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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Panda-s1" data-source="post: 7910242" data-attributes="member: 59554">oh boy, I missed this thread somehow. I'll only talk about stuff that somehow hasn't come up yet. also caveat: a lot of my grievances stem from misconceptions others had about the skill system, but I had these misconceptions, too, and when they're common enough it's basically good as RAW (like these are things I ran into among completely different and unrelated groups of people, so I'm assuming gamers everywhere had these misconceptions).trained vs. untrained: wtfthis issue is twofold for me.I know some people here are arguing about the need to max out Tumble, but someone once pointed out how since Tumble is a trained skill it's always worth blowing a skill point into it at character creation just for the ability to tumble in the first place. someone else pointed out that spreading your skill points around is a valid strategy since so many skills are trained. I think people tend to forget that while 3.x had a more granular skill system, it still had a lot of on/off skills as well. since your average game rarely makes it past level 10 breadth seemed to trump depth a lot of the time, and yeah I found myself doing this a lot in 3.5, or at the very least struggling to have at least a few decent skills while not being a complete idiot about how the world works.this leads into the other part which was this belief that you need to be "trained" in any skill in order to even use it to begin with. this one wasn't as common among more established groups, but it feels indicative of how much newer players actually studied the rules 3.x, which were byzantine and—well you get the point.why take 10? how even is take 20?a question that very few people I knew could get right back then: what skills can you take 10 on? this seemed like a confusing issue underlying the game until one day I realized the only skill that says you can't take a 10 on is Use Magic Item*. then I had to get over suddenly remembering all those times taking 10 could've helped me get out of some terrible situations. also I had only one DM I trusted enough to tell this to, and he was like "oh, huh, you're right", any other DM probably would've started a long winded argument that would have ended in altering take 10 to something worse (I had some bad DM's at the time). I think the real issue for me is take 10 should have been the DM using common sense to decide that "yeah of course your ranger who fought goblins and studied them for years knows what a goblin looks like". at least I hope that's normal these days (yes I had DM's that bad).and who decided how take 20 works? how does the mechanic even make any sense? please, some explain this to me, when's the last time irl you naughty word something 19 times in a row and suddenly wildly succeeded the 20th time?knowledge, and background skillstangentially related to taking 10, but I don't like how knowledge works. I don't like the Schrodinger's level of determination over whether or not my character knows something, even though they likely would given the circumstances of the game. it's possible I'm misunderstanding this. but as it has played out for me: 1) if I roll knowledge in battle to figure out something about an enemy monster and fail I just know nothing about this monster. never mind if backstory says I do know something, the skill just doesn't work that way. 2) attempting to know more about something means risking knowing nothing at all about that thing. assuming I am able to take 10 on a knowledge skill trying to roll higher than that means I can roll under a 10 and end up knowing nothing. why is this?knowledge also falls under the category of what I thought were "background skills", including crafting and profession. some people regard those throwaway skills, but it's also like "if my character was a blacksmith, but doesn't have ranks in profession (blacksmith) or craft (blacksmithing), was he really a blacksmith?". some people did make this sort of thing an issue, and I already have to deal with distributing my meager amount of skill points across 30+ skills, I know I don't have to have these skills, but why even have them to begin with?</blockquote>

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