Thomas Shey
Legend
If you expect to climb, swim or sneak, those things will be covered by the rules. If that isn't part of the expected play activities, making a Fitness check (or whatever) should be sufficient.
I quite disagree. What happens when you fail the Fitness check when climbing? How many times do you have to make it when sneaking? Do multiple people have to make it separately, and what happens when some fail and some succeed?
It doesn't matter whether its "expected" it matters whether it will cover the ground when it comes up, and a simple check notoriously does a poor job of doing so in all three of those cases. You may argue that if its going to be rare enough offloading it on the GM is an acceptable cost for the space savings, but you shouldn't kid yourself that's what you're doing and you've increased the chance that the answers to the above questions the GM gives are fairly likely to produce dumb or otherwise bad outcomes.
Edit: To make it clear, there may, indeed be games where these situations are so rare that the space and cognitive overhead is not justified. I have to say given the two primary ones I listed (climbing and stealth) that they'd have to be extremely far off the beat path for typical adventure gaming, however.
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