no ..just no
But why? What's the point of separating two very similar physical skills that get used much less than most others? Wouldn't it make it more valuable and worth the precious points?
I agree.
On a side note, maybe fly could be worked in there as well if not acrobatics? Fly is going to be a very limited use skill for a character, and I personally don't see the merit of having it separate for magical flight at all.
You can climb but not swim.
You can swim but not climb.
"Athletics" has a sporting connotation that I find inappropriate to those tasks.
toyrobots has my but why right up there. As skill stareved classes if they had 4 like they should have it would not be an issue.
Well said toyrobots and seekerofshadowlight! I completely oppose the idea of combining swim and climb into one skill. They are fundamentally different modes of movement.
Well, taste, listen, smell, touch, and spot are all different modes of perception, and they have been combined in one skill. Why different modes of movement would be different ?
Move silently and hide are different modes too. You can be good at move silently, but terrible at hiding. They have been combined too.
The choice is not more reallistic than climb and swim in one skill. It's really a game issue, reducing the number of skills.
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You can climb but not swim.
You can swim but not climb.
"Athletics" has a sporting connotation that I find inappropriate to those tasks.
All perfectly logical.
However, I personally can bandage a wound but not treat poisoning. Should we split up heal?
Also, "Stealth" has radar-absorbing connotations that I find inappropriate to ducking behind a water-butt ;)
Logic only gets us so far. Statistically, are people who are good climbers/swimmers more likely to be good swimmers/climbers than not?
There are other threads within which Swim is listed as the skill we would have bought if we had any skill points left. I'd be in favour of lumping it in with Climb, and possibly Fly as well, purely from an 'it will make the game more playable' aspect.
As to the name, Athletics or Gymnastics is as good as anything. Preferably something to keep it distinct conceptually from Acrobatics though - just for simplicity. 'Movement' would suck as a skill name - can anyone think of a good synonym?
Well, taste, listen, smell, touch, and spot are all different modes of perception, and they have been combined in one skill. Why different modes of movement would be different ?
Because both Spot and Listen are generally used to detect hidden movement and are thus usually rolled simultaneously. As such, having two skills mostly used for the same purpose and at the same time (just requiring two rolls instead of one) seemed to be redundant to the designers. The situations where Climb and Swim would be used simultaneously are rare at best.
Move silently and hide are different modes too. You can be good at move silently, but terrible at hiding. They have been combined too.
Again, there use has been simultaneous and for the same purpose in the majority of occassions only calling for two rolls to do the same task.
Climb and Swim are not even remotely conceptually similar. They are in fact entirely different skills just about the only similarity is that they both rely on physical strength. Here we have a game issue against combining Swim and Climb - if they were combined, there would be only one strength-based skill in the game. The game would be the poorer for it - I don't think it should be 1 ability score = 1 skill. At that level of consolidation, we might as well abandon skills altogether and have people able to advance their ability scores by adding skill points into them, but I prefer to have an actual skill system.
I am gonna go with roman on this. He made the points clearer and better then I would have
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I am gonna go with roman on this. He made the points clearer and better then I would have
Well put certainly, but I don't think that the fact that we would only end up with one skill using strength is a problem - there are lots of other uses of strength in the game. Unless the argument was that it removes the ability of strong characters to have 2 really high check bonuses, in which case it's probably a fighter and would benefit from the consolidation due to lack of skill points to start with.
The fact that listen and spot were often used together has nothing to do if they are related or not. Is a good climber a good swimmer too ? Not necessarily. Is a good listener a good spotter ? Not necessarily either.
You combine them not for realism but for easier ruling.
Attack rolls and damage rolls are almost always used together. Do they need to be combine for that reason ? Of course not.
Well perception is 5 wisdom skills that all do the same thing, Notice something.
Hide and move silently are almost always done at the same time, if ya was hiding it goes without saying ya was trying not to make any noise.
Swim and climb are never used at the same time....well i have never seen em used at once
And they kinda do the same thing....well almost kinda...sept ones is moving though water..and the other is well climbing stuff
I dunno if I'm completely sold on the whole "Athletics" deal. Sure, I can see how it would make some sense from a game design perspective, but I can't help but agree with everyone else who says "a good swimmer doesn't necessarily mean a good climber, or vice versa." Granted, Brock made some good points regarding the fact that Heal does many different things, but who would want to make a single skill out of Treat Poison or Stabilize or the like? People would be asking to consolidate the two... which makes more sense to me than consolidating Climb and Swim (which seem somewhat unrelated).
