It's not exactly rocket science.
You're certainly right about that, Mister Dweller, but I unfortunately think that it's
you that's out of touch with all things RPG.
You see, the entire point of role-playing is not to suffer from the chains of some arbitrary limitation like a character sheet, but instead to be provided the
freedom to
achieve things in an alternate, often fantastical world. Your sense of progression and the actual audience's is entirely out of balance. To you, a character should not be able to progress if they haven't refined the skills for whatever task is needed, and it somehow makes sense that said character - who I might remind you is -our- personal fantasy - can't do something that we decide they should be able to do just because of skill sheets. To provide a scene that would, say, allow our character to bake a cake stuffed with poison to assassinate a target, but then
fail us simply because our baking skill is -37? So what if my character has no sense of taste or smell in their traits? You provide us the option, I expect us to be able to pass this option regardless. Otherwise, what's the point? It's a fake option. It's there to simply make the game look 'hardcore', when in fact, it's just bad role-play. You're preventing content for my character based on an arbitrary skill check.
You see, Mister Dweller, it's not about playing around what you
don't have, but being rewarded for what you
do have instead. As you say, this isn't rocket science. Skills are meant to provide a semblance of progression and, absolutely, I agree that focusing on them should be important, but you don't
punish people for a lack of dedication, merely reward those that go through with it
more - in related categories to the skill, of course. You either bake the cake, or the bake the cake so amazingly that the emperor rewards you an estate before he eats it. The former is my role-playing the character, and the latter is rewarding my dedication to aligning skill choices with what I role-play.
Options. Failure is no option amidst this. The game doesn't tell me what I cannot do. That's not what games, especially role-playing games, are about. They're about
fun, remember?
Please, for your sake, research the genre a little bit more and look at the greats. At no point in Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age, especially, did I feel pushed back because I didn't put all of the silly skill points in the right places. I play what I want to be, and the games are merely tactically challenging rather than anally so. Oh, so I can kill some dangerous thugs in Age of Decadence, but making basic pottery eludes me? Give me a break.
Contact me if you want someone to help you with this, by the way. In my P&P groups, I have a special system for rewarding characters efforts in ways aligned to their attributes and skill setups without punishing them. For example, one player in my group decided to attack a Balor with his mage's quarterstaff (+1), and rolled a 20. I looked at the stats and, though he did no damage according to the silly D&D rules, I decided that a roll of 20, and with 21 intelligence on his mage, it was fair that, I quote, "You surgically remove the Balor's brain with your indepth and
intelligent (see how I focus it, there, so he knows why he's rewarded?) knowledge of alien anatomy". I am a very popular DM.
