Skills should not be superpowers in D&D

[Swordslinger]

I'm suggesting that the stuff on my character sheet should take narrative control away from the DM when I have to take the time to roll dice or spend spells on it.

I generally don't think it's a good idea to have stuff that directly removes narrative control. That tends to just lead to stupid stories where things happen for no real reason.

If an NPC is convinced of something, the DM needs to know how he's convinced and why, otherwise it's impossible to roleplay those characters, because you have no idea what their motivation is.

Once you start saying that NPCs do stuff "just because", you've lost the whole essence of an RPG and might as well just play a board game where the gate guard is a faceless flavorless placing piece on a board.

[tussock]

I'm suggesting that the stuff on my character sheet should take narrative control away from the DM when I have to take the time to roll dice or spend spells on it.

I generally don't think it's a good idea to have stuff that directly removes narrative control. That tends to just lead to stupid stories where things happen for no real reason.

No, it doesn't. You are wrong. Having any system of player input makes the outcomes of the scene change based on that player input. When that happens, you make shit up to explain it, or you don't bother and save yourself for more important scenes.

'S like, if the Ogre misses me with his club a couple times, we can take the time to carefully explain that by making shit up, or we can get on with playing some D&D. Same with the Guards! They let us in, they don't let us in, we can make shit up to explain that or we can get on with playing some D&D.

If an NPC is convinced of something, the DM needs to know how he's convinced and why, otherwise it's impossible to roleplay those characters, because you have no idea what their motivation is.

At some point, someone has to decide what the NPC's motivation is, if it is important enough to be portrayed (or funny at the time, whatever). No reason that can't be the PC after he makes his skill check. That's part of what narrative control's about for the folk who like that sort of thing.

Once you start saying that NPCs do stuff "just because", you've lost the whole essence of an RPG and might as well just play a board game where the gate guard is a faceless flavorless placing piece on a board.

Seriously? Next thing you know the 30 kobolds the PCs killed on their first day out didn't seem to have any more motivation that whatever someone made up for them to have at the time. Almost like someone had to use their imagination to narrate the scene or something.

[Ancient History]

I'm okay with skills-as-superpowers, under the right conditions - the main issue with D&D3.+ was that they went absolutely bugfuck insane.

For example, there was the Research feat. This basically opened up new uses for the Knowledge skill, and that was good - although why research wasn't a default part of Knowledge skills, we'll never know - but it wasn't really good enough to be a feat. It was a good idea crippled by the limits of the system, where characters were starving for feats.

It was the same with the Augmented Alchemy feat. Now, Epic-level skill checks are silly and broken, but I sort of like the idea that at the point where PCs are supposed to be throwing down with demigods, they could actually do something worthwhile with 20 ranks in Weaving or whatever. Augmented Alchemy addressed an actual issue - how to make the alchemical goodies that PCs had relied on as lower-level characters for an edge still viable at higher levels. The problem is, again, you shouldn't need a feat for this - and it should be available much, much sooner. By the time you hit 15th level, tanglefoot bags aren't even a fucking nuisance and liquid fire is something barbarians gargle with in the morning.

But if the feats to enhance and expand skills were too expensive, the class abilities that should have been used to enhance skills generally sucked balls. Case in point, the Exemplar prestige class from Complete Adventurer, a 10-level prestige class with about two half-decent abilities.

[Swordslinger]

No, it doesn't. You are wrong. Having any system of player input makes the outcomes of the scene change based on that player input. When that happens, you make shit up to explain it, or you don't bother and save yourself for more important scenes.

For most actions you already have a description. If a player breaks through a door with a strength check, well he forced his way in. A rogue using open locks picked the lock. No further explanation is really required.

Social encounters just don't work that way. Your character doesn't walk up and rewire the king's brain to make him more agreeable, he says something. And what he says is important to the story. If you're going to skip that very important aspect, you might as well not have social encounters at all and stick to hack and slash.

