So long as the Community headbutts the brick wall that is the term "magic" and refuses to acknowledge the fact that D&D is a game with most of its complexity in SPELLS, we'll be stuck repeating this nauseous discourse until the end of time.
The community
does recognize it, but theres an apparent disagreement on whether or not thats a feature or a flaw.
I promise you, I am reading them.
Then you should be able to acknowledge where I explicitly stated that your concern wasn't going to happen and that splitting Survival, among other things, is
why it isn't going to happen.
I will admit I have no idea what LNO is. 32 skills is still splitting the hair too thin for me.
There's going to be more depth in each individual skill than there is in the entire 5e Skill "system".
Each skill is not only going to be correlating to and integrating with a great number of game mechanics, but each one is going to have a multitude of uses beyond just binary pass/fails of some obstacle. Hell, every single skill to have just as much a combat application as they do in any other context. Even the Combat skills. Especially them, in fact.
Put another way; in LNO Skills are foundational to every single mechanic in the game. In 5e, Skills are a pointless afterthought.
If you increase the skill list, you end up having to give the Ranger (and other classes, hopefully) more skills to compensate.
Nope. Skills don't work like that in my game. You should be thinking more Skyrim than 5e.
D&D is never going to make a Ranger Wilderness subsystem.
And no 3PP has ever made a good one that scales 20 levels.
Well theres a lot of reasons Ive got 9 months of game design under my belt at this point, and thats one of the biggest reasons.
In fact, it was the
first reason I ever homebrewed for DND, and I put so much thought into it that its very plausible I have the single most comprehensive library on the subject of Wilderness depictions in RPGs on Earth at this point.
Thats why I have such an assertive opinion on the matter.
The level-scaling is an excellent point. Wilderness travel of any sort usually gets negated as soon as a party gets access to reliable magic for travel and provisioning. Thereby negating the entire new subsystem.
5e in particular actually had a brilliant idea to make approaching this issue really dead simple; by high levels, you're party are meant to be Heroes of the Multiverse.
You shouldn't still be facing the same Bubblegum Forest from level 1.
What you should be facing is the Pestilence Swamps on the Island of Doom as you seek out the Tower of Pain in the Sea of the Dark Abyss.
The failure to even try to imagine how these things change, nevermind how a non-magical person of great uncanny ability adapts their skills to these perils, is
not a problem with the idea itself.
TBH, I'm not sure how this isn't lazy design.
But you are right that a crafty ranger is a great idea!
I think it goes back to step-by-step simulation. You have to force the crafter to get ingredients and spend time crafting and generally make it as much of a pain as possible, like what they've done to exploration. The PF alchemist showed us the way a LONG time ago: just let them make them off screen as a class feature.
I think the issue of step-by-step isn't that its inherently a pain in the ass but that its just seldom integrated properly into the gameplay loop, not just by eliminating the seams between it and the rest of the gameplay, but by also just making it fun on its own.
Thats why I was happy to come up with my 7Dice mechanic. Its actually fun to engage with and the circumstances in which it'd be called upon loop right into normal gameplay. You're already going to the dungeon, gather stuff, craft stuff, go kill the dungeon stuff, repeat. Don't want to do that? Thats cool. Now you've got a massive pile of things to buy with all the extra gold you'll get spending more time looting.
Survival games already figured this gameplay loop out ages ago, and its just as fun on the table as it is in Minecraft, if the system embraces it and does it well.
