What good is an Endurance skill?

[Ahglock]

Bingo. I'm surprised they didn't do it more often. Like with Initiative. It would have made a great skill.

They did it in SAGA and it just became the must take skill for to many people.

 

[Burr]

Well this makes me think endurance should not be a skill. Climbing whether for short periods or long periods should be part of the athletics skill. By having the skill your muscles are conditioned to do those activities for both short and long periods of time. Arbitrarily narrowing other skills so we can totally have this other skill be useful isn't something I think is a good idea. I hope there is more to endurance than what I have seen in this thread or its a fail skill.

Suppose you have 20 Con and only 10 Str. It seems intuitive to me that you should be able to climb a steep cliff as well as someone with 20 Str and 10 Con. The stronger guy starts out faster than you but ends up slower than you, so it balances out. Having Athletics alone, even with the addendum you suggest, unintuitively favors the high-Strength character over you, the high-Con character.

Physical skills are so important that it makes sense to have Athletics (Str) and Endurance (Con) (and Acrobatics (Dex), since analogous arguments apply to it as well).

 

[Xyl]

The Endurance skill probably lets you do anything which the Endurance feat would have granted a bonus on the check for in 3.5e.

In other words, the Endurance skill in 4e lets them get rid of the Endurance feat from 3.5 by turning it into just another use of Skill Focus.