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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 6341184" data-attributes="member: 7006">And its for this point that I'm so glad we now have the BIFT personality characteristics in the game.  Because I know for my table that's really how the characters are going to distinguish themselves from each other.  As a previous Fate player, I can tell you that while the skills in the game had a place, they were generic enough that they were not the primary way the characters were shaped.  It was their Aspects that carried the heavy load for distinguishing characters.  And I can guarantee that my D&D game is going to see the same exact thing happen because of the BIFT.Here's what I wrote about it over in the 'Are you excited for the Backgrounds?' thread:To go a bit further on this topic... PCs having a proficiency with Arcana mean they know some stuff about magic.  But many people know stuff about magic, so that in itself isn't anything really unique for a particular PC.  Now the PC who have proficiency in Arcana *and* has a high INT... they're probably going to be known a bit more for it.  Their knowledge will be quite substantial compared to other regular magically-knowledgeable people.  But then there's the PC who has Arcana, a high INT *and* has the Sage background with an Astronomer specialty, plus a Bond that says "I have an ancient text that holds terrible secrets that must not fall into the wrong hands."  And it's determined between the DM and player that this ancient text is a book of star charts that describe the horrors of aberrations from the Far Realm... which now grants the PC Inspiration points whenever aberration knowledge has an import, and thus the player now gets to roll Advantage more often.All of these facets combined will give the PCs in my game much, much more of a specificity of character than they'd ever get just from having a skill.  Yeah, Arcana is great.  But it doesn't hold nearly the weight of character uniqueness on its own.  So combining/separating skills into smaller/larger foci doesn't really add much in the grand scheme of things in my game.  Which is exactly why for me... having a skill of just 'Athletics', or having 'Athletics' and 'Acrobatics', or having 'Climb', 'Jump', 'Swim', 'Balance', and Tumble' as options to choose from doesn't really mean a whole lot.  It's the PC that has these skills *and* the Trait 'Lithe Like A Cat' that really is going to be the exemplar and really unique.Most other games probably won't play it like that... and that's okay.  But it does hopefully explain why it'll work wonders for me.</blockquote>

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