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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 610993" data-attributes="member: 537">Neither does rolling up all the skills involved in running a tavern into one skill: Profession (barkeep). You learn to haggle with suppliers, keep rowdy drunks under control, balance your accounts (or maybe not), keep wine unspoiled (or maybe not), manage employees, maintain good relations with the town guard, suck up to the thieves guild, and so forth. Then you level up. You put one rank into Profession (barkeep) and all of these disparate skills get better? That makes no sense!The level of abstraction in D&D varies wildly. In some areas, notably the ones most related to adventuring, things are highly detailed. Spot, Search and Listen are all separate skills, for instance, although it would be quite reasonable to roll them all up into a single "perception" skill. Similarly, Bluff, Gather Information and Innuendo are all separate, but you could just as reasonably lump them together as a "streetwise" skill. Then you have Craft and Profession, which are as abstract as you can get.Perform is in the grey area in between. It's got little to do with D&D's core mission of going into dungeons and killing monsters, but it's also central to what bards are all about. For this reason, you want some level of detail to distinguish one bard from another, but you also don't want so much detail that it becomes incongruous. The current setup, where one extra rank improves your ability with all instruments or art forms uniformly, is a compromise that serves this purpose. You can have bards who are proficient with completely different instruments and so are differentiated from each other, but you also don't end up with a skill that's very fleshed out but also irrelevant.</blockquote>

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