And yes, Perception does allow many different forms of "sight," and even I think that its a little cluttered sometimes, so I can pretty much agree that its odd to have a person good at spotting something far off be equally good at smelling something keen. But eh, the thing is, my players like it, and they don't like the idea of Athletics (and what they say for that stuff I let them take). But thats just may players take on it.
Now, from the perspective of designing a game, I wouldn't be too opposed to combining them if we've combined stuff like Perception and Athletics. I could see Jason adopting this if it got enough attention, but as is, it seems that there's a fair amount of people (such as myself) who would prefer not to have it made into one skill, and that alone may stop Jason from changing anything about it. But that shouldn't stop YOU. By all means house-rule it; if Jason adopts it, I probably will house-rule it the way it normally was.
Yeah, it could be tedious to have to figure out every creatures new Athletics score, but I would just try to do it to the ones you think will, you know, be climbing or swimming a lot. I wouldn't see that as too hard.
The way I see it, there's always gonna be people against Athletics and people for it. Acrobatics and Perception never caught as much flak, and that's one of the reasons why it's the way it is. My bet is that Jason will kinda leave this one be until something really comes up with it and let people rule it on their own accord.
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The way I see it, there's always gonna be people against Athletics and people for it. Acrobatics and Perception never caught as much flak, and that's one of the reasons why it's the way it is.
You know, I think that I'm going to let things be and see if I start seeing characters with poor swim scores who really should know how to swim well. If I do, and it's down to them not having enough skill points and something having to get dropped, it's time to house-rule that they can use their Climb score to represent their 'Physically strenuous movement' skill.
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take "jump" out of acrobatics (when did jumping become the weak point of strong characters???) and mesh it with climb to create "athletics" (i dont even care if you want to add swim, our group hardly uses it) then you have strength based movement actions and dex based ones
So that's what it feels like to take a clue-by-four to the back of the head. Nice idea.
Swim not getting used is the situation I'm trying to resolve. Nobody puts any points in, even when their character (by concept) would probably be a good swimmer, because they need the skill points elsewhere. Then you get to the point in the story where someone needs to dive in and swim through a flooded tunnel to do something, and everyone looks at the buff ranger and he says 'I never learned how to swim...'
For some reason I find taking Jump out of Acrobatics and combining it with Climb less offensive than combining Swim and Climb. I am guessing the reason is that Climb and Jump are at least somewhat interrelated and there are situations when the two are used together.
I guess it is also a question of 'flaw' archetypes. An inability to swim is a relatively common archetypical weakness that I would like to see preserved and not tied to skill at climbing or skill at other pursuits. Indeed, allegedly most people couldn't swim up until the relatively recent past and this supposedly even applied to the majority of sailors! (I don't know how much truth there is to that, but that's what I recall reading somewhere anyway) An inability to jump, on the other hand - well that's not much of an archetypical flaw. Sure, I could make a character with such a flaw if I wanted to be weird, but it would not feel very archetypical.
That's one of the reasons why Swim is sarcosanct for me. Removing this particular skill just breaks immersion for me in ways that manipulating/combining/removing/adding other skills does not.
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I wish there were a way to totally honor what was written in v.3.5 while still making a skills system set that does all the good things suggested here combined with the changes Jason has already made. Hmmmmnnn, perplexing....
A retro-fit is always the hardest type of design...
What if.... all the original v.3.5 skills were honored as-is, but PRPG used a new skill system of groupings i.e. categories of skills like some are suggesting for "athletics" and groupings already existing like "perception"?
Could we have just a handfull of skill groups/families?
It might be neat to assign individual points, or sets of 5 points to larger categories while preserving backward compatibility.
For example, a GM uses monster and npc skills as-written, but players have a players-option of Skill Groups. The original point system and skills remain, but the skill groups are limited to only a handful: Knowledges, Perceptions, Athletics, Stealth, Mechanics, etc.,....
Something like this wouldn't deviate too far from our d&d traditions of grouping types of skills by attributes that typically govern them.
Just my two cp.... thinking out loud.
Ease of 3.5 compatibility is an important requirement in my group's book.
