Did 4e make a good move by removing skills and forcing players to roleplay everything out of combat instead?

Did 4e make a good move by removing skills and forcing players to roleplay everything out of combat instead?

4e didn't remove skills

4e didn't remove skills, it streamlined them. But yeah, it was a fantastic move.

The 4e still list was an improvement, but IMO it still wasn't perfect. Still, it clearly understood that skills should exist in the context of what the game cares about and should be made roughly equally valuable options, rather than having bloated skill lists full of repetitive and overly specific skills.

>Dungeoneering
>Endurance
>Streetwise

Endurance is a bit overly specific, but it did at least give Con something to do. Streetwise and Dungeoneering are great, consolidating a selection of contextual skills into a simple package that says something about your character.

This.
It was great

Explain why nobody ever takes Dungeoneering or Streetwise then.

streetwise is because it was weirdly defined, dungeoneering is because they're stupid.

Because they are dumb.
Most interpersonal activities falls under streetwise, including most urban knowledge, and why wou'd you not have Dungeoneering?
Are you in a forgotten lost citadel? Streetwise.
You wanna know where the good bar is? Streetwise.
You wanna find the man with the hookup for that GOOD pipeweed? Streetwise?

...They don't? I've taken them and I've seen people take them all the time. What kind of weird groups have you been playing with?

4e didn't do anything wrong. It just wasn't the game that non-autistic numbercrunchers wanted.

I mean, I like 4e, and that game did a shitton of things wrong, especially on launch. It's just that most of the criticisms completely miss its actual flaws.

To be fair, it was fairly crunchy.
It's just that optimizing wasn't based on what your dude alone could do, but the group.
You couldn't be the Main Character by default in 4e.

Absolutely.

Dungeoneering is one of the more useful skills. What are you even talking about?

Look at this fag who doesn't even realize that Dungeoneering doesn't even cover all THAT much about dungeons.

What, you fight aberrations all the time?

Let's look at the PHB

>You have picked up knowledge and skills related to dungeoneering, including finding your way through dungeon complexes, navigating winding caverns, recognizing dungeon hazards, and foraging for food in the Underdark.
>If you have selected this skill as a trained skill, your knowledge represents formalized study or extensive experience, and you have a better chance of knowing esoteric information in this field. Also, those trained in the skill can identify creatures of the Far Realm that lair and hunt in dungeons and underground settings.
>Make a Dungeoneering check to remember a useful bit of knowledge about an underground environment or to recognize an underground hazard or clue.

It's basically a general skill for a huge variety of things taking place in dungeon style environments- Which, given the game is called D&D, you can expect to see quite a lot of. How is that not useful?

Yes

Aberrations are a common monster type and often have esoteric abilities that a good dungeoneering check is really helpful for

Basically every adventure in 4e's adventure books and Dungeon Mags hella sidelines Dungeoneering.

The adventures don't agree with you.

PEOPLE USED THOSE?

most (mechanical) traps can be disabled with either dungeoneering or thievery
It's not as vital as perception but it does give the cleric or other wis-focused class a way to disable or understand traps and hidden stuff in dungeons

I never run modules, so I wouldn't know.

This isn't what they did, but the end result was a big step forward. The destination -- backgrounds -- is fantastic.

4e also came up with backgrounds (which came in through Dragon and later appeared in the Forgotten Realms' Players Guide, the PHB2 and pretty much every book thereafter), later refined them as themes (first in Dark Sun, then as a recurring thing), and in the end what 5e and 13th Age have very much comes from those areas of 4e.

>most (mechanical) traps can be disabled with either dungeoneering or thievery
Horse shit.

You need a feat to disable traps with Dungeoneering.

4e just isn't a very good roleplaying game. It excels at one thing, ROLLplaying your WoW combat simulation.

2/10

Evidently not, given the flight to Pathfinder.

Given what I've seen of Pathfinder, I'm not sure this was a loss.

>Has all interaction skills as 3.x had
>Has skill challenges
>Has skill powers

Wut

It didn't remove skills... It created skill challenges which were a way to streamline non-combat scenes in game and provide them with structure the entire group could contribute to.
It's implementation was sloppy , the initial rules as written were broken and the way they were presented was confused. They should have framed them as ways to resolve entire 'scenes' rather than individual actions. But it was a step in the right direction which unfortunately 5E backtracked on.
Skills are a tricky one ingame. Simply 'roleplaying' skills is a bit of a shitty cop out. For one you might not be a thespian IRL but want to play a persuasive bard and the game shouldn't stop you anymore than you shouldn't have to be strong IRL to play a barbarian. If you leave it purely to 'RP' then a used carsalesmen IRL playing a charisma 5 fighter becomes the face of the group.
On the other hand the way systems like 3.5 resolved them relied on a single roll for the most part, so if the bard min-maxed to shit he could become a social god convincing random strangers to kill themselves or kings to hand over their treasury. This naturally led to GM's curbing the power but how far they did so was pretty much arbitrary and so a weird metagame developed of 'mother may I' in respects to social characters.
This approach also excluded non-social characters entirely from the scene , as one bad roll meant the inverse that the entire thing was fucked up.
The skill challenges 4E introduced actually fixed both these issues. You still have to roleplay in say a scene to treaty with a king, and infact every player is encouraged to take part. One bad roll wont ruin the entire thing and players can also simply roll 'secondary' rolls which don't contribute to a failure but do give other players bonuses on rolls. A character like a bard can get their spotlight time but wont be able to crush the entire encounter with one roll. ...I think I've convinced myself to implement this in my 5E games.

4e didn't remove skills

I only played 4th ed, and it actually did have skills.

Red box skills were actually rather elegant, much like 4e. You either had a skill, or you didn't; if you didn't, when you needed to use the skill you had to roll under half your stat instead of the full value.

Or you could just not come to the shitty threads, you fucking brainlet.

I took streetwise whenever I could. I miss it in 5e. So many times my group went to roll it and had to settle for investigation

Investigation/perception is such a weird split. I understand you want to reel in perception, and give INT something else to do, but seriously...

Isn't it just active/passive?

You can roll perception actively. I'm not sure when you'd use investigation passively, tho (seeing if you spot the hidden message in obvious graffiti without trying to?) .

INT has enough to do. They've been stuffing every knowledge skill under it, now even religion and nature. Perception is the only thing WIS is gonna have left. They should've just left dungeoneering and streetwise in.

The very act of rolling a skill can't be passive. What would even be the point of having a separate passive perception score if that were not the case? Investigation is a confused, redundant skill.

>They've been stuffing every knowledge skill under it, now even religion and nature.

Been like that for quite a while now.

>Perception is the only thing WIS is gonna have left.

That and Insight. Which also happen to be the most useful skills if you don1t want to run into ambushes and traps and die.

nature was WIS in 4e

This exactly. 4e was a great improvement from 3.5.