Any movie with social or political characters has the characters talk. I can just imagine if you stripped out all the talking out of Game of Thrones and just turned it into a mindless series of battles. It'd suck.

At some point, someone has to decide what the NPC's motivation is, if it is important enough to be portrayed (or funny at the time, whatever). No reason that can't be the PC after he makes his skill check. That's part of what narrative control's about for the folk who like that sort of thing.

Any good DM knows the NPCs motivation, even if that's as simple as "just trying to do his job."

And having the PC do it just doesn't work well most of the time in any kind of complicated political setup where NPCs may have hidden motivations the PC doesn't know about. This is why it's equally important that what the PC says/proposes is noted. The situation may not be as simple as it appears. Playing on the loyalty of a duke who wants to overthrow the king probably isn't the most successful tactic.

[K]

If you tried to collapse the skills down to the minimum, there would be like four skills, then crafts and knowledges.

Skills seemed to be originally designed as a pool of resources for low level characters to use that were then expanded on, but the design clearly never had high-level applications in mind.

I mean, the system already has weirdness where physically weak characters can be master Climbers and CHA can be your dumpstat and you are still the party face.

I'd probably replace the whole system with a separate track of feats like the skill trick system.

[hogarth]

If you tried to collapse the skills down to the minimum, there would be like four skills, then crafts and knowledges.

See, that's one reason why I'm against the idea that skills should be awesome. Because then you end up with four awesome skills, each of which is an agglomeration of a dozen or more not-terribly-useful skills, some of which scale at high levels and some of which don't.

From an aesthetic standpoint, I don't like the idea that being the world's best mountain climber makes you an Olympic level swimmer. I'd rather just let skills be cheap enough that you can be both an expert mountain climber and an expert swimmer by level 3 or 5, and then you can go on with the rest of your life (because nobody really cares too much about climbing or swimming anyways).

[CatharzGodfoot]

In 3e, there are three kinds of skills: skills that should be Professions, skills that should be class abilities, and skills that should be something else entirely (e.g. saving throws).

[K]

From an aesthetic standpoint, I don't like the idea that being the world's best mountain climber makes you an Olympic level swimmer. I'd rather just let skills be cheap enough that you can be both an expert mountain climber and an expert swimmer by level 3 or 5, and then you can go on with the rest of your life (because nobody really cares too much about climbing or swimming anyways).

Honestly, you can learn everything you need to know about swimming and mountain climbing with a pamphlet and about a week of practice. Everything else is physical conditioning which is totally applicable to other things, and the fact that DnD tries to make it a skill is pretty insulting to people who have actual skills.

[tussock]

No, it doesn't. You are wrong. Having any system of player input makes the outcomes of the scene change based on that player input. When that happens, you make shit up to explain it, or you don't bother and save yourself for more important scenes.

For most actions you already have a description. If a player breaks through a door with a strength check, well he forced his way in. A rogue using open locks picked the lock. No further explanation is really required.

No explanation is really required? Sure, usually. Want to re-close the door? So, did the hinges tear, the wood part, the catch break, what sort of catch was it anyway, did I break the bar or it's seat, is the frame intact, ...? See, all of that might be important in some scene, same for the lock, we just don't normally bother because it's quicker and more fun to abstract it all, roll a die, and get on with playing D&D.

"Break it open, go through, close it again."
"Can't close it, it's broken."
:skill: "I figure something out and close it anyway."
"It'll be easier for them to break."
:skill: "I take a moment to secure it, now it's harder."

Maybe he jammed some loose boards in the hinges. Who cares, let's play some D&D already, the important thing is the run, not the door.

Social encounters just don't work that way. Your character doesn't walk up and rewire the king's brain to make him more agreeable, he says something.

Maybe, or maybe it's just not important enough to break out the teen angst for and we roll some dice and get on with playing D&D. Do you haggle with every merchant? No? Huzzah! You're using abstraction to get on with the game!

And what he says is important to the story.

