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<blockquote data-quote="Giant Octopodes" data-source="post: 8746633" data-attributes="member: 7037488">IMHO it's because Skills are a means to solve problems.&nbsp; The more skills, and the better you are at them, the more well equipped you are to handle a variety of problems.&nbsp; Now, certainly it's possible to be skilled in things and have them literally never come up.&nbsp; Or, like 3.5, you could have broad categories of skills broken into an insane amount of specifics, such that you need 6 different ones to solve a specific problem.&nbsp; Thus, someone with a huge amount of 'skills' would lack the requisite depth to handle a huge amount of 'situations'.&nbsp; But the general principle behind giving more skills to one class than another would be to balance against other abilities which might allow the other class to solve a higher amount of situations with means beyond just skills.For example, you need to get past a guard and into a chest.&nbsp; A wizard might knock the guard unconscious with sleep, bypass the lock with knock, and get it done that way, with their spells.&nbsp; A fighter might challenge the guard to a duel and get it done that way, via his martial prowess.&nbsp; A rogue would need to leverage skills to achieve the same end result.&nbsp; Certainly it's been discussed (in this thread and others) the problem of spells just inherently being a Better Solution than skills for a lot of problems, and an asymmetry between the quantity and type of situations solved with each.&nbsp; But at the very least I can get the design intent behind using skill distribution as a balancing mechanic.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Giant Octopodes, post: 8746633, member: 7037488"] IMHO it's because Skills are a means to solve problems. The more skills, and the better you are at them, the more well equipped you are to handle a variety of problems. Now, certainly it's possible to be skilled in things and have them literally never come up. Or, like 3.5, you could have broad categories of skills broken into an insane amount of specifics, such that you need 6 different ones to solve a specific problem. Thus, someone with a huge amount of 'skills' would lack the requisite depth to handle a huge amount of 'situations'. But the general principle behind giving more skills to one class than another would be to balance against other abilities which might allow the other class to solve a higher amount of situations with means beyond just skills. For example, you need to get past a guard and into a chest. A wizard might knock the guard unconscious with sleep, bypass the lock with knock, and get it done that way, with their spells. A fighter might challenge the guard to a duel and get it done that way, via his martial prowess. A rogue would need to leverage skills to achieve the same end result. Certainly it's been discussed (in this thread and others) the problem of spells just inherently being a Better Solution than skills for a lot of problems, and an asymmetry between the quantity and type of situations solved with each. But at the very least I can get the design intent behind using skill distribution as a balancing mechanic. [/QUOTE]

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