Using Heal to find out how someone died.

[Lord Pendragon]

Which switches the question to: "Does adding a new skill mean removing (or minimizing the utility) of another skill?"

In your case, it would seem the answer is yes.

In essence, yes. It's been my experience that doing justice to even the core skills is a difficult job. You have to keep a lot of things in mind as you're designing adventures, providing lots of chances for the various skills. There are only so many opportunities in a campaign for skills to be emphasized. If you choose to give the limelight to one, another is going to become less useful.

As for the argument: "Heal does not give the user any knowledge of anatomy."......That seems like a very difficult position to argue from. A PC knows how to set a broken bone, but doesn't know how the bone is positioned in the body?

I can certainly understand an argument to the contrary. But I personally do not lump everything "medical" under Heal. For my money, Heal represents those talents an herb woman or midwife might have. It's treating symptoms. It does not represent the knowledge gained through the actually dissection of human bodies, which was considered taboo for many years, AFAIK. My campaign was set during a cultural Renaissance, wherein certain heretical scholars were breaking that taboo and cutting corpses up. Hence that knowledge was just emurging, and the skill became relevant. Particularly since a campaign-long villain was an accomplished doctor, and had a penchant for cutting up bodies and sewing them back up in disturbing ways.

 

[Nail]

But I personally do not lump everything "medical" under Heal. For my money, Heal represents those talents an herb woman or midwife might have. It's treating symptoms. It does not represent the knowledge gained through the actually dissection of human bodies, which was considered taboo for many years, AFAIK. My campaign was set during a cultural Renaissance, wherein certain heretical scholars were breaking that taboo and cutting corpses up. Hence that knowledge was just emurging, and the skill became relevant. Particularly since a campaign-long villain was an accomplished doctor, and had a penchant for cutting up bodies and sewing them back up in disturbing ways.

I disagree with your interpretation of the Heal skill......and your campaign sounds very cool and well conceived. Your players were lucky.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

I disagree with your interpretation of the Heal skill...

Well, as I said, I can certainly understand where you're coming from. And in most games the difference between your interpretation and mine is moot, since the more specialized knowledge I lump into Knowledge (Anatomy) isn't present in the campaign.

...and your campaign sounds very cool and well conceived. Your players were lucky.

Thank you, I certainly like to think so.

 

[Storyteller01]

It might be arguably sensible to actually remove the rarely-used skills from the game in the same manner I add them, thus preventing players from spending skill points on skills I won't be using much at all. However, since those skills are listed in the PB, I figure removing them would be more hassle than it's worth. Somewhere, a player would forget I'd removed it and wind up with 13 ranks in it at 10th-level, then learn his error and have to re-calculate all his skill points... Nah, more trouble than it's worth.

I've actually taken a slightly different approach. Players can pick the skills that fit their character concept. I tell them ahead of time that numerous skills may be used to find the same thing, but the DC's will be different for each. For our current example, Heal may provide the same info a Know (Anatomy) but a higher DC may be required. My players accept it, since they know what to expect. No reworked skill points, just adjusted DC's.

As a nice after effect, I have players who think about a problem before slashing at them (then again, none of them are fighters). You'd be surprised the skills uses they come up with (some are chees but that's why I'm there).