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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5574744" data-attributes="member: 3887">We did this in our 4e campaign when the party challenged a powerful rival to a play-writing duel (a "play-off"!). To write the thing, we used the following checks: Diplomacy (to win the audience's sympathy), Intimidation (for the scary villains), Insight (for art's age-old quest for insights into the human, and demi-human, condition), and an plain INT check (for the plot).The result was an absolutely charming script with a frightening bad guy, surprisingly psychological depth, and a plot so dumb even Michael Bay would send it back for rewrites. Here a lack of an appropriate skill led to a much more interesting result. I am now picturing a remake of The Seventh Seal starring the Wu-Tang Clan, with the Rizza, no, make that Ol' Dirty Bastard as the wandering knight. Thanks, RC! My take is simple: 3e had good support for the common adventurer skills. They also had skills like Craft and Profession, which had little to no additional rules support -- outside of "you can write them on your character sheet and put points in them". Which isn't particularly helpful to a DM trying to run an interesting court-room scenario for PC's with Profession: Lawyer.4e simply removed skills which didn't have meaningful rules attached to them in the first place. Functions with empty code blocks. Skills can serve as a means of communicating interest, sure. But a skill needs to do something else, in addition to signifying interest. It shouldn't cost a Feat merely to tell the DM I want to play a pirate or a haiku master. The way I see it, 4e doesn't inspire certain folks to role-play. Making it a poor choice for them. Somewhere along the line this morphed as: you can't role-play in 4e. Bingo!Even the most detailed RPG skill systems are still gross oversimplifications/abstractions. The difference in the level of "realism" or "simulation" between a raw CHA check, Diplomacy, and Perform: Unrealistically Large Category of Performable Art, is vanishing small, at least to me.</blockquote>

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