Steely_Dan
First Post
Well it looks like skills are going to seriously change, not tied to specific ability scores, and maybe narrower.
Do we really need Forbidden, Geographical, Heraldic, Historical, Local, Magical, Natural, Planar, Religious, Societal, Underdark, and Undead Lore as separate skills?
Do we really need Forbidden, Geographical, Heraldic, Historical, Local, Magical, Natural, Planar, Religious, Societal, Underdark, and Undead Lore as separate skills?
No.Do we really need Forbidden, Geographical, Heraldic, Historical, Local, Magical, Natural, Planar, Religious, Societal, Underdark, and Undead Lore as separate skills
I'm not a big fan of this - it gives the GM complete control over the dispensing of information, whereas I like the idea that players can play sage-y types, and can engage situations in part by gaining information about those situations. (Exactly what the mechanics are for this is a further question.)I love knowledge checks for plotline advancement, exploration, etc. but it really got old when players were calling for knowledge rolls at the beginning of every combat. I'm all for just tying them to class and background and just letting the DM pick, without rolling or combat implications, when a character should know something or not.
I don't really agree with this. I prefer skills, including Knowledge skills, to provide players with a tool to leverage the situation (in "3 pillars" terms, they facilitate players engaging the exploration pillar).Knowledge skills are a mechanic for getting "clues" that may useful for the story, with some investment cost required*. There is no way in the world to make these skills work in a strongly regimented way. Better to recognize that their nature is to be vaguely defined, open-ended, and DM-controlled.
The same thing is true of weapon proficiencies, though. For various reasons, we think it matters that a player engages ingame situations via a sword-wielding PC rather than an axe-wielding PC. The corresponding question, in relation to knowledge skills, is what (if any) distinctions do we think are worth drawing?Skills in general, rather than empowering players to do or know certain stuff, more often serve as a boundary for what they can't do and that's terrible.
I don't really agree with this. I prefer skills, including Knowledge skills, to provide players with a tool to leverage the situation (in "3 pillars" terms, they facilitate players engaging the exploration pillar).
That's not to say that the GM can't also use them as a clue-dropping tool ("Who's got the highest Forbidden Lore bonus? OK, when you wake up in the morning you remember the most eerie of dreams . . . ") but I don't think that should be their sole or even their primary purpose.
It might be cool to have a point spend system similar to the Gumshoe system. Have a split similar to GUMSHOE's General/Investigation split. So we would different rules for exploration skills and knowledge skills. Maybe knowledge skills could have a point spend to get information.
The distinction between ordinary Magic Lore and Forbidden Lore strikes me as less intrinsic to D&D play, but quite flavoursome and one feature of D&Dnext that I quite like and would be keen to see developed. (4e captures this difference in its gods - Ioun and Corellon vs Vecna and Tharizdun - but not in its skill system, making it hard to explain why every expert in Arcana or Religion doesn't know everything there is to know about Tharizdun and the Far Realm.)
Do we really need Forbidden, Geographical, Heraldic, Historical, Local, Magical, Natural, Planar, Religious, Societal, Underdark, and Undead Lore as separate skills?