In the same way that exactly how the door failed when broken open might be important to the story of how you close the door again before the endless horde of Illithid get there, but you can still abstract that, roll some dice, and get on with playing D&D.

If you're going to skip that very important aspect, you might as well not have social encounters at all and stick to hack and slash.

Seriously? People do that here? I'm having badwrong fun am I? Guess how traps used to work sonny: the DM would describe the room, the players would have to guess where a trap was based on vague clues, and would then describe in detail how they might try and disable or bypass it. The DM would judge their actions as either successful or not based on how he secretly thought the trap worked.
There's still people out there who think that's the one true way to run traps, and all us people who roll dice are totally missing out by making traps into a boring dice game. "May as well not have traps at all and stick to hack and slash" would be a fair paraphrase. Probably true if you want the trap to be a big deal, but they don't have to be a big deal every single time, or even more than a couple times a year.

Any movie with social or political characters has the characters talk.

Oh, fuck off. Any movie with sword fights has actors swinging swords in a pre-determined sequence for a set outcome. Meanwhile, D&D.

:snip:
Seriously. The "motivation" of most NPCs is about as important as exactly which way the door broke. What matters is what they're going to do to the PCs in this scene, and it's nice if the players can have an effect on that, without needing to read the DM's mind.

If nothing else, because human beings are really fucking terrible at reading minds. It being impossible. You either give them some big clues with your speech and body language and they play 20 questions with it (snore!), or it's just so much random noise that arbitrarily fucks them now and then.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Honestly, you can learn everything you need to know about swimming and mountain climbing with a pamphlet and about a week of practice.

My father is a world champion swimmer, and would disagree with that statement.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I figured that I should elaborate on my post above, so here's a 'non-heroic' skill system:

Disable Device, Jump, Open Lock, Spellcraft, Tumble, and Use Magic Device are all class features belonging to classes that have them as class skills. Bonus equals class level, and multiple classes stack.

Bluff, Hide, Intimidate, Move Silently, and Sleight of Hand are all class abilities that set save DCs, which are equal to 10 + level/2 + relevant attribute.

Listen, Search, Sense Motive, and Spot are all saving throws. Classes with them as class skills get good saves, others get bad.

Balance checks are now reflex saves. Concentration checks are now will saves.

Everything else is a profession which comes in two ranks: Trained and Expert. If needed for checks, Trained is 4+attribute and Expert is 8+attribute. An 'easy' check is DC 5, a 'tough' check is DC 10, a 'challenging' check is DC 15, a 'heroic' check is DC 20, and an 'impossible' check is DC 25. Checks, however, should be used sparingly.

Climb and Swim as movement types still exist. The +8 bonus that characters with the relevant movement type get is from automatically being Experts.

Anything too awesome to be gained from a profession check should be part of a class ability or feat.

[K]

Honestly, you can learn everything you need to know about swimming and mountain climbing with a pamphlet and about a week of practice.

My father is a world champion swimmer, and would disagree with that statement.

I'm sure he would.

I'm also sure that if you handed him a pamphlet on mountain climbing and some equipment and then came back in a week, he'd be a pretty good mountain climber.

Athletes have this entire mythology built around activities that require physical conditioning where they pretend that there is some mental component to it as well because it would be super depressing to spend ten years in physical conditioning and then have no one have a reason to respect you when age finally takes your ability from you.

By the same token, academics do the same by pretending that talent has to do with being smart instead of mental conditioning. This is why we have Oscar movies about "geniuses" that can perform wicked hard piano compositions even though every sixteen year old at Julliard studying piano can perform the same pieces.

Being truthful about what can be taught and what can't be taught is really hard for people.

[Lago PARANOIA]

My father is a world champion swimmer, and would disagree with that statement.

Yeah, and what's the gap in ability between him and a non-Olympic but still practiced swimmer in top shape? Probably not that huge. In top-tier competitions a 15% relative advantage over the competition is utterly dominating but in D&D-land that's seriously only like a 2 or 3 point advantage on the d20 roll at BEST.

