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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5996643" data-attributes="member: 27160">You may have a point, here, but I think if that is so it creates its own nest of problems and issues. The first to spring to mind is the status of combat as a skill.Let's look at a skill that folk might be more conversant with the realities of: metalworking (I'm assuming a few folk will have done a smattering of this at school, as I did, if not later as part of technical or engineering training). If a character undertakes a metalworking task, how should the mechanics go about "linking" the mechanics to the fiction? The range and variety of techniques and actions used while metalcrafting are way too diverse to adequately cover the "how a character might achieve this task" without a treatise of some considerable length, unless either (a) the task is extremely simple or (b) the players are already intimately conversant with metalcrafting techniques. A rule set that says "metalcrafting is the skill of shaping metal by bashing it with a hammer" might get an "explanatory" pass from someone who knows absolutely nothing about the topic, but to most people it will pretty soon be clear that this is hopelessly insufficient.For skills - like metalcrafting - therefore, it seems to me that we need to be able to accept some measure of "this guy is using a range of techniques - I'm not well informed enough to even be able to say what they all are - that can achieve the endpoint dictated by the outcome resolution". Most RPGers seem eminently able to manage this, on occasion, even though it gets somewhat contentious where social skills involving influencing, deception and persuasion are concerned.And then we come to combat. It seems to me - especially reading over the last few pages, that there is some reluctance to view armed, hand-to-hand combat as a real skill. What I mean by that is that there is a tendency to see it as merely "hitting things with a sword", rather than using a whole range of techniques - physical, psychological, perceptual and through body conditioning - to achieve a whole range of outcomes. The idea that fooling your enemy about your intentions does not form an essential part of "the skill of combat", for example, is particularly egregious.I think this "de-skilling" of combat leads also to the idea that the cause-effect relation for a combat action must be the exact same pairing every time. If I said "my character uses woodworking to make a chest", we wouldn't hesitate to imagine that he might use a whole range of techniques and methods to make a chest that could fit a variety of detailed descriptions and a variety of styles. And yet, when my character uses "Come and Get It", there must be one specific technique that "explains" the action and result every single time. Does it really seem that implausible that "dumb fighters" have developed actual skills that allow them to select from a range of techniques and tricks that generate specific types of desired reaction in foes in battle, much like any craftsman selects techniques from a repertoire in order to best form a crafted object for a specific purpose?</blockquote>

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