"Hey let's keep putting super situational skill stats like swimming that no one will ever use!"

realistically, weapons skills are more situational than swimming.

Right, because every character can fly. KYS, OP.

Or maybe he's a normal player who never puts points in swim and never suffers for it because his DM doesn't care for rivers

Rivers are lame man

Oh sweet naivety. If the GM wants you to drown in piss, you will drown in piss.

In systems with shit like swimming and climbing as the ultimate useless skills, flight is cheap

classic games have proven, water kills... coulda changed a lot of lives if you could swim

Don't forget how potions of waterbreathing are just kind of lying around in random treasure hoards

>tfw in a group with a fighter, a druid, a ranger and a rogue my fighter is the only one with ranks in Handle Animal, Ride, Survival and Swim.
>tfw the druids and rangers animal companions like me more than them.
>the feels when I befriended a shark after booping its' nose to get it to stop attacking us and I have a new mount for water shenanigans when the druid and ranger are forced to leave their animal companions behind.

This is bait, right?

It's the DM's job to make that into something interesting. They/you should figure it out.

Depends on where you set your campaign. Is it in the mountains or dungeon diving? Barring flooded catacombs you should be fine without it. Are you having a high seas swashbuckling pirate adventure? Might be wise to put a few points in swim.

water also does occur quite commonly in caves/underground.

This is why I'm glad D&D 5e folded climbing, jumping, and swimming together into a single Athletics skill. It's about fucking time they did that.

True, but most DMs don't make their dungeons triathlons. The better ones have excuses. Necromancer doesn't want the added humidity increasing the rot of his zombie hoard. Bugbear doesn't want fur mold. Drider heard Itsy Bitsy Spider one too many times.

Indeed.

Now, an interesting first take that's proving to be quite effective, sparking discussion on the nature of skill specificity and the necessity of GM's adjudication in this area. Original topic, smooth execution, balanced degree of mocking tone, and the Angelica pic is quite a nice touch. This is actually quite well-done, and more of the same would be a welcome change to the board.

9/10, Great, but not amazing, quite optimistic as to what this baiter will do in the future.

What if you're in a game system and setting where the general assumption is that 95% of the time you'll be on a somewhat hard sci fi space station of some description, and 70% of that time you'll be in micrograv, yet climbing and swimming are still their own skills? Should they exist just in case you come across some freestanding liquid while you're busy murdering mutants in the frozen wastes of Mars?

Yeah, D&D isn't really a system that calls for that much granularity.

Remember when Call of Cthulhu had Fist, Kick, and Headbutt as separate skills?

Sometimes granularity is bad and dumb.

rivers are real tho. i almost drowned in one one time

>play a fighter
>2 skill points per level
>want my character ro be pretty athletic
>look at skills
>climb
>jump
>swim
>run

Nah, Athletics as a skill is a good change, especially compared to editions where being a triathalete apparently requires as much intelligence as basic magic

What if the Necromancer uses superior skeletons and the dungeon is partially flooded? Intruders cant breathe, skellys don't need to. Plus maces would be worse underwater, helping to shore up a weakness

Well if you really want to break it down then it depends on both the system and the setting. On one extreme you have shit like Iron Claw, the Game of Thrones but Zootopia, where splitting up climbing and swimming makes a lot of sense. Then you have DnD/Pathfinder where the bulk of characters will be equally good at swimming and climbing, barring something crazy like a mer or a naga. Then you have Deathwatch, where who gives a fuck what your swim and climb are, you're a super soldier in environmentally sealed power armor.

Well, yeah, obviously. Those were DM excuses to why there's no water in a dungeon. A smart Necromancer would flood the shit out of his dungeon, poison the water to keep lizardmen out, and either teleport in or be carried by minions in a sealed cab through the water.

But having more skills, is more fun, especially if you don't use most of them.

haha shit I only played it once but I remember that

Another thing I'm glad D&D dropped was skill points. Now you just are or you aren't proficient in a skill, and you get better at all your skills as your proficiency bonus increases.

Less granularity, but the simplicity is a refreshing change of pace. What's especially nice is that your Intelligence modifier no longer applies to how many skills you know, meaning you can finally play a low-Int character who can be good at a wide variety of skills based entirely on his background and class.

No more "Guess I'll just put my single lone skill point into Spot. Maybe I'll put one into Listen next level" trash garbage shit design.

Now that you mention it
>Spot
>Listen
>Perception
are all retarded skills. They should be based off innate stats. Unless you get a prescription nobody practices to "get better at seeing".

I've always figured Perception should be its own stat that you put points into. Same with Willpower. I've been playing D&D since 1995 and I still think the division between Intelligence and Wisdom is absolute bullshit.

