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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 7968735" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I've never heard of a single case of that, and I'd argue that making your own unique painting requires creativity, not skill in painting. Meanwhile, copying the flow of another person's work, their line depth, ect, requires you to understand those details and how to recreate them. Which by default, falls under the skill of the painter's tools. Also, taking a year to copy would be the equivalent in DnD terms of taking a 20. Anyone could successfully forge something if you let them take a 20 on the skill, even if they have no skill in the relevant work. Amusingly, since it would require a lot of money and more than 250 days, it would also potentially qualify them for proficiency in the tool set.A few things. 1) I'm not caring about the countermeasures and I see that as being a red herring. Yes, forging a document can cost someone millions of gold or thousands of lives. That is why creating a forgery is difficult. But, any possible measure has two possible things in game. A) It is something that as a painter or scribe they would know about. If every real military document misspells the the word Army to show it is real, then a scribe who ever had to work on a military document would know this. Or B) Every official document needs to be sealed with a magical wax seal that is kept in the desk of the Master Scribe in the capital. In which case, you need to use it without getting caught, because you can't just replicate it. Unless we are going to say that Forgery kits give everyone a) magic or b) the ability to make and replicate any design AND you can't do that with any other skill. And things like again, things like aging paint or aging paper are things that people with those tools would know how to do. I have a friend who is an amateur woodworker. He knows how to quickly age wood, because he wants to make tables and desks that look antique without waiting a few decades for it to happen naturally. I could probably call up a Professor of the visual arts at a college, and ask them how to age paint to look older, and they can likely tell me. Which is what leads into thisThe point isn't to look at forgery kits, it is to look at Painter's Tools, of Blacksmithing tools, of Calligrapher's Supplies. If Water Vehicles proficiency covers any floating boat shaped object, and dozens of sailing techniques, then why can't painter's tools cover knowing how to age paint? Why can't a blacksmith put a design on a rod of iron that matches the seal made of gold? Why can a jeweler not create a ring engraved with a message that looks like identical to one created by another jeweler a decade ago? Why does it take a different proficiency to do the same thing that someone else did with the original tool? Should it be a high Dc? YesShould it require special materials? YesShould it be difficult? YesShould it require an entirely different proficiency that has nothing to do with the tool that makes the object you are copying? No, why should it?The bolded is the part I'm saying. Sure, have a separate set of items, but the skills, the knowledge, the jargon? That makes sense to combine with the proper skill, or it is specialized knowledge that you just wouldn't know. For example, I would never allow someone with a forgery kit to make a perfect fake die for embossing coins (not that it would actually matter in DnD). Because those dies are a heavily guarded state secrets. Without the proper background, you just don't know that. If they wanted to, say, use their blacksmith tools and try and copy a coin that they have, I might let them make the attempt. They know metal, they know how to form metal, but it still will likely not be a perfect copy, because that requires them to get the die, and copy that. And since it is made of metal, a blacksmith can do that, but a forgery kit with paper and ink is useless for that.</blockquote>

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