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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9516654" data-attributes="member: 18">I think at a certain point you do probably have to factor in something being widely regarded as "how it works". And we are at that point with Climb/Swim speeds. Especially as we as DMs would have to make a lot of monsters make Athletics checks to climb and swim (and sometimes fly) that we generally do not - in fact, I can say in 5E I have never made a monster make any of those checks if they had the appropriate speed - even though I definitely would have made a PC doing the same w/o a climb/swim speed make the check. I mean have you? Spiders and Vampires are specifically exempted in 5E I note though, but I think that is more to do with ceilings (whereas we'd probably just never say a monster with climb speed was going across a ceiling unless they were a spider/vamp).So I do think here we do have to assess it as the vast number of people play it. I doubt many DMs or groups would be happy with some Rogue with no swim speed outperforming a Triton simply because he had Athletics and the Triton didn't and both had to make the same Athletics DC.Re: Powerful Build, not using Encumbrance definitely makes it less useful, and I think always would be worth mentioning in any discussion of its value. But again we have a slightly odd situation where in practice, an awful lot of groups do a thing where they don't track encumbrance routinely, but when people are trying to pull/lift really heavy stuff (boulders, bodies of heavy monsters, solid gold reclining couches you found in the villain's chillout room, etc.), they do often consult the maximums, which are influenced by Powerful Build. I think that's probably the normative mode of play at this point.</blockquote>

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