Rawls;n10627701 said:
It makes more sense to me to just make it so the player can swim.
But why? Why is the ability/inability to swim different from any other skill? As a concept I mean? Why should it be taken for granted that the PC can swim? I mean, there are a lot of people in the world who can't so it's not something unusual.
It can open or close possibilities through enhanced aptitude just as any other utility skill. Climbing is also a very specific, and not at all different skill by concept. And so what if they are.
The skill system should be a means to an end, a tool to interact with the game, not the sole point of it so skipping stuff like climbing and swimming, if one doesn't want them, shouldn't break the experience, just close off certain content.
It adds (potentially a lot of) character variety through a fairly simplistic action. I don't know why that woudl be "boring".
In a similiar vein, I'd tie to the players ability to read to his/her intelligence so that below certain level of INT all the the text in the game would go "asdfeiorjasdf#"¤%"&%/". That too might sound "boring", the way I put it there, but imagine playing a character like that and trying to get around. Just like with swimming (or climbing, or shooting or driving.......), what would you do to bypass situations where your inability causes a blockade? The game should create these situations and make you ask that question. Sometimes the answer is that you can't do anything about it, and that's ok too, you don't need tob e able to "everything" and not all situations have 10 alternatetive routes to complete them.
sv3672;n10632851 said:
A skill in the range 0 to 10 is technically the same as a "tree" of 10 perks
Technically, I suppose. But this is what I meant by comprehending them, the difference in how these things are supposed to work. A skill is a measurement of aptitude, a perk is an extra advantage. The former weighs the difficulty of the task against the PC's ability (and the attempt can be failed by the PC), the latter unlocks him abilities that can then be performed by the player (at the players own level, even if some ranking might try to hinder it). The design of the skill is bad if it works like a perk - as in a master ability whose possible "ranks" (that try to represent the level of aptitude) can be circumvented by the players own ability.
For example, Fallout 3 has a "skill" of lockpicking, but the actuality is that you have 4 perks that each cost 25 skill points.