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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6036028" data-attributes="member: 42582">No.Here's my take on list reduction:* Historical and Heraldic Lore merge into something like 4e's History skill; * Societal and Local Lore are absorbed by Diplomacy, Streetwise and the above-mentioned History skill; * Geographical and Natural Lore are absorbed by Survival (and perhaps Healing for herbalism); * Magical and Planar Lore are merged; * Religious and Undead Lore are merged either into the general Magic Lore, and/or into Forbidden Lore; * Underdark Lore merged into Survival and/or Forbidden Lore.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 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.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?I think it's at least worth trying to capture the difference between a PC who engages situations via social skills/knowledge (Diplomacy, Streetwise etc - whether we run these together, or make them distinct, might depend on how important we think the difference is between a paladin's sociality and a rogue's sociality), via wilderness skills and survival, via traditional "book learning" (History skill or something similar) and via esoteric knowledge (Magic Lore, Arcana or something similar).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.)I think distinctions more fine-grained than those I've drawn don't really capture anything of value to D&D as a genre (much like the excessive detail in AD&D polearms are unnecessary). And I could even see a case for eliminating my distinction between Historical Lore and Magical Lore and just merging them into a single Lore skill - so there would then be Social ability (Diplomacy and/or Streetwise), Survival (4e's Nature), Lore (4e's Arcana + History + Religion) and Forbidden Lore (the D&Dnext innovation that I want to preserve).There's still the question of how the mechanics for these skills would work, of course.</blockquote>

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