Although the idea of skill groups is a nice one (the exact details of how these would work could be worked out relatively easily if the decision to adopt them were made), this is really not going to happen. Jason has stated that the current system is now set in stone. Discussion of modification of how each skill works is another matter, but the skill system itself is already immutable and indeed so is probably the current skill list (though this one is slightly less certain).
Even though this entire discussion is probably redundant, considering that the skill list is probably already finalized, there is, nevertheless, one more thing that I want to add.
Skills are not only for player characters, but are also used to build other creatures. As such, it is important that these other creatures also be taken into account in the design of the skill system. I for one don't want to see fish being the best climbers in the world! Unless, of course, they are some weird mountain fish or tree-living fish or something along those lines. By the same token squirells, monkeys, apes or mountain creatures also should not be the top swimmers in the world, unless there is a very good reason for them to be that way.
Yes, it would be possible to resolve this by not giving these creatures ranks in a unified Athletics skill and just giving them racial bonuses to the Swimming or Climbing part of Athletics only. Ultimately, though, it's just an added hassle and despite the appearances of fewer skills, it just makes the system more convoluted, rather than cleaner and more streamlined. Sometimes removing too much for the sake of simplicity adds additional complications, because what is simpler on the surface merely hides the complexity under another layer. This is such a case - retaining these two skills (Swim and Climb) actually makes the system more streamlined than combining them into an artificial entity and then being forced to distinguish between the two anyway.
In some ways, this is similar to the Fly skill controversy. Some people would like to see it disappear, because they consider it useless, considering that PCs don't fly very frequently. Well, PCs don't fly often, but various other creatures that PCs will encounter do fly a lot! The skill is useful for that purpose. Sure, it could be in the monster manual only, but I prefer to have the skills all in one place. Of course, Swim is different, as it can be used quite frequently if PCs come near any significant bodies of water (and in my campaigns at least, PCs tend to move around quite a bit and certainly do come across water - it is not considered a useless skill in my gaming groups).
Well perception is 5 wisdom skills that all do the same thing, Notice something.
Hide and move silently are almost always done at the same time, if ya was hiding it goes without saying ya was trying not to make any noise.
Swim and climb are never used at the same time....well i have never seen em used at once
And they kinda do the same thing....well almost kinda...sept ones is moving though water..and the other is well climbing stuff
I don't get the "they're not used at once, so they're different".
Both skills require some strength ability and moving your body. It's something you can learn equally in real world, (much more than being very good at smell/taste/touch/listen/spot, by the way).It's not because you can jump far that you can tightrope walk easily. It's really different too.
It's not because you can forge documents very well that you speak 10 or more languages and decipher many others.
These skills have been combined not for realism, but for some easiest game ruling and make them more interesting choices for PCs. Do we need to separate them again ?
It's exactly the same thing. Why should we make something in a way for some skills and in another for others ?
A merman might be really great at swimming, but he probably sucks at climbing. With a consolidated Athletics skill, he'd be great at both, thus losing some of the realism that once existed.
take "jump" out of acrobatics (when did jumping become the weak point of strong characters???) and mesh it with climb to create "athletics" (i dont even care if you want to add swim, our group hardly uses it) then you have strength based movement actions and dex based ones
Precisely what I did. Along with reinstating Concentration (and rolling Autohypnosis into it...) and doing away with Spellcraft, I also pulled jump out of Acrobatics (seriously, who wouldn't take that skill now?) and put it into Athletics along with climb. They should both be keyed off of STR anyway.
I originally was going to roll swim in there, too, but decided to leave it separate because it just didn't feel close enough overall, though I've considered rolling swim and fly into one skill, and making aquatic combat a bit more interesting than "If you don't have a swim speed, you'll just move really slowly and generally towards the bottom, but if you do, it's just like having perfect flying maneuverability in 3.5!" Haven't actually done it yet, but still...
A merman might be really great at swimming, but he probably sucks at climbing. With a consolidated Athletics skill, he'd be great at both, thus losing some of the realism that once existed.
The game already takes that into account:
Skills: A merfolk has a +8 racial bonus on any Swim check to perform some special action or avoid a hazard. It can always choose to take 10 on a Swim check, even if distracted or endangered. It can use the run action while swimming, provided it swims in a straight line.
They are good at swimming because they have a swim speed. See the Monster Manual regarding things that have climb speeds too, etc.
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I think that making a general Str-based action skill and Dex-based action skill makes perfect sense.
