Logic_Ninja's page

LogicNinja it's fun how you are trying.

First off not everyone in the world will make the same amount of money:

Spell casters will make more as they can also sell spells which are (for them) a renewable resource.

Great, spellcasters, a tiny minority of people, can make money selling spells. I'm not sure how this is relevant. Everyone who is *plying a trade* still makes pretty much the same amount of money.

Also some people will have better stats, or better tools or both.

A few points of wisdom and some masterwork tools are a handful of points. When you're rolling a d20, having a +3 or +6 bonus doesn't actually impact your wages all that much.

"You can earn half your Profession check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work."
So someone rolling d20+5 (+1 stat, 1 rank, +3) gets an average of 16.5 gp a week, while someone rolling a whopping d20+11 (18 stat, 4 ranks, +3) gets an average of... 22.5 gp a week.

If a mediocre butcher (Mr. +5) is making 16.5 a week, don't you think a highly competent goldsmith (Mr. +11) should be making way, WAY more than 22.5 gp a week? And it's worse the other way around--what if the butcher is the one with the +11? Then he's actually making *more* money than the goldsmith! But if he rolls a 15 and the goldsmith rolls a 4, that's a week in which the mediocre butcher makes more money than the excellent goldsmith.
Who knew being a butcher was so lucrative?

Others won't have all the time needed each week to make the check.

Some people won't bother.

That's called "people who are not actually plying their trade". According to the rules, if you apply them to NPCs, a barrister and a butcher who are equally good at their trade make the same amount of money.

I actually went over a large part of this already because I had the time and it comes up so often.

The problem is -- you are expecting something other than what is actually modeled. If you look at what is modeled and not trying to expect it to be what you want you'll see the system works -- it's just not what you expected.

The Profession skill isn't modelling much at all beyond "you get some money for plying a trade". It's not intended to model that. If it was, then it would have, for example, distinctions for types of trades (so that high-paying, 'white-collar' jobs like jeweler, barrister, etc make more than menial labor jobs like 'farmer').

You've gone to great lengths to try to turn it into something that makes sense, but the same amount of effort could have created a neat little subsystem that makes far more sense.

The Profession skill literally models every single profession in the exact same way. It makes zero attempts to distinguish between them. If that doesn't tell you "high-level abstraction meant for handwaving things and influencing players, not used for any kind of detailed simulation", what *would* tell you that?

If you want a game that actually takes some amount of economics and such into account, I'm pretty sure GURPS has a splatbook for that. But the Profession skill does nothing of the sort, because the Profession skill isn't there to tell you how much each person in a village makes (the results will be nonsensical)--it's there so the player feels like their character is "really" a cook.

But they are not terrible at it. NPCs can make a living wage, the equipment costs make sense for the money NPCs can earn, even poor untrained characters can buy food and clothing. I don't care about NPCs making a living and hand wave it in my games. However, I enjoy discussions like these because I often find the rules are more robust than I thought they were.

They are absolutely terrible at it. We are talking about a world where being a better blacksmith makes you much more dangerous and harder to kill, where wizards make better blacksmiths than warriors, where getting feeble and senile makes you better.

We are talking about rules that mean you make the same amount of money as a scribe, a goldsmith, a lawyer, a brick-layer, a woodcutter, and a waiter.
If we're using Profession rules for NPCs, every NPC of the same level makes about the same amount of money regardless of their status or profession. This is obviously ludicrous.

As far as rationalization, that is what the whole game is about. Roll a bad stealth check? Well why did that happen? Maybe you were distracted because AM Barbarian called you weak. Maybe the floor is strewn with extra crunchy leaves.

Miss a to hit roll? How did that work for your character? The nimble goblin ducks under your massive blow, you can see the hair on his head move from the whoosh of your massive hammer....

The purpose of game rules is, essentially, to restrict the narrative space. I certainly agree, a single attack roll or skill check is an abstraction. But in the case of attack rolls or stealth checks, you are getting something out of that rationalization--you're getting a narrative. Explaining why this guy makes X gp even though it doesn't make any sense is just an exercise in rationalization, it doesn't contribute to the narrative.

When a rule is giving you a weird narrative restriction, you have two options: bend the narrative to the rule, or bend the rule to the narrative. I don't know why you feel that bending the narrative to the rule is better in the case of Old STR 2 to 6 Guy Working As A Woodcutter/Blacksmith/Whatever.

profession Check

You can earn half your Profession check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work. You know how to use the tools of your trade, how to perform the profession's daily tasks, how to supervise helpers, and how to handle common problems.

seems like they are using it EXACTLY for the purpose it was written

The rule is there so players can feel like their character is "really" a [profession], and as a quick way to handwave, in a highly abstract and non-simulationist way, how much money the PC gets for going "I work as [profession] when we're in town."

