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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5712697" data-attributes="member: 2011">And then every PC is by definition "good at their combat role", "good at their non-combat role", and "good at their other non-combat role".You want to keep the skill system simple, but increase the complexity of the PC's out of combat options.Even two silos, combat and non-combat, are probably one too many for DMs who want the players to decide where to spend their resources or for players who want to be combat monsters and non-combat lambs, or vice versa, or somewhere in between. Two silos is doable, but three starts getting ridiculous because the third silo will expand into quirk powers, just like skills are evolving into skill powers. It'll become the design equivalent of analysis paralysis as it takes 3 or more hours to go through all of the stuff needed to create a character sheet. Both the second and third silos could be combined without losing good game design features.Just like skills are just part of a single silo system in 4E (it's something that the player decides when creating the PC), the "aptitudes/quirks" could just become a part of the second silo in a two silo system. You get your quirks and you are done. No special additional benefits.Personally, I think that quirks and traits and such out of other game systems are a crutch and used just like backgrounds are in 4E. Not to give the PC flavor, but to find some minor game mechanics advantage. I think quirks and traits and such are just a bunch of white noise that makes the entire game system more and more complex, and PCs harder to build as the player then reads through pages of quirks. Aptitudes and quirks and traits and such should have zero mechanical advantages and should be a small paragraph explaining how to create a good PC background. IMO.Let's stop adding so much side trash to the game system. This is no different than adding a bunch of unnecessary skills to the skill system. Crafting? PC background. Playing the flute? PC background. Walks with a limp? PC background. The game could have a simple rule for using background abilities and having 1000 sentences in the PHB on specific background skills and traits could be dropped.These types of things keep getting added to game systems by people who need to have a rule for every little detailed and insignificant thing. That's what we have DMs for. Have rules for combat encounters and skill challenges. Let people just roleplay for background stuff and let the DM decide what is appropriate and works for his campaign world with just a few guidelines or a simple single rule or such.As a side note, I think that skill utility powers was one of the biggest mistakes that WotC made for 4E. As mentioned earlier in the thread by someone that backgrounds came along and messed with the math of the skill system, skill utility powers messes with the math of the skill system.I don't think that the players should be able to pull a +5 to this skill out of their butts encounter/challenge in and encounter/challenge  out. It's ok to fail in skill challenges because the dice are cold. There doesn't need to be an old style "action point" system to get bonuses to skill rolls.I view skill utility powers as minor super powers. When taking a math test, does it really make sense that someone can come up next to you and encourage you to "do better"? Either you know how to solve the problems, or you don't. Yes, encouragement can help in some cases, but 4E went way overboard with it.And this is part of the problem with 4E conditions. Every other power and his brother has these little side bonuses or penalties to all kinds of game mechanics.  It's not just marking a foe. It's a +2 bonus here, a +Cha bonus there, on and on and on. Thousands and thousands of powers have game mechanics modifiers somewhere within them.I think one of the best ways to improve 5E is to increase the number of ways that PCs can modify themselves, and decrease the number of ways that PCs can modify NPCs or other PCs. A Fighter giving a +1 bonus to AC to all of his allies next to him should be rare, not common. A Fighter giving a +1 bonus to himself should be more common.If the concept of "adding bonuses and penalties to other characters" were decreased and "adding bonuses to myself" were increased, then the bookkeeping would be a lot less intrusive. Each player would keep track of his own PC more and the entire table would have to keep track of all of the PCs and NPCs less.The conditions tracking nightmare flows directly out of the concept that 3/4ths of the powers have to do something beyond just damage and/or movement, and that concept flows directly out of the entire design model of powers. When you give many many multiple powers to every PC, there is a tendency to give every PC a bunch of "cool ways" to affect the combat beyond their own PC.I don't think the conditions problem can even be addressed until the game designers understand the root cause of it. The root cause is because every PC is a minor super hero with multiple super powers that can affect others and most of those minor super powers only last for a small varying amount of time, so the players are constantly having to do bookkeeping in some way on when those effects end.The main solutions are to decrease the number of different powers, to decrease how often those remaining powers can affect other creatures, and when powers can affect other creatures, increase the duration and decrease the effectiveness of those effects.</blockquote>

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