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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5820667" data-attributes="member: 54877">The typical jack of all trades, (First 3E bard version being a great example), is too far the other way from what I'm talking about.  Of course, one of the reasons he doesn't work is because the rest of the party are hyper-specialists.  But mainly it is because the system is designed to heavily reward hyper-specialization.  (4E doesn't really solve this with its +1/2 level to all skills, either, because of how skills work.) However, I think you might have missed the "hyper" part of that in the argument.  I'm not arguing against specialization.  I agree you need some of it.  Rather, I'm saying that most walking, breathing people are generalists in a lot of walks of life, while specialists in some areas and weak in a few things.  Even in our relatively hyper-specialized modern world, this is often still true.  The world-class violinist, practicing 6+ hours a day and traveling a lot, is necessarily deficient in general skills compared to the average population (barring genius or other such average skewing effects).  Yet even he or she has some general things that they do well enough to bother doing them. 4E says that a fighter should be broadly but mildy competent in all the activities of riding, discussing with a young noble, researching history, swimming, climbing, sneaking into a lax camp at night, etc.  Not super at these, or capable of performing them well in difficult situations, but enough to get by in lesser situations.   3E says (roughly) that the fighter can pick one of those to be a bit better than mildly competent in, but the rest are out of reach.  In those, he will be inept. I say that the fighter should have weaknesses in those area, preferably chosen to aid characterization of the particular fighter, but not be broadly inept.  He performs like the 4E fighter was expected to (but does not always manage) in maybe 50% to 75% of those situations, perhaps excels at one or two if he works at it, and sucks at the rest.  You know, like real people do.  That should be the default assumptions of each character (albeit with somewhat moving targets on the list, depending on class, theme, etc.)</blockquote>

Verification