Jump, Climb, Swim all under Athletics. It's not because you'd inherently be able to do all those, but rather because you are training all of them on purpose and they all use Strength to do so.
Then put Tumble, Balance, and Fly in Acrobatics. Aren't flight maneuvers in real life called "acrobatics"?
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If we are going to lump Search (int based, logic, proactively used) with spot/listen (wis based, noticing things, reactively used), then making Athletics and Acrobatics shouldn't be an affront to anyone's sensibilities.
I happen to think that lumping Jump in with Balance and Tumble is a great idea and for the same reason would expect Climb & Swim (both under-used, under-powered Str-based mobility skills) to become one skill too, just like Handle Animal and Ride (though this is a more difficult case).
If people really hate Perception being both active and passive, you could always remove Search and bundle it with Appraise (another active observational Int-based skill).
Now I "grew up" with Dark Eye. In that game there was always two pages on the character sheets dedicated to nothing but listing different skills. So my view may be a little biased, but:
For the sake of all that is and was only mildly related to a detailed roleplaying experience STOP FOLDING SKILLS TOGETHER!
So far it all made sense from a game mechanical standpoint and was moving from welcomed to tolerable changes.
Perception and Stealth: Yes it's true, a person would not be automatically good at hearing, seeing, smelling and feeling at once, neither would someone necessarily be trained at moving silently and staying out of sight. But These skills are made to build adventurers. And either your adventurer wants to be sneaky or he doesn't. If he wants to be sneaky he will surely not say "oh, you know what, I don't have the time for an all-round training, so i will just train to hide. Who cares if they hear me lumbering through the brushes like a drunken ogre.". They might not have been planning to become an advewnturer all their life, but still it would make little sense for anyone to just train one aspect of stealth, and leaving the other out entirely.
For perception its again something a lot different. The perception skill does not represent your actual eyesight, hearing, scent and feeling senses. No those would be represented by circumstance-, and racial bonuses and penalties (deafness, or bad ears because of an explosion went off close to you, or because of a genetic fault). Perception represents your character's attention and mindfulness. A character trained in perception is a character who got themselves used to constantly watch out all around, listen up and detect any sign of activity around him. Your abilities to see or to listen are not trainable they are the way they are, you only train to use them, and when you train to use them, you train to use them all at once.
Acrobatics: Jumping, balancing and tumbling are all very tightly linked to each other, and the longer you train to tumble the better you also get at keeping your balance and at jumping. And that works in pretty much every other way too. (to tumble you often have to jump and then catch yourself without falling over or you have to keep your balance while doing a flic-flac, when jumping very far you also have to be able to come to a save stand, and meanwhile you train a crucial part of a tumble, and when balancing you train crucial party of both jumping and tumbling)
Now swimming and climbing. These two are not even remotely connected. They are used in entirely different situation and do entirely different things.
"But if a sneaky adventurer trains hiding and moving silently equally, whouldnt an athletic character also train climbing and swimming equally?" - No. The character might very likely not expect to ever need one of these skills. When they want to be able to climb, because they are for example a thief or an assassin having been working most of their time in the same town, they might just have learned to climb. And why would they want to swim, when the biggest body of water in the whole town is a pretty marble well in the castle yard?
A ranger or druid living in a swamp area with little to no trees might learn to swim, but would never think of ever having to climb something.
It bugs me to no end that Pathfinder now has some combined "super skills" (Perception, Acrobatics) and many uncombined "sub-skills" (Knowledge: Geography) that both cost the same amount. That's poor design, in my opinion; if some skills are in fact "packages" of multiple sub-skills, then they should cost more than the components. So I see three possibilities:
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The thing that kills me about people who says Climb and Swim are too different to be related is that Pathfinder already relates them. The Athletic feat description already exists, and it reads, "You possess an inherent physical prowess."
Sheesh.
Athletics as a skill (IMO, also incorporating Jump) is simply a matter of balancing skill utility, and by Pathfinder's own current rules, the realism is close enough.
-- Jeff
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The thing that kills me about people who says Climb and Swim are too different to be related is that Pathfinder already relates them. The Athletic feat description already exists, and it reads, "You possess an inherent physical prowess."
Sheesh.
Nothing weird about it, though. It's a bonus to skill execution (which are, broadly, about talent), not skill ranks (which are about learning). Whilst you could learn to be perceptive just with your ears, or stealthy just while standing still, it doesn't seem that likely to me. You can easily learn to climb without learning to swim -- the skill development process for each is disconnected from the other -- which is why the process of learning them is considered to be two processes, even though you might have an underlying physical process that makes you talented in both.
