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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Irda Ranger" data-source="post: 3689496" data-attributes="member: 1003">There's nothing "extra" about them. If you spend X years as a Fighter you get BAB, HP, Feats and some Skill Points.  If you spend X years as a sailor or farmer you should get some skill points for that too.  They're not "extra"; you've earned them.  They also make you character more believable, and more interesting to play.  If all I wanted was a 1-dimensional collection of stats that killed things, I could play Diablo."I've been a village herbalist for 40 years, but I don't know a lick more about herbs than the 1st level Dwarven fighter that's lived in a cave all his life."  What kind of sense does that make?  I don't know about you guys, but we play pen-and-paper roleplaying games (as opposed to God of War or World of Warcraft) because you can make more complete characters and more believable worlds, where belief is suspended.  But if you're going to go to the trouble of writing a character history, it should be worth something, and not just words on a page that do not translate in any way into the gaming session.I don't appreciate the insinuation that I have the emotional maturity of a six year-old.You wouldn't be wrong to do that if the game was starting as 15th level adventurers.  But that's not what we're talking about.  If you really were reading what I and SHARK and the others were saying, we're talking about a few "life skills" that you've picked up along the way.  Not the same at all as being a 15th level Ninja-whatever.  I hate to accuse people of "not getting it", because I feel like that's a cop-out, but I think that's really the problem here. You just don't "get" what we're trying to do.That simply isn't how the rules work.  As a very simple for instance, most Craft DC's for ordinary things are DC 15.  Assuming that you have to be constantly Taking 10 to make a living at something, an NPC of average Int needs at least 5 Ranks in Armorsmithing to make Chainmail - which means they need to be 2nd level.  Masterwork items, full plate mail, locks & lanterns, etc. all require even more, which means you need to be higher than 2nd level.  Any sailor "worth his salt" would also need to be at least 2nd - 3rd level.  The link between Max Rank and Class Level require this.  If you want to remove the Max Rank rule, then fine, most NPC's are now free to be 1st level characters.  But your assumptions do not fit the RAW.You may be right. I also suspect that OD&D didn't have skills for reasons of accidental omission, not out of any deliberate intent to allow for "creative freedom." But that simply doesn't matter; the author's intent is meaningless.  What matters is what people did with the game once they got their hands on it, and what they continue to do with it.  The evolution has been away from character sheets being "just spells & combat stuff" to a more feature-complete abstraction of the whole "person."  It started with ad-hoc solutions like the thief skills and disguise ability, and expanded to more "universally applicable" NWP's and secondary skills, and expanded further to where we are today."Unfortunately" the result has been that since it's all on paper now, and can be compared, character-envy has set in, and the desire to make sure no one else gets any "extra" Skill Points drags us down to the lowest-common denominator of creativity and character history design.  Crothian's group does fine in 3e because they're all emotionally mature and competent roleplayers, but the guy at the table who can't be bothered to write a character history and "just wants to kill some orcs" points his finger and says "Hey! He has 2 more SP than I do! That's broken!"  Well too bad, buddy. If you were actually interested in roleplaying, you could have some too.  This isn't Halo or WoW where everyone who pays their money starts with the exact same amount of in-game "stuff", this is D&D, and you get what you give.</blockquote>

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