>A sea of goblins stands before you
>I roll to swim.

>You are engulfed by the gelatinous cube
>I roll to swim.

>You are trapped in your own super-ego
>I roll to swim.

>You fall right into a vat of boiling pudding
>I roll to swim.

>The floor is too slick with oil to walk acro-
>I roll to swim.

>The black dragon breathes acid down on the party. Luckily your armor prote-
>I roll to swim.

>You are sucked into the vacuum of space
>I roll to swim.
>user you can't-
>I got a 17.

>>You are trapped in your own super-ego
>>I roll to swim.
Pardon?

>Pardon?

>I rolled a 27.

...

The literal fuck have you been doing?

Why are your armor skills all so close together, why do you have two melee skills high, why do you have casting and magic device high, why are your negotiation and investing so low?

All my armor skills are pretty much raised solely through traveling. The high melee skills are the skills I've actually worked towards using, along with casting/magic device. Negotiation and Investing are low because I rarely actually use shops anymore, after investing into all the shops in my home to around 500.
All actual combat at this point is mostly handled by the little girl I started the game with.

>All my armor skills are pretty much raised solely through traveling.
Then why are they forty to sixty points ahead of so many other skills?

Motherfucker loves walking

A combination of having them from the start and remembering to actually raise their potentials.

I think the idea with perception as a skill is to have it be something that can apply on top of Wisdom for things like Elves that would have particularly keen vision or hearing.

Granted, it is more odd to have as a separate skill that you can train in. You could probably make it like Initiative where it's simply a flat wisdom check, and then only have really specific things offer any sort of bonus to it.

Of course, then you get cases where stealth becomes really easy against most things because nobody can train to spot hidden objects, while someone can learn how to hide a lot better.

What Bugbear doesn't want his own indoor swimming pool?

No, but that was my first thought too.

Source is in the file name.

Except it is a skill set but should be rolled up into perception.

It's about how well you can play where's Waldo when looking for tracks, catching an odor and being able to recognize it, seeing broken branches and worn paths where others would see brush, being able to distinguish sounds from a crowd, catch a face in it and so on.

Tracking was and is still a very very real and valued skill. Military teaches it, Rangers spend a good 4 years developing it, hunters mostly use it but on the cheaper end of things, but ye olden hunters extensively used it in hinting badger, deer, wolves and other food and pelt animals.

But they should be skills that co develop, not their own thing individually.

Failed your perception test. Prepare for vaginal polthergeist.

>D&D 5e folded climbing, jumping, and swimming together into a single Athletics skill
They honestly still should have had skill specializations like most other RPGs, though. It makes sense that someone ATHLETIC would be good at all those things, yes, but even trained olympians aren't necessarily good at all those things at the same degree. Even something as simple as "add half your Proficiency bonus again to a skill specialization" would have gone a long way in giving players incentive to focus skills in certain ways.

Yeah, a degree of granularity would be nice, but it goes against the simplicity 5e was going for.

It might be nice as an optional rule to trade off specialisations in regards to athletics, sacrificing swimming down to just 1/2 proficiency in exchange for adding an extra 1/2 to climbing or whatever, but having it be the default just seems really easy to abuse.

Swim checks aren't usually that difficult, and getting an extra bonus to Grapple checks can,be quite meaningful.

I think it's fine where it is really.

>put nothing in swimming
>drown to death

it was based on nonsense psycology theory that was going on in the 70s, also to make wise holy men and intelegent mages seperate

what game is this?

Elona. You better be prepared to dump a lot of time into it if you start playing.

>Put points into swimming
>can't Climb down cliff, fall and die
>can't Jump a short gap, fall and die
>can't Spot a pit trap, fall and die

Having 50 different skills is fine if you dont have a system where players can start with 2 or 3 at best.

Ahh i thought it looked familier i played that years ago but never really got anywhere

>have an athletics skill
>athletics skill breaks down into subskill
>putting 1 point or whatever gives you basic proficiency in all those skills
>can increase all the skills up to a cap for a high cost OR individually increase sub skills for halfcost

EX, Raising a macroskill each level increases proficiency with all those skills, but increase exponentially in cost each time. 1 points for first level, 2 points for 2nd, 4 points for 3rd, 8 points for 4th, 16 for 5th

Alternatively, you can just increase a single sub skill rank for half cost. 1 point for 2nd lvl swimming, 2 points for 3rd, 4 points for 4th, and 8 points for 5th

With rank 1 being "Has heard about how to do a thing"

Rank 2 being "has done a thing once or twice"

Rank 3 being "Is practiced at doing a thing"

Rank 4 being "Highly proficient at doing a thing"

And rank 5 being "Expert/professional" at doing a thing

maybe a special rank six if you want to be a "peak human" autist but you can only do it for an individual sub skill and it costs the same as a macro, so lvl 6 running is 32 points

have exp apply directly.

