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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6727699" data-attributes="member: 37579">Originally posted by wrecan:Neither is flavor text what? Necessary? Who said it was necessary?But if it doesn't improve in a way important to the game, then it doesn't matter. Also, if you're not discussing realism, then you're discussing a world in which the skills don't work the way they do in real life. (We're discussing, after all, mundane skills like blacksmithing and singing, not fantasy skills like spellweaving and mindpainting.)If you want rules in which there are skills for blacksmithing that don't operate the way they do in the real world, then it doesn't make sense to have such rules in a general game that isn't about your fantasy version of blacksmithing. If, in your world, a blacksmith can make a sword without the investment in anvils and forges and coal and minerals, and that his skill affects how quickly one can make a weapon, or how much damage it can do in combat, then that is a specific fantasy realm, and perhps that should be reprsented as a campaign setting, not as a general rule to be applied to every campaign using the default D&D rules.Moreover, adventurers "improve" by getting experience by overcoming Traps, monsters and skill challenges. Why should your blacksmithing improve because you kill a dragon?This ends up with the weird scenario in which all the best blacksmiths int he world are also better fighters than the people for whom they make swords,because, to get enough experience to improve blacksmithing, they have to go out and kill things. Or, if you can get XP by blacksmithing, all those long-lived races should spend their prolonged childhoods blacksmithing. That way, their race will never run out of armor and weapons, and they'll all be epic-level adventurers before they even begin adventuring.And that's why CraPPer and adventuring don't mix very well.No, because the DM runs the world. No fluff text can dictate how NPCs react to the PC. You can't say you're the best blacksmith, because that dictates what other blacksmiths are like. And your character has to fit in the DM's world.It's the same reason a player can't declare his character to be the beloved godchild of every noble family on the planet who can walk into any town and be expected to be showered with presents and money and whatever magic ites the nobility has available. Even though there are no (and never have been) mechanics for being somebody's favored godchild, the DM gets to decide how reasonable your backstory is.No, because the DM controls God, as an NPC in the DM's world.Because having a skill for corner cases (like music contests) is bad game design. It forces players to choose between two different types of effectiveness. That's why blacksmithing is relegated to a separate mechanic: Backgrounds.On a separate note, why is when people try to defend CraPPer or Crapper-style systems, they always reference these weird little contests? A singing contest? I've seen others talking about impressing a king with a bake-off, or that you might impress a king with non-magical some gift the PCs made, as if kings were really impressed by the adventurer's equivalent of "Mom, I made you this macaroni art." If this an actual fantasy trope somewhere? Is there an example of award-winning fantasy literature or some myth out there of which I am not aware in which some major conflict is resolved because a hero of yore managed to win a craft contest?The only myth I can imagine is the Roman myth of how Arachne insulted Minerva and was turned into a spider. Except, of course, Arachne was not an adventurer. Weaving was all she could do. So it wasn't actually a contest to resolve a conflict. It's just a backstory to explain the presence of spiders. Oh, and Arachne didn't get polymorphed because she beat Minerva in the contest, but because she chose a blasphemous subject for her contest entry. So the contest, was, in fact, not even waged!It seems this concept of Craft Contests was devised to justify CraPPer mechanics; CraPPer mechanics were not designed so that people could roleplay out some notion of Crafting Contests that existed before CraPPer skills existed.</blockquote>

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