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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 5711611" data-attributes="member: 19675">If I'm playing an instrument to earn my supper, a competition for a monetary prize, or even in a "cuttin' heads" competition with the Devil's champion, I'm not bluffing or intimidating my audience, I'm engaged in a display of skill.  In each, I'm trying to please my audience, but the judging criteria are different.  And they all boil down to "can you play your instrument well at this time"- IOW, without "chord amnesia", without oversoloing to the point that the main theme is lost, hitting some clams, and so forth.  None of the skills in 4ed reflect that. Stepping back to the Starlock example: Monster IDing is spread out over 4 skills- Arcana, Dungeoneering, Nature and Religion.  And those skills are not necessarily on the lists of those who would be familiar with those critters- like the Starlock not having Dungeoneering- usually because there's good reason for the class NOT to have the main uses of he skill.  This IS a problem.(The best way I can see around this is remove that IDing from thos classes and simply making each class familiar with certain critters as a class feature- essentially, a class-specific Monster ID trained skill.)Going back further upthread to look at the HERO system, it's crucial to recognize that any PC may take any skill- without classes, your PC's skillset is unique to him because he can take ANY skill.  In addition, if you don't see the skill in the book, you cn simply add it...and it follows exactly the same mechanics as a standard skill.Translating that into 4Ed, that would mean divorcing skill selection from lists limited by class.  If you want to maintain that certain classes are better at certain skills than others due to training- part of the logic behind class-limited skill lists- give classes a +2 bonus to those skills (let's call that the Expert bonus...and it only applies to skills you train in).You'd have a functionally infinite skill list with 3 basic tiers- untrained, trained, and expert- plus racial, level, and feat-based bonuses.</blockquote>

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