Swimming Uses Agi?

[Flyndaran]

By that argument every physical act should be strength based.

[Acolyte]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

By that argument every physical act should be strength based.

I don't quite see how that follows. Agility would be much more important in something like tennis or even moreso in racquetball, and it doesn't bother me that the Driving skill is Agility based.

More to the point, how swimming anything but the backstroke requires careful timing to keep from inhaling water. Timing isn't quite the same as agility, true, but it's closer to that than strength.

I actually find backstroke requires a lot more focus for me to keep going, but I don't have trouble drowning when swimming crawl.

Upon review, though, I wonder how commonplace basic Swim training is in 1) the world, and 2) among celestials?

For example, most everyone I know can swim easily. And it's not like swimming ability is particularly hard to attain. Historically, though, swimming ability was pretty rare (no stats for that, just commonly what you hear--all the sailors drowned but they didn't know how to swim anyway, etc), and my experiences certainly aren't world-wide. Does your average Chinese 30-yo know how to swim? Or Indian? Or Azer-Baijani? What about your average Elohite?

What I'm getting at is that even in a high stress situation, me and most of the people I know would have no problem doing a front crawl for a few laps. Or to a rescue boat if the water wasn't excessively choppy, etc. But making Swimming its own skill, and given those rules (or the one I suggested, for that matter), most humans would fail at that.

If the Swimming skill meant training in competitive swimming, I see it based on Agility without much complaint. But if all swimming-based issues are related to the same skill...the failure rate is pretty sickly high. For example, compare to Running. If you fail your running check, you still run, just not as fast (unless on a 6, which I'm okay with). It's not that failing the running check results in you standing still.

Swimming is obviously harder than running...but not THAT much harder.

[gjc8]

Keep in mind that there are difficult swimming tasks that still bear little resemblance to most competitive swimming, and for which the agility critique applies. There's very little timing involved in simply treading water, but it can still be difficult if you're carrying significant dead weight.