In the real world, when you narrow the window for achievement to be a little past 'peak human' those advantages a human being can get from practicing swimming every day of their life is overwhelming, but when you stretch the window to a world where sea giants are considered mid-level critters, well, it's pretty obvious that skills--at least envisioned in the way we do with the 'real' world as a comparison--just plain don't matter as much as phlebtonium.

[Swordslinger]

No explanation is really required? Sure, usually. Want to re-close the door? So, did the hinges tear, the wood part, the catch break, what sort of catch was it anyway, did I break the bar or it's seat, is the frame intact, ...? See, all of that might be important in some scene, same for the lock, we just don't normally bother because it's quicker and more fun to abstract it all, roll a die, and get on with playing D&D.

Speak for yourself. I don't find it to be more fun to abstract everything. Eventually if the game gets too abstract it loses any actual story value. If I can't even imagine what the ingame action looks like, the game is no longer an RPG and has just become a board game.

There's no real abstraction in breaking a door, only DM judgment. If he wants to say you forcing the door open damaged the lock and made it so you can't secure it anymore (totally reasonable) he could. In any case, we know what it looks like, a guy pitting physical might against the door, and we know what the end result of that might be. And that makes sense, because wood may break apart when forcefully kicked or rammed.

Maybe he jammed some loose boards in the hinges. Who cares, let's play some D&D already, the important thing is the run, not the door.

I care. I want to get a mental picture of what he's done to the door. When enemy soldiers come in, can they realize the door's been modified? Does it look good as new? Does it look broken and repaired? I need to be able to answer those questions.

So yes, how he's repairing it is important.

Maybe, or maybe it's just not important enough to break out the teen angst for and we roll some dice and get on with playing D&D. Do you haggle with every merchant? No? Huzzah! You're using abstraction to get on with the game!

Nice Strawman bro. Yeah, because totally leaving off a dramatic encounter with the king is the exactly same fucking thing as leaving out a trivial scene where the protagonist buys a pack of cigarettes.

When you think that way, I can see why your logic is so flawed.

Seriously. The "motivation" of most NPCs is about as important as exactly which way the door broke. What matters is what they're going to do to the PCs in this scene, and it's nice if the players can have an effect on that, without needing to read the DM's mind.

Terrible storytelling. Apparently your NPCs never do anything off camera and sit in a castle 24/7 waiting for the PCs to arrive because they're totally devoid of personality, character or motivations. Your PCs are apparently low creativity people who just want to fast forward anything that involves them doing real roleplaying like talking in character or trying to figure out the gameworld's denizens. Sounds like you're really catering to the lowest common denominator.

Needless to say, your game isn't one I'd ever want to play in and lets leave it at that.

[tussock]

Terrible storytelling.

The story is what happens when we play, not something I make up beforehand. I'm not reading a book, I'm playing an RPG. Harpies randomly turn up and randomly side with the bandits you're fighting? Woot! Guess who's got an alliance, and where half the missing taxes have been going. Story ho!

Apparently your NPCs never do anything off camera and sit in a castle 24/7 waiting for the PCs to arrive because they're totally devoid of personality, character or motivations.

I don't give a fuck what happens off screen until it affects the PCs, whereapon the players get to have input. It's just that simple. There are, after all, billions of things happening off screen that the PCs will never interact with every week.

Your PCs are apparently low creativity people who just want to fast forward anything that involves them doing real roleplaying like talking in character or trying to figure out the gameworld's denizens.

Ah, the No True Scotsman defense in all it's glory. Funny thing is, you're the one who doesn't trust your players to narrate some sense into however the scene's turning out. You flat out declaring that no one could possibly give an NPC some sensible motivation at the drop of a die.

Your dice rolls conform to secret NPC motivations, my NPC motivations conform to the dice rolls. It's not the end of the world either way, even if you are an idiot.

