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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 5574793" data-attributes="member: 19675">Are you kidding me?While it describes a kind of performance, it is most definitely NOT a musical one.  You (and any other musicians in the ensemble) either can or cannot play the music they are trying to play.  To paraphrase Yoda, there is no bluff, only play or play not.I don't know what musicians YOU'VE been listening to, but nobody I can think of has ever been threatened into enjoying a show. That's a design issue, easily addressed by systems that draw combat/adventuring and non-combat skills from separate pools, or simply letting players choose how focused they want to be.  Even in 3.X, where skills were drawn from the same pool, you could only spend a certain amount of points improving a given skill per level, so if you had "extra" you were forced to look elsewhere (though you could go cross-class instead of non-combat).Simply excising non-combat skills is, IMHO, suboptimal design at best. Add to that list the story of the comedian who had to tell a joke to a mobster to save his life (which actually derived in part from tales of jesters and kings)- a mobster who had once been his comedic rival.  The comic stole one of the (not yet a) mobster's as-yet unperformed routines and rocketed to fame, while the other man's career flamed out.So he had 24 hours to make this man laugh or be shot.Add to that list the 1980s movie Crossroads, starring Steve Vai as the Devil's guitarist...like the aforementioned "Devil Went Down to Georgia", inspired by several score blues songs about "going down to the crossroads" to make a deal with or to compete against the Devil.  The whole crossroads thing has been alleged of many guitarists, including the bluesman Robert Johnson and prog guitarist Robert Fripp: they gained their skill by making a deal with the devil...then won their souls back.Add to that list Scheherazade, who had to tell the King stories in order to save her life...The list DOES go on.  Its a pretty common trope.  Some (not all) would consider the story of Baldur's death and non-resurrection to fall under this umbrella.1) Being an adventurer and a musician (or otherwise artistic) are not mutually exclusive.  In some traditions, being able to recite poetry, do calligraphy, sing or play an instrument are as essential to one's place in society as skill with bow, blade and buckler.  Heck, in some, poetry & storytelling was the primary tool of passing along education, since writing was not a common skill.2) By eliminating the skills, you eliminate even the possibility of a well-rounded artist/adventurer (and all those potential storylines) in your campaign.If there is no skill, there is no skill challenge, just a kludge...a workaround.</blockquote>

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