Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 7928778" data-attributes="member: 87792">To chime in to me the biggest weakness of the 3.5 skill system wasn't how granular it was (I found it took up far more time in character creation than it was worth but that's a matter of taste and you could just dump all your points into a few skills) but the fact there were 32 different individual skills and a further four families of skills (craft, profesion, knowledge, perform). This both meant that even rogues were generally untrained and unskilled at most things and, far more painfully, there was a lot more of "that's a skill?" or people struggling to find the skill that was called for in play. And on this note I find it interesting that 4e and 5e each have 17 skills by default and Fate Core has 18 by default.I find 5e to have a watered down version of the 4e skill system where you were either proficient or not. And then you could add a feat to it or a utility power that represented a specialism in that spell. One example is if you want to do the classic "brush pass" pickpocket where you walk past without breaking your step. In 3.5 making a sleight of hand check as a free action is a -20 to your roll (and as lifting a small object from a person is itself DC20 you need to hit DC40 to do this). In 4e instead of it being a -20 to your roll you instead specialise; you take the utility power that lets you do it as a minor action (which if you are trained in thievery you can get at second level if you wish - but you get limited utility powers) and then the brush pass as opposed to needing an excuse to stand by your target is just part of your thing. In 3.5 you specialised in skills by numbers going up; in 4e you specialised in skills by being able to apply those skills in more ways (and by numbers going up admittedly).This was a "Murphy's Rules of RPGs" issue however as the bigger, older, and more powerful a monster got the less you knew about it. As written it could lead to silly results."Whats that?""A wrymling red dragon that grew up on granite hillsides like this one. It weighs about as much as a horse and the pair of us can take it assuming it doesn't have parents around. Its treasure is about that of [treasure table Q]"Five minutes later:"That was an easy fight against the red wyrmling. Now what's that?""A big red flappy thing? That seems to be breathing fire? But it's got too many hit dice for me to identify and is heading this way!"Waaaay too complicated and way too inflexible. I can't remember the last time the exact value in GP of what I was trying to craft was even vaguely relevant - and it does "interesting" things when you so much as try to dig a pit trap.And this is a huge issue with worldbuilding. Your numbers feel decent to me, but that's a lot of high level commoner NPCs you need just to run the economy.</blockquote>

Verification