[hogarth]

My father is a world champion swimmer, and would disagree with that statement.

Yeah, and what's the gap in ability between him and a non-Olympic but still practiced swimmer in top shape? Probably not that huge. In top-tier competitions a 15% relative advantage over the competition is utterly dominating but in D&D-land that's seriously only like a 2 or 3 point advantage on the d20 roll at BEST.

That's why I'm saying that skills should peak out early and often.

Next up: K points out how a top historian can become a top physicist with a pamphlet and a week of practice.

[Ancient History]

I think a distinction needs to be made between "real world" skills and "fantasy" skills. In the real world, the upper limit to any particular ability is capped by the physical limits of the human body and the amount of time and effort a person puts into it. In fantasy, those limits don't exist. So you can have the weaver Arachne that can beat a goddess at sewing, or a violinist that can outplay the devil, or warrior monk who can ring a bell at twenty paces.

So whether or not skills are superpowers is a function of the type of game/campaign you're playing. If it's a high fantasy campaign, skills should probably scale with other abilities so that they remain relevant. In a gritty campaign, skills should be very limited, making the use of even low-level powers that much more exciting. In a low- or mid-level campaign, epic skills might make a good substitute for actual magic or powers.

[Swordslinger]

Ah, the No True Scotsman defense in all it's glory. Funny thing is, you're the one who doesn't trust your players to narrate some sense into however the scene's turning out. You flat out declaring that no one could possibly give an NPC some sensible motivation at the drop of a die.

I don't need a PC to "give" my NPCs motivation. They already have motivation because I try to make actual characters in a fantasy world instead of faceless playing pieces on a board.

If you're too terrible of a DM to actually think of up motivations and make quality NPCs, I can see why you'd use the system you do. With your system, when your story sucks ass, you can blame the dice or the players. I get it bro. It's Obama politics: give the other side everything they want, and then whine that it was their fault when things go to hell.

But lets not pretend it's actually conducive to a good game.

[RobbyPants]

Next up: K points out how a top historian can become a top physicist with a pamphlet and a week of practice.

There's probably a bit of difference between a field that has a bit of mental skill and a ton of physical skill required and a field that has a ton of mental skill required.

[souran]

I'm also sure that if you handed him a pamphlet on mountain climbing and some equipment and then came back in a week, he'd be a pretty good mountain climber.

Athletes have this entire mythology built around activities that require physical conditioning where they pretend that there is some mental component to it as well because it would be super depressing to spend ten years in physical conditioning and then have no one have a reason to respect you when age finally takes your ability from you.

By the same token, academics do the same by pretending that talent has to do with being smart instead of mental conditioning. This is why we have Oscar movies about "geniuses" that can perform wicked hard piano compositions even though every sixteen year old at Julliard studying piano can perform the same pieces.

Being truthful about what can be taught and what can't be taught is really hard for people.

Wow, this is probably the biggest swath of bullshit you have ever written on this site and that really saying somthing.

This statement is false, its is proven false by doctors, psychologists, and literally thousands of atheles who are exceptional at one sport and terrible at others.

This is not to say that physicality doesn't count. It counts for quite a bit. Having your couch patato buddies try and play pickup basketball against a bunch of football players or a baseball teams infielders would probably result in a brutal beatdown.

However, there are skillsets that go along with using your body in athletic ways. Soldiers, baseball players, football players, soccer players, basketball players, and swimmers all have different body types. They all train for different kinds of agility.

The real issue is how LONG it takes to aquire skillsets.

You can pick up "the basics" of most kinds of skills (be it whatever they are) with about the 40 hours of practice K is talking about. However, knowledge of the basics doesn't even mena a person performs a task better than a person with 1 to 2 hours of training!. It just means that they know why things are done a certain way.