Rank 1 is 2 EXP
Rank 2 is 4
Rank 3 is 16
Rank 4 is 32
Rank 5 is 64
Rank 6* is 128

>Unless you get a prescription nobody practices to "get better at seeing"
Horseshit. Situational awareness is definitely something that people can and do train in the real world, and is covered by all those skills.

What's what's worse? Hard-core GURP like games where you need to be trained in your unrinaion before you can take a piss, or rules lite super generalist stuff?

situational awareness is still just perception though.

you can't spot something without perceiving it, you can't detect the exact location of something without perceiving it. Hearing and seeing is literally just perceiving. I feel like it should be separated, but not for your reasoning.

They should be separated because a player can lose an eye or an ear.

>GURPS like
You mean with defaults that mean you don't have to be trained in everything?

>They should be separated because a player can lose an eye or an ear.
>what is situational modifiers
"-3 to perception rolls involving hearing" isn't hard.

It is when your GM never tells you what the perception checks are for, so you say "22", he says "DC was 20, you hear orcs in -" and you have to say "SHIT 19 MAN TELL ME IT"S HEARING".

I usually do it like this:
Give me a perception roll.
>Hearing?
Nah.

This If your DM is the sort to use injury rules that can cause you to lose an eye or ear anyway, then he'll probably be able to at least roughly keep track of who is missing what to know that he should specify what type of perception it is.

Besides, having a general Perception skill means it can also apply to other senses outside of just seeing or hearing, and also means that you don't have a single skill that's arbitrarily broken up and therefore costs twice as much to increase.

Are there any systems where common sense is its own stat?

> with defaults way you don't have to be train in anything.

The default of the defaults (heh) are quite low when you remember it's a 3D6 bell curve. Do anything skil remotely specialist is going to be on the low end of success if you didn't have the skill for it.

You could just run GURPS ultralite without the customisation rules if you wanted to, but why would you choose a system based around modular customisation to begin with then?

Define "common sense".

In Shadowrun, Common Sense is actually an advantage you can take on Char gen. It lets you ask the DM if something is, in a general sense, a bad idea.

Common Sense
COST:3 KARMA
PREREQUISITES:NONE
RATING:NONE
SOURCE:SR5:RF
“Common sense is not so common” as they say. It’s nothing supernatural, just a keen sense of knowing when something is just a bad idea. Any time a character with this quality is about to do something the gamemaster deems foolish, the gamemaster must act as their proverbial inner voice of reason and issue a little warning. The gamemaster can only give a number of warnings per session equal to or less than the character’s Edge rating. After that, they’re on their own.

Also GURPS where it work more or less the same way.

>>play a fighter
Well, there's your mistake right there.

Honestly, for Eclipse Phase, splitting up Swimming and Climbing makes sense. They are edge-case skills in a system absolutely spoiled for skill points. There are times when you desperately want to know how to climb and how to swim, and those times will be extremely different.

That said, has a very valid point.

You would have a point, except that's explicitly either Survival or Investigation, depending on whether you are in the wilds or in a city.

You could do that better with situational modifiers, rather than separate skills. Skill starvation was much too widespread in 3.5.

While this is an interesting way of doing it, it works best in a dice pool system, like Iron Claw or Exalted.

It's a merit in Vampire. A player had it given to his character once. It did not help.

savage worlds sort of does this - raising a skill up to the relevant stats costs 1 point, raising above stat level costs 2 points. so you spend 3 points to raise agi to +3, 5 to raise acrobatics to +4.

Yeah I think Shadowrun does the same thing.

It makes sense but I'm not really fan of it, especially anything you're not automatically defaults to the absolute worst of d4-2 regardless of the stat.

Swimming is only a situational skill if you're a fat americuck who never leaves their bedroom.

Distinguishing between swimming ability and climbing ability and running ability is a situational thing.

>It's about fucking time they did that.

You mean what 4e did first, kiddo?

Well it's modern video game mentality. I shouldn't have to think and make choices between different options and my character shouldn't have any weak points I should just be able to click a button and do whatever I want even if that means my character is an Olympic level swimmer, climber and sprinter all at once because that's how it works.

keep going

Eh, I actually agree. I hate huge overbloated skill lists with literally everything you can be proficient in stuffed in there. 99%of players never gives a fuck about them anyway, they just focus on getting the combat skills and some actually often used utility, like lockpicking, sneaking or repair. Skill lists should just limit themselves to stuff which will presumably be used at least semi-often in the game and are important for adventurers in given setting. When it comes to everything else, whether a character can do it or not can be determined from their background and other stats.