However, the point about balance remains; I'd make swim DCs easier.
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Bagpuss, I'm really not sure I'm getting your point.
All I'm saying is that obviously the designers of Pathfinder already feel that Climb and Swim are related by "physical prowess," as evidenced by the Athletic feat. Combining the skills is no more a blow to realism.
Two other examples, just off the top of my head, where this was done: 3.5's Nimble Fingers feat (bonuses to Open Locks and Disable Device) and Stealthy feat (bonuses to Hide and Move Silently) both were heralds of their governed skills being combined as being "close enough." There are probably other examples.
Any anybody that argues that Climb is more valuable from a utility standpoint than Open Locks was -- or is anywhere near as valuable as Disable Device is now -- is just asking to be laughed at. And Swim? Gah.
-- Jeff
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Clearly performance in climbing and swimming are related by physical prowess. However, skill ranks are about learning, not directly about performance (although they affect performance, clearly). Learning is not about physical prowess so much as it's about practice and the like (one could make the case that some people would learn faster than others, but other than class skills in 3.5, which doesn't work the same way in PFRPG anyhow, there are no rules for that).
I agree with adding athletics, I don't see how climb and swim being put in the same group makes less sense than someone being able to smell or taste better as they gain levels (perception), or someone having the knowledge to disarm a dangerous trap because they trained to pick locks from a young age (disable device).
I've been playing D'n'D for close to about 5 or 6 years now. I've played plenty of games (both off-line and on-line) and I've yet to see a single character with ranks in swim and only one or two character with ranks in climb. It's hardly game-breaking to combine the two and the skill is still no were near as good as perception.
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I just want to reiterate the idea that the Skill list is NOT meant to be an all-encompassing list of every separate action your character can take.
It's there to round out your character and customize her a little, adding focus to certain areas and further describing her abilities. Are you a particularly stealthy ranger? Is your Cleric more of a church diplomat than a holy avenger? A quick glance at their skill lists allows you to see their strengths and weaknesses.
D20 games are more about heroic action than pure simulation. Having all five senses encompassed by Perception isn't exactly realistic, but it makes it much easier to play the game. Simply put, it's not fun for most people to micromanage a bunch of stats like Climb, Jump, and Swim. That's why Forgery got cut, that's why Jump is gone, and that's why Climb and Swim should be put into one skill that makes them worth the points.
Combining Climb and Swim is the only thing that makes sense.
Friend, I would be the last person to support micromanagement or pure simulationism, BUT, 3.5 is actually a pretty good simulationist and narrativist and gamist rule set. Frankly, the best ever designed for all three of these styles. That aside, I happen to agree with you that skill categories over-top of 3.5 would work marvelously for me i.e. swim & climb in a category of athletics, etc. That said, I would recommend a game called Castles & Crusades to you. It reminds me a great deal of quick first edition play, where attribues were all you needed to adjudicate skill use results. Just a thought for you...
Yeah, I'm also sick of people bringing up the same old problems with the 3.5 ruleset. If only there were a dedicated forum for discussing our views on the current rules and changes we would like to see.
OH WAIT, THAT'S WHERE WE ARE RIGHT NOW. What do you think the point of this playtest is, exactly?
I'm not suggesting the idea has no value, only that the point has long since been made and Jason quite plainly rejected the idea. Nothing new has been brought into this discussion since it was brought up in the Alpha almost 9 months ago.
Is the point of the play test to repeatedly bring up the same topic that Jason has clearly seen and rejected?
But don't let me stop you, beat on this dead horse some more.
It seems to me that there are the people on this thread who are very concerned with what makes good sense, and the people who are very concerned with game balance. Both sides make good points, so I'm on the fence.
The problem is basically that "good" skills cost as much as "bad" skills. What is really wanted is something to make the skills climb and swim a little bit more attractive and worth putting some points into. Perception comes up all the time, swim comes up hardly at all, yet they cost the same. Someone already pointed out that this is flawed.
On a side note, with realism in mind, can we *please* stop swim being a skill that you can use untrained? Please? I'm a swimmmer. I've taught beginners how to swim. You can not swim untrained, period, end of story. Maybe removing that rediculous allowance will make people want to put at least *one* rank into swim.