Re: help interpreting Gleemax posts

On 22 Mar 2008 01:05:42 +1300, tussock <scrub@xxxxxxxxxxxx> scribed into
the ether:

Matt Frisch wrote:


They aren't just good at "adventuring skills", they're good at
EVERYTHING.

The skills /are/ highly focused around adventuring.

And yet, the characters are still good at things that have nothing to do
with it. Like...farming, calligraphy, bridge building, crop rotation,
astronomy.

A dumb-as-rocks half-orc fighter gets basic competence in "Knowledge:
Ancient History" just because he's a PC...uh yeah, ok...whatever. Sure
he'll take a penalty for being dumb as rocks, but in midlevels, he'll be
better at it than low level specialists, despite having even token
knowledge of that skill be completely out of character for him.

At 30th level he'll have +14 (Int 8). A 1st level strongly focused
character could have +15 (Int 20).

That's not "strongly focused", that's natural brilliance.

The young bookish type knows all the
ancient sigils by heart, but has little experience with the real thing.
The grizzled half-orc knows the most common sigils at a glance, because
he once had to find his way using hundreds of chipped and faded ones in
the lost city of the great desert.

Extremely contrived on the part of the orc. And nonsensical.

You don't learn to read latin by spending a couple weeks wandering the
ruins of Pompeii. Except in 4E.

I suppose it's a good thing they aren't trying to convert 4E into a
d20-like system that can be reasonably well ported to any environment,
otherwise you could throw your Forgotten Realms adventuring party into the
modern world where they'd all get jobs as expert computer programmers
within a week of arriving.
.

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