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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5820744" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'm sympathetic to the idea that real folks have fairly broad skills. However, in a game of heroic fantasy, some measure of specialization (often followed up with decades of flanderization) is very much part and parcel of the genre. The highs are DRAMATICALLY high, and the lows are DRAMATICALLY low. It's not a mathematical relationship by any means, but it certainly should be part of any D&D game I'd like to play!And again, this is excluding the extremes. You've gotta make SOME concessions for gameplay purposes, and excluding the "Always Wins" and "Always Fails" results seem fine to me, as long as the difference can be dramatic enough to matter in play.I'd take a bit of an issue with your characterization of the 3e skills. By my estimation, 3e supported a diversity of skills by not having the DC's you need to hit be very high -- anyone who can hit a DC 10-15 could be fairly "average person" in any skill, and only if you wanted to be significantly powerful (or were up against opposed rolls that would be significantly powerful) was it wise to bother investing more than a few points into a given skill. You don't need a Diplomacy bonus of +15 to be a good diplomat. I don't think that quite worked, because people functionally just kept putting points into the stuff they were already trained in without really looking at what they could functionally accomplish with the bonuses they have, but given 3e's crunchy, rulesy nature, that's not too shocking.I do think the idea of 4e's "everyone learns a bit of everything, and specialists get more" (the +1/2 level bonus) is pretty solid. It's why my Aspergaficer can still make diplomacy and bluff checks, but generally shouldn't. I think the bigger problem in 3e and 4e tended to be the proliferation of cheap, easy skill bonuses. The curve of the d20 can only support a divergence from average of about up to +10 (assuming the DC has no modifiers) and still have the roll matter in play, and my Aspergaficer already has an Arcana skill of +12 (without using Backgrounds) at second level. That...probably shouldn't happen. I couldn't get an attack bonus that high, (though mine do hover at about  +7, which is pretty big, though it's against a defense that rises reliably, too), and for good reason. Mitigating hyper-specializtion in my book is first about mitigating those stacking bonuses, and second about DMs putting a variety of challenges in front of the players. In 4e, you wouldn't just use Brutes in every combat for your campaign, right? You use a variety of threats, and that variety challenges different characters in different ways. In 5e, expanding this view to the entire adventure, you wouldn't just use combat as the perfect solution for everything. You use a variety of challenges, and that variety challenges different characters in different ways. Hyper-specialization results in failure in a variety of challenges, and your big success in that one area doesn't count for more just because it was bigger. But I think we're mostly in agreement, anyway. Specialization yay. Overly narrow specializtion or overly broad characters boo. Exclusing the ends of the bell curve is great, I just don't want to play in the middle of that bell curve.Which goes back to my overall gaming philosophy that swinging from "Booo!" to "Yaaay!" more often is a lot of fun. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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