In computer games it's ok, but on tabletop where the only processor is your easily distractable meaty bitz...

I liked how blue planet did it. Which was set on a appropriately Ocean planet appropriately enough.

Your attribute was the number d10s you could roll, while your skill rank was the numbers on the die which counted towardsas a success.

So having a high attribute but low skill in somethig would improve your over all odds of succes but not the quality.

Not really sure how the math scaled but it made sense to me.

>d&d
Ok hope you also prepare spells to get the rest of the party across, or to gain access to that submerged barge you're looking for. Good thing you picked all of those up, or ponied up a small fortune for the one time use options that are readily sold at children's scroll stand on every street corner.

Oh and
>pirate campaigns aren't a thing.

I almost agree with you. In more modern settings I'd totally agree with you. But d&d and the nebulous several centuries it can consider to be its time period, very few people knew how to swim. People drown all the time in deep puddles. Why not make reference to that and the dangers of water?

I've included optional swimming in every campaign I've ever run (not d&d admittedly), sometimes it saves a ton of time because the nearest bridge is a 2 day hike, sometimes it nabs you phat loot, and sometimes dredging up the bones of a murder victim and burring them is just way easier than bringing the killer to justice.

>This is why I'm glad D&D 5e folded climbing, jumping, and swimming together into a single Athletics skill.
Actually, that was 4e.

I used swimming a few times in my last campaign. Had to swim under a boat to avoid getting crushed.

I like godlike's use of multi skill perception. You have an attribute called sense, and skills for each sense mother fucking including taste.

Its a skill + attribute pool system though. So sense was generic human perception. Where individual sense skills represented being especially honed in one of those areas. You want your character to used to have been a Sommelier? Put some points in taste. Be one of those weirdos who vison bleeds into the high end of infrared? Sight. etc, etc.

Mind you its a supers system where if you crank your sense up high enough you can literally shoot bullets out of the air by sound alone. Which in my opinion is also a fucking plue.

Fuck you I literally had to train my depth perception as a child and I fucking hated every minute of it. Literal visits to the eye doctor's, constant daily exercises.

You have muscles in your eyes, and my right eye was fucking garbage. Still is, but I can only legally drive because of all of those otherwise lost hours.

4e and 5e had the same numbers of skills FYI. They pulled, Dungeonerring, Endurance and Streetwise and bright back Animal handing, Investigation and Performance.

The 4e DM screen even listed which of the old skills were covered by new skills.

Swimming is actually a very important skill.

t. Dutchman who lives right next to a river

Bringing back Animal Handling and Performance is a bit of a mistake imo. Too narrow, as skills.

Performance I can agree with you. Animal handling I don't. Really depends on how natury the campaign is obviously, but there is a pretty big difference between convincing a fellow person to do something, and training an animal to do something especially if it is wild. Language barrier combined with species barrier and all that.

I mean you could throw some penalties on a more generic skill, but what. Make getting rid of those penalties a druid only thing or a feat?

I'd have gone with 'Just use social skills' personally. D&D characters deal with language barrier + species barrier all the time. I mean, Blink Dogs are a thing among others and you wouldn't use Handle Animal for them despite being canines.

I dunno, having 'Social skills but for dumb things' feels a bit limited as a skill.

Animal Handling is worthless because unless you're a Ranger or a Druid, you're never going to use animal handling in a way that would actually make up for the costs of putting points into it.

Think about it, I could put my points into diplomacy and be on good terms with most sentient races, or I can put points into *maybe* convincing a wolf not to eat us while also fucking us over out of getting EXP from the encounter.

It's the sunder of CHA skills, even when it works as intended, you just end up fucking yourself over in the process.

What do you genuinely get out of a skill list larger than, say, FATE's?

>also fucking us over out of getting EXP from the encounter.
Oh is completing a challenge without killing it no longer worth exp in d&d? That used to be baked pretty hard into the rules last I played.

I remembered an anecdote that my mom told me about her roommate. This was the mid 80s in Moscow, and the roommate was going through some kind of training related to the KGB. Nothing super secret, so she would ask my mom for help. She would enter a room, look around for a few seconds, then leave. My mom would then move a few things and then tell her to come in. She was training herself to be able to memorize the exact details of a room and then be able to spot any changes. She seemed to get pretty good at it, from my mom's telling.

You can swim in Mountain Dew and Doritos

Hell originally you only got experience for finding gold.

Performance is there to justify the bard existing.

Animal handing was pointless, nature covered it pretty well. same goes with survival.