Re: Dead Worlds & D&D 3e

> Leroy Van Camp III wrote:
> >
> > It has nothing to do with roleplaying vs. rollplaying, dungeon
> > crawls vs. politics. I am not talking about skills such as Bluff,
> > Diplomacy or Sense Motive. For the most part, I am talking
> > about skills such as Profession (Farmer) and Knowledge (Art
> > History). The kind of skills that should exist in the background
> > of most people, regardless of whether they are adventurers or
> > commoners.

> "David Caveney wrote
> With all due respect, this is more due to the choices you and your
> characters make than the game. A character must choose whether to spend
> time learning climbing or diplomacy, sneaking around or reading books.
> Your character could easily learn these skills.

[I know this topic has really been beaten to death but I think this may be a sort of new angle?]

I'm certainly not a big expert on medieval history but my impression was
that D&D tech wise is basically late dark ages (+magic and
stuff). It was an extraordinary person (almost always a landed male from
the ruling class) who even knew anything about art, let
alone had enough breadth of knowledge  and who had traveled and read
(multiple languages) to have any kind of grasp of the changes
art had gone through, even in the recent past in his region. Obviously
with magic around (and the ensuing social interest in
research, sages, etc) you can have more access to that kind of scholarly
work, but I'd still think that things like Art History,
Diplomacy, (even swimming) would be so uncommon that the average fighter simply couldn't get access to them.

Obviously  in SJ the level of knowledge and so forth is much higher than
it would be in almost any given Crystal Sphere, but I do
think that one of the big, neat differences about fantasy is that the
world the characters inhabit is simpler in many ways than the
"real" world: they don't have to think about buying investing for
retirement, which political party they want to vote for, when
purchasing swords whether they should go to Jersey because it has lower
sales tax, etc. (OK this has definitely gotten off track).

Do you need to have a skill to "take 20"? If not then a character with
some natural ability could easily get a DC of 22 or 23. I
assume you can since the point of the rule seemed to be that someone
could just keep standing there and trying the same thing over
and over again until they rolled a 20 that anybody can get a character.
In other words if the great sage could glace at a painting and tell that
it was a lost masterpiece from 371 years ago in the Shuto
School then your character with Knowledge (art) 2 could spend five
minutes looking at the edges and the composition and figure out
most of the same stuff. Or am I missing something?

Graf


[I'd look this up but I don't, ah, actually own any D&D books anymore,
except stuff on my computer. I just couldn't afford to bring
them to Tokyo.]

Is there