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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5089801" data-attributes="member: 4937">I struggled heavily with the profession skill through all of 3.0.  My biggest problem with it wasn't that it was useless.  The biggest problem I had with the profession skill was that it seemed that for most tasks it was redundant.  For example, just what did Profession (Lawyer) cover that wasn't covered by other skills like Diplomacy and Knowledge (Law), and why did Profession (Lawyer) determine your income if the actual practice of being a lawyer was determined by a combination of success in more concrete and general skills.  Other cases just seemed like bad editting.  For example, Profession (Cook) clearly should have been Craft (Cooking), as cooking produced a tangible good.  Of course, the Craft rules also sucked, but that's a different topic.  Craft at least had clear uses.What I had ruled through pretty much all of 3rd edition was that Profession could be used in place of any skill provided that it was used in the narrow advancement of your profession.  For example, you could use Diplomacy to argue a case in court, but you could also use Profession (Lawyer) in place of diplomacy to argue a case in court.   That solved Profession's lack of usefulness, but it never felt particularly elegant. Through much of 3.0, whenever someone claimed that the solution to the profession skill was to simply drop it, I would point out that there were some things that the Profession skill covered that weren't covered by any other skill.  The classic example of this was the ability to paddle a canoe or handle a ship.  Profession (Boating), Profession (Sailor), Profession (Navigator), and Profession (Astrologer) seemed to cover skill sets no other skill covered, in some cases in part and in some cases in whole.   However, when it was leaked that 4e would drop the profession skill, I reevaluated my position (back when I was somewhat hopeful about 4e and assumed that the changes would be ones I would welcome).  I set about listing all the skills that I didn't think were covered elsewhere and were applicable to an action hero, and to my surprise came up with basically only the above short list.  I then decided that the best solution was to make the few skill sets not covered elsewhere there own explicit skills.  So, Profession (Boating) became Boating, Profession (Navigator) was folded into Intuit Direction and became the Navigation skill, and so forth.  That would be my recommended path at present.</blockquote>

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