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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gribble" data-source="post: 7688811" data-attributes="member: 12430">1) Ok, let's pick two examples from the approach you outlined (two examples I gave earlier that have been ignored): your change will encourage players to play rogues and wizards more than fighters and clerics, and your change will encourage players to spread their skill points as thinly as possible. Are you honestly saying that if the players turned up with a D&D party entirely composed of rogues and wizards, and all of them had spread all their skill points out across as many skills as they could, that it wouldn't upset the campaign or the d20 ruleset at all? That you wouldn't have to go through and re-scale all your DCs (because you suddenly had no "experts"), or expect that the party would fail to hit high DCs more often than the system assumes? Or replan combat encounters because you have no tanks or healers in the party? How do you handle the player (we all have one in our groups), who says "I don't care if it's an investigative campaign, I really want to play an 8 Int fighter so I'm going to"?3) No, in Gumshoe it really isn't. There is no "campaign management" needed. Every PC will have a suitable spread of investigative skills, without any outside management needed. You can't say the same thing about D&D for an investigative campaign. At the very least you need to say to the players "We're going to be playing an investigative campaign, make your characters appropriately", which will (effectively) take a whole swathe of player options off the table. With Gumshoe you just say "make a Gumshoe character" and you can guarantee it'll work and be able to contribute in an investigative campaign. If you don't understand this point, I have to question if you have ever even played Gumshoe, and if you have whether you understood the system.4) Of course it can - but that is the default campaign mode, what the rules are designed to model, and what they're best at modelling. Just because I *could* run a dungeon crawl with Gumshoe, it doesn't mean I'm under any illusion that it'd be the best system for that type of game, or even that it'd be a good fit for hat type of game (it wouldn't, on both counts).5) That's like saying "In D&D, I don't think every character should be able to contribute in combat as well as every other character, If they can why does anyone feel special?". It's because although they all contribute *equally* (in terms of impact), they do it in different ways - the fighter by tanking, the wizard by blasting big groups of minions, the rogue by sneak attacking the big bad and the cleric by buffing and healing. It's exactly the same in Gumshoe - just because all characters contribute equally to solving the mystery, it doesn't necessarily follow that they all contribute in the same way. The face talks to people and gathers "human intel", the forensic scientist anaylses the physical evidence, the hacker gathers signals intelligence, and the ex-soldier spots potential hiding places and movements of people. But they all contribute equally (in terms of impact) to solving the mystery.8) The example was to illustrate the difference between a character being able to choose when to expend effort/resources, vs. being randomly able to do so. Nothing more, and had nothing to do with illustrating expertise. You seemed to think it was a relatively minor thing, but IME it is not.9) If you think this, then you have misunderstood the "primary element" of the Gumshoe system. Hint: as I've said multiple times, it isn't about the group solving the mystery (or even finding clues) without chance of failure.10) My position is that a system specifically designed for running investigative campaigns is (shock horror), better for running investigative campaigns than a system that isn't specifically designed for running investigative campaigns (and in fact is designed for very different campaigns). It's hardly a controversial position. You haven't established anything which would make me doubt that position, based on my experience. In fact, all you've done is confirm it.</blockquote>

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