Let him roll, for god's sake man, let him roll

Well, just thank me in the traditional manner- with co-authorship. I feel sort of paternal towards ye olde skill system, you know?

I'm going through the pdf adding little post-it notes, I'll send it back to you. Dave made some good points, but I'll wait for him to repost his comments here before replying.

Mainly, though, I wanted to disagree on one point Dave made. I think you *shouldn't* ask yourself what kind of game you want to play. You should ask yourself what kinds of games anyone would want to play. Obviously, not everyone enjoys any one style or type of game. That was made clear in the DiDTT firefight at the end of the first campaign.

...

Oh, okay, I get Paul's thing now. Yeah, it's kind of lame to have to collect all the boy scout merit badges- rope use, fire building, flag folding, smores cooking- just to survive in the wild.

I like Paul's discussion of kids playing and rolling to speak persuasively in front of the king or whatever. Gets back to what I mentioned above- although sure, good role-playing should never be trumped by a die roll, could you imagine Maggie and Peter playing a game with Mike, and Peter speaking with such passion and insight that a Rhetoric skill is unnecessary? The guy's like 5 or something. Let him roll.

(Actually, I still agree with Mark that skills like 'rhetoric' and 'persuasion' are the most problematic in the game, even more problematic than trying to figure out the damn spell system. Maybe there should be an optional class of skills, that the DM can allow at his discretion?)