To get to where a person can reliably perform a task better than a person who is just learning the task takes about 100 hours of practice. To get to where a person is "proficient" takes between 4-7 years of constant practice (usually assumed to be at least an hour a day every day for that time periord or between 1500-2500 HOURS of practice). To get to the level of an olympian requires about 10k HOURS of practice.

By K's theory there should be lots of cross sport atheltes in figure skating and gynastics. They require similar builds, levels of atheleticism, and the peak body type comes at basically the same age.

However there are very few because aquiring the companion skillset to be top tier in both sports would require that they forgo something like school or sleep which are not allowed/feasible for a 15 year old human being.


The end result of this is that it is almost impossible to "out train" a person with high atheletic/physical ability. Unless you have a huge time advantage its just not going to happen. On the other hand, it also means that a good athelte trying to play in a different sport of setting is not going to be abile to "get up to speed" in a week. Hell in some sports with highly specilized roles switching postions within a sport is considered extremly difficult and a possibly ruinous venture (left and right tackle, guards trying to become centers, baseplayers moving from the outfield to the infield or vise-versa.)

So if you gave the expert swimmer a week and say a person whose hobby is rpgs a week to become mountain climbers then yes bet on the swimmer. But that won't mean that the swimmer is a "good" mountian climber.

[Kaelik]

souran, learn to read.

K did not say that a week would result in an Olympic Mountain Climber. He said it would result in a better than average mountain climber. This is true. Yes, to get from signficantly better than the average person to Olympic level takes a lot of work. Great, but the point is that Olympic swimmers beat non Olympic but competent swimmers by seconds. The thing where being 5% better than someone at baseball means you can make millions of dollars and they have to work at an office is great and all, but has no bearing on the fact that the difference between me and minor league baseball players is several hundred times greater than the difference between minor league players and major league players.

Lots of good figure skaters could become better than average gymnasts with very little work. They won't do it because there is no real benefit in becoming a better than average gymnast.

[K]

I'm also sure that if you handed him a pamphlet on mountain climbing and some equipment and then came back in a week, he'd be a pretty good mountain climber.

Athletes have this entire mythology built around activities that require physical conditioning where they pretend that there is some mental component to it as well because it would be super depressing to spend ten years in physical conditioning and then have no one have a reason to respect you when age finally takes your ability from you.

By the same token, academics do the same by pretending that talent has to do with being smart instead of mental conditioning. This is why we have Oscar movies about "geniuses" that can perform wicked hard piano compositions even though every sixteen year old at Julliard studying piano can perform the same pieces.

Being truthful about what can be taught and what can't be taught is really hard for people.

Wow, this is probably the biggest swath of bullshit you have ever written on this site and that really saying somthing.

This statement is false, its is proven false by doctors, psychologists, and literally thousands of atheles who are exceptional at one sport and terrible at others.

Actually, it isn't. Physical conditioning plays such an overwhelming part of athleticism that the simple fact is that if skill played a huge part there would be cross-sport athletes since the required time to master a new skill is well within the life of any person.

It may take 10,000 hours of physical conditioning to reach the peak body type for a sport, but that doesn't mean that there is a mental component. That peak form also probably means you'll never reach the peak form for another sport because of simple biology (Olympic body builders can't become floor gymnasts). This differs from mental skills where a world-class physicist can spend 10,000 hours studying chemistry and also become a world-class chemist (although academics ascribe the myth of the genius where talent and not time spent makes one good at a discipline).

Certainly, there are some sports where there is more mental conditioning. Baseball has had some really old guys playing, but that's a sport where you can get someone else to run for you. The oldest winning Olympic athletes also tend to be in sports like rifle shooting and archery, both things that don't require a peak physical form and rely heavily on skill.

That being said, we aren't trying to compete at a world level, but at a minimal competence for a task level. A Climbing skill check doesn't have the granularity to represent the guy who gets to the top of the wall two seconds faster because he is a peak physical type for wall climbing, but simply note that he got to the top of the wall at all. At that point, we don't need to start being hyper-realistic and say that the guy who can bend bars really well is also going to be generally shitty at swimming because both have different peak physical forms for the task at hand; all we care about is that two people can both get across a rough river.

