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Message: <blockquote data-quote="n00bdragon" data-source="post: 6032132" data-attributes="member: 6689371">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."Oh, you didn't put X points in Perform (Dance)? Well your character has two left feet then. No points in Knowledge (Local)? Guess you can't find an inn."For every example of a player using a skill to do something extraordinary you can find a hundred (particularly when it comes to knowledge skills) of DMs tossing out checks that you and I, joe shmoe nobody, could not possibly fail simply to inject the skills in the game and make them "matter". To make a point open up your monster manual to any given page. Without looking at the name of the entry simply look at the picture. Can you figure out what sort of creature that is? Undead, outsider, elemental, etc? Your character lives and dies by his knowledge of such creatures and fights them almost every day. Do you really think he can't tell the animated blob of water is an elemental or that mind flayers aren't from this world?Getting back to the point of knowledge skills though when you fragment them across a variety of subjects you simply decrease the amount that anyone is allowed to know and encourage wild metagaming. No one wants to spend their limited and valuable pool of available skills on things which will probably never come up so they spend them on skills with mechanical uses and then rely on the DM to ignore the RAW on knowledge. This is how the rules should be. I would say there should only be ONE knowledge skill, call it Extraordinary Knowledge. Everyone knows basic things but on those occasions where the DM determines that average joe couldn't possibly figure out X there's a skill for that. If you need to granulate it then give characters bonuses to EK when rolling on particular subjects. You don't have a separate saving throw for fear and mind control. They are both will saves with modifiers if relevant. Why should skills be any different?</blockquote>

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