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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6852481" data-attributes="member: 2067">I dunno about murderhoboism, but yeah - I basically agree with what you say here. In general, the bigger difference there is between being proficient and being non-proficient, the more the party is encouraged to min/max, to pump up their most significant skills and not even bother with their other ones. If a DM uses a diversity of skill and tool checks, this creates a situation where someone in the party has to be proficient in any particular skill or tool. "Oh, I seen none of you took proficiency in land vehicles, so I suppose the wagon careens into the ravine. The best way you could've avoided that was by being proficient." It doesn't matter if operating land vehicles isn't really important to any of the PC's, the high divide between proficient and nonproficient means that it has to be important to someone, or else the party is going to get boned the next time they're driving a wagon on an unsteady mountain road. When creating (or leveling up) characters, this creates a lesser version of the "you gotta have a cleric" conversation - "Look, someone's going to have to bite the bullet and take a skill/tool they're not really interested in For The Sake Of The Team." And now someone whose heart was really set on being a Spy has to be a Folk Hero instead, because coverage trumps character concept here. You can play a Spy who dies in the first cart chase, or you can be a Folk Hero who lives. It's not inevitable that this happens to every group, but it's a tendency of putting a bigger gulf between what a proficient character and a non-proficient character can accomplish. The 5e assumption is you don't need proficiency to be pretty good, because then you can be whatever character you want to be and you can still survive a cart chase over a rugged mountain path. Changing that assumption is fine, but one of the prices you pay is that you encourage party optimization at the cost of interesting character choices. That might be an acceptable price to pay for some! I don't think it is for me personally. I really like creative characters, so much so that I don't want anyone to ever feel like they "have to" play anything.</blockquote>

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