DnD skills only represent mental skills. This is why a higher Int gets you more skill points, and why there is a second reason to not have Climb or Swim as a skill. It works perfectly for Knowledges, but poorly for everything else.

I mean, DnD wants you to believe that a guy with a Str of 1 who is heavily encumbered by his clothes can also be a master climber of mountains, and I think we need to call bullshit on that because even in a fantasy universe that's some tall tales nonsense. You might as well let people use Use Rope checks to lasso hurricanes at that point.

[Seerow]

I mean, DnD wants you to believe that a guy with a Str of 1 who is heavily encumbered by his clothes can also be a master climber of mountains, and I think we need to call bullshit on that because even in a fantasy universe that's some tall tales nonsense. You might as well let people use Use Rope checks to lasso hurricanes at that point.

Use Rope to lasso a hurricane actually sounds incredibly awesome.

[quanta]

There's probably a bit of difference between a field that has a bit of mental skill and a ton of physical skill required and a field that has a ton of mental skill required.

Have you looked at most historians? Most of them aren't doing much physical work. It's mostly mental work. Ditto for physicists. And it would probably take several years to train one to do the others job. Especially training a historian to be a physicist. Or a physicist to be a historian of law or something like that.

I'm sure he would.

I'm also sure that if you handed him a pamphlet on mountain climbing and some equipment and then came back in a week, he'd be a pretty good mountain climber.

Athletes have this entire mythology built around activities that require physical conditioning where they pretend that there is some mental component to it as well because it would be super depressing to spend ten years in physical conditioning and then have no one have a reason to respect you when age finally takes your ability from you.

By the same token, academics do the same by pretending that talent has to do with being smart instead of mental conditioning. This is why we have Oscar movies about "geniuses" that can perform wicked hard piano compositions even though every sixteen year old at Julliard studying piano can perform the same pieces.

Being truthful about what can be taught and what can't be taught is really hard for people.

It's not really abstract mental conditioning. The training is too specific, and a great deal of it is memorization. Most academics would take at least a few years to reach the basic proficiency of academics in another field outside their own.

A week to be above average is a ridiculous underestimate for sports too. People's hand-eye coordination and muscle memory doesn't develop that fast. On the other hand reaching very good physical condition strength and endurance wise doesn't really take that long if you're not doing much else (a few months or so can do it no problem). And it doesn't fucking matter if you "know" what Chris Sharma does when climbing since it's going to take years to develop the coordination and experience to actually imitate it well enough to be half as good as he is.

But really, skills in D&D should not resemble the real world. Because in the real world, great scientists and great athletes are largely great because they spent a very long time doing that thing. This is boring and largely prevents people from being great at more than one thing. In some sports, improvement has been squeezed down in the latter years of a decade of practice to granting only minimal absolute returns. In other things, this isn't as true (a world class climber (say bouldering) can succeed almost 100% of the time on things that even very good climbers can't do; if you tried to compare this to a d20 system based on rolling against set DCs, you'd be forced to conclude the best climbers are at least a whole die better than very good climbers).

edit:

although academics ascribe the myth of the genius where talent and not time spent makes one good at a discipline

This does not describe the opinion of any academics I've ever met.

[RobbyPants]

There's probably a bit of difference between a field that has a bit of mental skill and a ton of physical skill required and a field that has a ton of mental skill required.

Have you looked at most historians? Most of them aren't doing much physical work. It's mostly mental work. Ditto for physicists. And it would probably take several years to train one to do the others job. Especially training a historian to be a physicist. Or a physicist to be a historian of law or something like that.

That's not what I was getting at.

K was saying that certain sports can be mentally learned in a short time, but it's all the physical training that makes you seriously good. Then Hogarth compared that to purely mental activities. K didn't say you could learn any mental task in that point. It's a complete fucking strawman.