But I also don’t like the way it leads players to not take roles other than their combat role. So I do have a fix for my house which doesn’t ‘nerf’ a player that wants to roleplay by making them less powerful in combat. Many MMOG’s well the good ones have completely separate combat and non-combat skill pools. By picking up crafting of some kind you don’t have to give up your ability to do combat.
I’m not saying I’m going to put back in separate roleplaying skill sets with a separate system.
What I am going to do though is every character CAN pick a profession and they’ll automatically get a ‘trained’ level of skills in that profession and at the DM’s (aka me) discretion they’ll get untrained skill ranks in complimentary skills. It’s optional a character could certainly have done nothing but train for the day they pick up sword, bow or wand to go adventuring. But others might have stepped into the party late, perhaps they were a sailor or a blacksmith or a sign painter before they left their humdrum lives for the exciting and terrifying and grand and mostly terrifying life of the adventurer.
So let’s pick Sailor as a profession. As a DM I’d give the player trained skill values for things like using ropes and knots, reading the weather, fishing, repairing boats. If they were a navigator they could have skills of map reading or direction finding. Etc.
So now our Dragonborn Paladin who for some reason known only to the Nine Who Watch started life as a cabin boy the dirty little nipper before he saw the light or dark or neutral shade of gray to become a paladin can now rest assured when he ties up a bad person that person is likely to stay pretty tied.
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