Unless, of course, you think that the game designers *wanted* to create a world where nothing matters as to how much money you make except what level you are and how wise you are, and where everyone makes roughly the same amount of money--lawyers, coopers, guardsmen, jewelers.

You know, I started out looking to respond to each of MendedWall12's and LogicNinja's, but really, your arguments boil down to: "This is stupid and you should all feel bad for playing the game in a way that I don't care for and using rules, so I'll mock you." Allow me a rebuttal with an equal amount of logic: "No, and both of you should feel bad for telling people they are having bad/wrong fun."

No, my arguments boil down to this is not what the profession (or attack/damage) rules are *for*, and using them for this does not confer any real advantage over making something up or making an arbitrary roll.

If what really makes the game fun for you is rolling to see how much the Profession skill says an NPC makes, then go ahead--I'm not going to tell you it's bad, wrong fun.

Fun is fun. It's the question, "how can anyone in the game world chop wood if the rules say they can't beat a tree's Hardness?", that's bad.

LogicNinja wrote:

The rules have a hard enough time working when used for their intended purpose.

Sorry, you just made me not want to read any of your other posts right there. Good job.

That's not a dig at PF, that's true of RPG rules in general. Any rules-heavy RPG has a ton of unforeseen rules interaction, abstractions that you have to work with, etc.

Even if it was a dig at PF, though, man, that'd be getting pretty huffy over a slight to your favorite pretend elfgame.

That being said, I am left with another question:

If the Profession skill rules are not intended to tell us how much money folks makes then, uhm, what are they intended for?

The Profession rules have two basic purposes.

One is to let players feel like their character is "really" a woodcutter, chef, etc. Yes, you could just write it down on the character sheet, but some players don't feel like it's "real" if they haven't spent any character points on it. (I personally find this view pretty limiting, but YMMV.)
These players can feel like their character is a chef because it says "Profession(Chef) - 10" on the sheet, they can say "I make money by being a chef!" when the PCs are in town, and there's a connection between the size of insignificant sum of money they make and how much they sunk into the skill, which makes them feel like putting ranks in the skill makes the character a "better" chef, even though Profession has nothing to do with how good you are at doing something, just how much money you make.

The other purpose is to provide an easy, handwaved answer when a player asks "I work as a chef while we're in town, how much money do I make?" You handwave the entire affair and get a number, instead of delving into detail. The purpose of the rule is to *skip over* the working-as-a-chef.
Note that I said "player" here. The rule is there to handwave a player action ("I make money as a chef") and to make the player feel like the character is "really" a chef.
The rule is *not* there to simulate an economy or tell you how good an NPC is at something. If it was, the rule would look pretty different.

I don't follow the complaint.

The complaint is that people think that the "RAW" is somehow supposed to be able to be used to determine what a random peasant makes, or if he can chop wood. It's not. This is quite literally not the purpose of the rules. The rules have a hard enough time working when used for their intended purpose; trying to use them to figure out what a woodcutter can and can't cut down is asking them to do something they're neither intended nor built to do, and for no good reason.

Are you saying that using combat rules IS a more appropriate ruleset for a woodcutter's mundane activity than profession skill check? O.o

I'm saying neither is at all appropriate, and that the desire to use either of them to determine how much the woodcutter makes is bad and makes gaming worse, not better. Using a "Profession skill" to determine this isn't any better than using the combat rules, and can even be worse. The Profession skill isn't actually there to simulate an economy or determine how much random NPCs make. It's an extremely abstract skill that doesn't actually make much sense if you try to use it for anything other than its intended purpose.

Jo, the game rules are not the physics of the game world. They are not the absolute arbiter of everything that happens or can happen. This is not a super-detailed simulation run by a computer, these are highly, highly abstract RPG rules.

There is no conceivable circumstance in which you should be using the game rules to determine if and how an NPC woodcutter chops wood, because this is simply not what those rules are *for*.

What I'm trying to say is, your question is bad and you should feel bad.

I wanted a second opinion though. I know every campaign is different, and I kind of miss having second opinions like Echodork and Dictum Mortuum and especially LogicNinja.

Today's your lucky day!

Here's my second opinion: you're playing a f~~!ing Wizard in a version of D&D 3.5. Suck up not being *quite* as game-wreckingly powerful as, stop complaining about how there are fewer completely unbalanced spells, and start having fun with spells that don't auto-win the encounter for you.

As a bonus, you might even want to avoid stocking up on all the entire-type-of-problem nullifying utility spells, to give the rest of your party a chance to do stuff!

Christ, dude, that post says something about you, and what it says (that you can't have fun if you think that what you're playing isn't totally optimal) isn't good. You're already a 3.5 Wizard. That should be more than enough for you.

Edit: anyone who uses Magic Jar in a real game should never play tabletop RPGs again.