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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9854804" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I've expressed my feeling about backgrounds as a substitute for skills, so I shan't belabor it.  But even backgrounds are adding something OD&D didn't have for the job.  Making that sort of thing matter did not intrinsically make fighters worse; the specific handling of it did.I'd say that entirely depends on how big a difference there is between skilled and unskilled here.  I also think "occasionally" is doing some heavy lifting there.D20's being what they are, that's certainly true, but it still doesn't mean there's no potential difference, just that it needs to be fairly large to be visible.I could go through examples but they'd be long.  There's a lot more to melee combat in particular than you're suggesting there; trying feints, aiming for weak spots, attempting to knock weapons out of line, binding shields--its just that D&D buries most of that in the mixture of the attack bonus and the die roll.  But that's a choice, its entirely possible to do it otherwise.  The reasons for that with physical activities are largely arbitrary; if you can determine success in a climbing attempt by how someone says they're doing it, you can do it that way with combat too, using their combat skill as just a reference.  I know that because I've done so (its not my preferred way to play, but the two situations are still not fundamentally different).I'd politely suggest that's because you haven't chosen to sit down and think about it.  I could provide a rough and ready one with some thought just from having watched rock climbers, so I'm sure you could do better, just as I did better with the combat example (because I'm both an experienced fencer and martial artist, though woefully rusty these days).</blockquote>

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