Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6575995" data-attributes="member: 82106">No, it IS in a club by itself when it comes to clarity of the skill system, certainly for D&D. Its quite precise when it comes to doing things 'in action'. There's a specific skill which is almost always clearly indicated which will apply, a designated way to calculate a DC, and modifiers which indicate the most likely adjustments to that DC, plus precise rules for things like conditions and effects which would likely supply other modifiers, assistance from others, etc. You could generate longer lists of modifiers, but don't be fooled into thinking that's 'more precise', its just longer. You might end up with a slightly different modifier with a longer list, but either way you'll definitely have a modifier that is supported and could be agreed by most people reading the same situation.I see the most cost-effective path as a system that has a relatively small number of rules that apply broadly and gets on with the action rather than focusing on lots of steps and process. If it is clever, and 4e is, then it pretty much just works and adding more specificity would gain you very little. Where it is of high value, combat, 4e goes whole hog and gives you as much as you can handle.Those rules should be general enough and non-specific enough that they can be applied flexibly to extrapolate them to a wide variety of situations that have never been anticipated at all. This is where I lose you because I don't see how detailed lists of modifiers for every kind of situation can exist unless you already anticipated that situation. It thus seems inevitable to me that the action will be constrained one way or another to that set of things. But again, IMHO 'codification', in the sense of giving long lists of procedures, modifiers, etc isn't the only way to be 'complete'. That's how I see it. 4e's Nature skill isn't 'incomplete' because it doesn't have a huge long list of every application anyone could think of. Its COMPLETE because its VERY CLEAR that you are going to use Nature, the rules always tell you when that's the skill to use, and it always works pretty much the same way. There are conventions around DCs and modifiers and what the outcomes of skill checks are normally expected to be, which presumably the GM will supplement if they're really inadequate, but they rarely are. The GM simply has to supply narrative context and where things go from there when a check is made. When I GM 4e I never refer to books, I don't need to. What I need to know to tell exactly what a check will be is already in my head, and I've actually never had a player disagree with me at that level. I've had a very few combat rules questions come up with a player asking how something really worked or if I did it right, but that's about it. Maybe there's a way to write up that system in a more playable way for others, but the way it works for me couldn't be improved, and I'm pretty sure the players choices were the central element of those games.I think I lost the thread a bit here, but backstory has been quite strong for us in 4e. In fact much more so than in previous days. 1e was especially dry in my experience. 2e not quite so much as often you kinda had to knit its crazy borked mechanics together with SOMETHING, but 4e backstory has been gold. I've had 2 players write 1000's of words on their characters backstory, and it was GOOD!</blockquote>

Verification