I believe 5e is easy to tune.

You answered your own question.

 

[AnotherGuy]

You answered your own question.

Ah, I was going to post the only way to solve your issue with skills is to create a skill point system, but I decided to go back in the thread and see if you had posted your preferences on the matter and I see you did (fairly early on). So yeah we are on the same page on this.

The problem you (general you) have with 5e is that it brings to the table its own systems (Tool Proficiency, Expertise, Advantage/Disadvantage, Bounded Accuracy) so it means besides any personal fixes you may have had with 3.x/Pathfinder with the skill system - you now also need tweaking for the new things introduced within 5e.

 

[Minigiant]

I want Endurance, Streetwise, and Lifting skills back.

The core issues with 5e skills is like I said, their use is based on personal preference and thus rarely match the personal, realistic, nor fantastical expectations. 5e more or less gives you vague outlines then when things don't match how you want the game to look or play, it says "Well that's on your Group or DM"

 

[tetrasodium]

Ah, I was going to post the only way to solve your issue with skills is to create a skill point system, but I decided to go back in the thread and see if you had posted your preferences on the matter and I see you did (fairly early on). So yeah we are on the same page on this.

The problem you (general you) have with 5e is that it brings to the table its own systems (Tool Proficiency, Expertise, Advantage/Disadvantage, Bounded Accuracy) so it means besides any personal fixes you may have had with 3.x/Pathfinder with the skill system - you now also need tweaking for the new things introduced within 5e.

No it's bigger than that those things you listed as "systems" have their own problems with some of them even violating the goals of the others. Proficiency growing with levels violates bounded accuracy on an objective level by sheer virtue of the objective fact that the rest of the system doesn't keep up with the growth in proficiency bonus. Expertise does so again to an even more extreme degree. (dis)advantage beats the whole thing bloody while invoking maslow's hammer to force itself in place of any possible situation in ways that would not even have been a credible "what if" thought experiment for purposes of discussion prior to 5e doing it. That mess happens exactly because 5e & 5e's skill system is trying to support "completely opposing preferences" in an effort to "accommodate the greatest number of playstyles" while simply dumping the mutually incompatible results on the GM.

If 5e went the way of pre-3.x d&d where skills were not really a thing & the GM got to decide if a player can do X & how they did it that would be one thing & I may or may not like the results.... But that's not what 5e did either, it gave a crunchy core skill system for players to use and left out the gm side stuff* right down to forcing the GM to debate if "would you like to use your action for that?" or "what is your character doing to accomplish that?" is a reasonable GM call or not for seventy two pages. & even longer at the table.


*That one was apparently even in 4e, source.

 

[Minigiant]

No it's bigger than that those things you listed as "systems" have their own problems with some of them even violating the goals of the others. Proficiency growing with levels violates bounded accuracy on an objective level by sheer virtue of the objective fact that the rest of the system doesn't keep up with the growth in proficiency bonus. Expertise does so again to an even more extreme degree. (dis)advantage beats the whole thing bloody while invoking maslow's hammer to force itself in place of any possible situation in ways that would not even have been a credible "what if" thought experiment for purposes of discussion prior to 5e doing it. That mess happens exactly because 5e & 5e's skill system is trying to support "completely opposing preferences" in an effort to "accommodate the greatest number of playstyles" while simply dumping the mutually incompatible results on the GM.

If 5e went the way of pre-3.x d&d where skills were not really a thing & the GM got to decide if a player can do X & how they did it that would be one thing & I may or may not like the results.... But that's not what 5e did either, it gave a crunchy core skill system for players to use and left out the gm side stuff* right down to forcing the GM to debate if "would you like to use your action for that?" or "what is your character doing to accomplish that?" is a reasonable GM call or not for seventy two pages. & even longer at the table.


*That one was apparently even in 4e, source.

As times goes by, I and many others realized that the easrly idea of having a very basic core system and a several different variant modules that were designed to work for different genres and playstyles with the assumption that 90% of group would choose one or more modules of each type is an idea sorely missed in 5th edition.

Well 5th edition's core mechanics are simple and small enough to easily create a varient to match the Genre and Style the group wants if you are honest about what you want. But I feel a lor more of them could have been included in the base core books and more space given to them overall..

 

[Vaalingrade]

As times goes by, I and many others realized that the easrly idea of having a very basic core system and a several different variant modules that were designed to work for different genres and playstyles with the assumption that 90% of group would choose one or more modules of each type is an idea sorely missed in 5th edition.

Oh, like 5e was supposed to definitely was never supposed to be like and was never said, trust me bro.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I want Endurance, Streetwise, and Lifting skills back.

The core issues with 5e skills is like I said, their use is based on personal preference and thus rarely match the personal, realistic, nor fantastical expectations. 5e more or less gives you vague outlines then when things don't match how you want the game to look or play, it says "Well that's on your Group or DM"

What does Lifting do that Athletics wouldn't cover?

Also, do you see any distinction between things which are intentionally meant to be extremely broad and things that are just vague and not defined? That is, the former is explicit that it covers lots and lots of things and you should take relatively liberal interpretations, while the latter just straight-up doesn't tell you much, hoping silence and player imagination will fill the gaps.