The year was 2008. The place, Indianpolis...GenCon. I was listening to a panel from WotC fielding questions from the audience concerning D&D 4E (some of them a bit hostile). The game had only been out a few short months at that time and the Edition Wars were not quite over yet.
When the line of questions got to me I asked of the panel if there was any intent of ever publishing any sort of powers that would aid in non-combat situations. Bill Slavicsek very staunchly held the opinion that between Utility Powers and Rituals everything outside of combat could be covered. Admittedly, I think Rituals are awesome. When we play 4E I tend to care far, far less about what gear I get than I do my ability to buy new Rituals. In that regard I think Slavicsek was right. But let's pretend for a second Utility Powers weren't primarily intended to let the character do stuff other than damage while in combat. Let's pretend that their original intent was for non-combat use. Now, welcome back to the real world.
I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the PHB 3 was going to have a new kind of power, the Skill Power. For the most part I think that Skill Powers are a large step forward in how the game mechanics approach non-combat situations. Does it fix the issues I currently have with the system? Not really. Initially I thought the system was awesome. Holding the opinion that I'd held for a long time, I felt that system wasn't a requirement for RP. 4E provided rules for combat and that's all it needed to do because we could RP without rules. True? Absolutely.
In the course of the Q&A Slavicsek responded to a question about crafting skills. It was his position that people don't really want crafting skills they just *think* they want crafting skills. If someone wants to be the best smith in the city just call him the best smith in the city, you don't need rules for that. If I were on top of it at that moment I would have asked him why we'd need rules to make someone the best fighter in the city. What does D&D provide the player that wants to player a character that has taken oaths of non-violence, that has never done anything in their life that would cause them to know anything resembling a power? Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking D&D as though it's impossible to RP using those rules. That system just makes certain demands of its players to tell certain kinds of stories.
Every system implies, by virtue of its rules, what kind of stories are going to be told with that system. It's also going to inform how the players are going to play their character. D&D doesn't reward, by virtue of its stated mechanics, playing your character honestly unless that is solely done in the realm of defeating challenges. This can be remedies with house rules (which my group has done) and this is fine. However, what you have after doing so is your character become more deadly and badass as a matter of playing out the things that are important to him. "We secured supplies supplies for the floundering orphanage we were raised in by making a special deal with a guy at the meat market." Congrats. Here, as a reward your Base Attack Bonus goes up or, depending on your flavor, you get a new daily combat power.
I'm doing an unfair amount of picking on D&D here. I think this is a drawback (or failure, pick your poison) of most, if not all class-based systems that I've seen. You are free to define your character as long as it's within a more strict set of parameters. And those parameters exist within words like fighter, wizard, rogue, and in doing so I think it's far easier to limit who a character is by giving a mechanical title to what that character is. What's the combat bonus to the penitent class, or the intellectual class?
And I'm sorry for the bad pun.
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