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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8744344" data-attributes="member: 4937">B) All martial classes in D&D need to be skill monkeys.The traditional model of class archetypes is fighter, skill-money, and spell caster.  Each of these three has generally been seen as occupying equal design space and offering equal utility.  And in a hypothetical system that might well be true, but it’s definitely never been true of D&D.  D&D has always been very conservative in its skill design and unwilling to make them important to the game, while at the same time hard punishing skill-monkeys by making them pay high prices for access to skills.  The longer the game goes the more this has become true.  If you roll the game back to 1e, the fighter gained more NWP than any other class, extending how it was advantaged in almost every aspect of the game over every other class.  Conversely, D&D has never been especially conservative in its spell design and been very willing to make them important to the game.  Even in 5e where the power and scope of magic has been drastically toned down, the legacy of that still means powerful spells and weak skills.  Spell casters in D&D are neither weak in combat nor weak in skill.  Instead, they excel in both.  Indeed, they tend to not even have to pay a large price in access to skills in exchange for spell power, as Wizards for example are as likely as not to have robust access to intellectual and knowledge-based skills, meaning that even as mundane skill monkeys they are quite useful. Fighters conversely are seen as good at fighting and nothing else, and fighting is not seen as skillful.  Fighters are seen as properly dominating “the one thing they are good at” a phrase that makes me want to pull my hair out.  Fighters are not good at one thing.  Fighters are filled with martial prowess and martial prowess goes well beyond just winning a fist fight.  It’s just that the areas that it extends into were not seen as skills when the 3e design team decide what D&D skills were, mostly because they were trying to translate the thief of 1e into a skill system.  They didn’t pause to consider whether being a fighter also meant a bundle of skills, and unlike the wizard the fighter didn’t inherit a skill set because the design team never considered it or if they considered it they decided it would be too complex to implement.As a result, what we’ve seen over the years is things that properly ought to be a part of martial class skills tend to become class abilities that the base or core martial classes then don’t have access to.What then are some of these things that are part of martial prowess that didn’t become part of the lexicon of D&D skills?As some examples:Porter: The skill of bearing weight without encumbrance.Running: The skill of moving fast.Endurance: The skill of continuing in the face of hardship.Tactics: The skill of understanding the nature of combat and how to gain a marginal advantage over the opponent.Command or Leadership: The skill of providing encouragement, organizing groups, and providing helpful advice in stressful situations.Demolition: Breaking thingsThat’s six skills on the fighter’s skill list!  Maybe not all of those things are best served up as skills, but they could be.  And all of those things are well within the idea of some having martial prowess.  Indeed, they are things still taught to modern soldiers in addition to the skill of wielding a weapon.  They are in fact probably as important to being a good soldier as the ability to protect yourself in combat.  If you arrive to the battle without gear and fatigued, and with no understanding of what you need to do and no organization, you probably aren’t going to be very good to anyone even if you can shoot your weapon effectively.But these things, so basic to martial prowess have come to be seen as so far outside the purview of the fighter that we’ve seen the creation of actual classes like Warlord that take over the entire field of martial skillfulness and silo it away from a fighter.   Then people complain that fighters are just big dumb brutes as if we haven’t stripped them of all else.A fighter needs to not only have enough skills to be skilled at a good portion of that list, they need a few left over for other things that a fighter might be good at like being alert, riding a hose, being stealthy, or being intimidating or any of the other things that a fighter might conceivably have in his background.  A fighter is indeed just as much of a skill monkey as a rogue, the focus or concentration of abilities just differs a bit.If this isn’t the case, then there will be no balance between martial classes and spell-casters.  The martial classes must have broad out of combat utility and must bring things to the table in terms of skillfulness that they can shine in where the academic wizard perhaps can’t.</blockquote>

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