Discussing 4e Subsystems: Skills

Skills

There has been a continuous debate back and forth to the goods and ills of 4th edition. A common complaint is that 4th edition has stripped out the flavor of the game. People look at the new powers and wonder where the “roleplaying” in their roleplaying game has gone. To those people I say, you’re looking in the wrong place.

Since 3rd edition, the skill system has been the backbone of the game. While spells, feats, and combat mechanics often have specific rules, skills are left more ambiguous. Herein lays the chance for players to flex their imaginations, and use their combinations of skills to come up some truly unique things for their characters to do. It’s easy to forget that with the new rush of mechanics 4th edition has brought, but that does not make skills any less important…in some ways, it makes them more so.

The Half Level Bonus

Part of the “new math” of 4th edition is the removal of skill ranks and the addition of the half level bonus. A lot of people were worried that this would lead to a homogenization of classes, where everyone was simply good at everything. In my experience so far this has not been the case. Sure a 6th level fighter might have a +3 to arcana, but a wizard with an 18 int and training has a +12, which is a very large difference mechanically.

That said, its not too hard to become good in other skills through the use of the skill training feat. While 3rd edition skill ranks allowed you to take any skill you wanted, the price was normally too high to pay. In 4th edition, feats are more frequent, and the combat power of them has been weakened. Correspondingly skills have gotten stronger (my opinion), and the bonuses from feats haven’t declined, making them a more attractive buy. Three players in my group have taken skill feats and they have made good use of them so far. I will admit that I do miss the customization of the skill ranks from 3rd, but overall I think the 4th skill system actually gives me a wider berth of skills I can be useful in.

The Declining of Skill Bonuses?

Another promise of the 4th edition system was the toning down of bonuses, to prevent too much specialization and allow characters to keep up with each other, or at least lag behind but still be within earshot. This is an area I think 4th failed at out of the box. With a high stat, some utility powers, skill training and focus, some feats like agile athlete that let you double your skill rolls, and a plethora of magic items that provide bonuses of +1 to +6 to a skill…it is still very easy to become the Skilly McAwesome of a particular area, to the point that you are unbeatable in skill challenges, and far away above the rest of the party. We’ve seen this in my own group. An elven rogue with high wisdom, skill focus in perception, and a perception bonus item has given this player sonar like abilities…he never misses an ambush or a trap. Now he did pay for those abilities, but the funny thing about skills is player’s and DM’s alike don’t give them much attention until the bonus is really high, and then suddenly they are trying to milk every use they can out of it.

Overall, I think I would have preferred more powers and magic items that worked with your skills to produce cool effects instead of giving more bonuses. Still, this problem only manifests for players that choose to really specialize in skills, for many groups while every class has a specialty, no one is ever completely out of the game.

The Combining and Alteration of Skills

One of the big changes 4e did was to largely reduce the number of skills you could take. My opinion on this, they got it right….mostly.

There were a lot of skills that needed to go from 3rd edition. Gather info and use rope were too weak to be by themselves. Concentration was so automatic it might as well be a class feature for spellcasters, etc. Further, I think the combinations they did made a lot of sense. Spot and Listen as one, sure. Hide and Move Silently together, absolutely. And heck, Knowledge History is actually quite nice now, incorporating nobility and law along with it. Overall, there was a lot of fat to trim in the 3e skill system.

Still there are a few skills that I feel are left in the cold. Endurance, Dungeoneering, and Streetwise are the three that stand out the most. There doesn’t seem to be enough innate use for endurance. Sure its great when a disease comes around, but I don’t plan to waste a skill in training for a once in a while thing. Streetwise is likely great for city games, but often wasted in “normal” adventuring games, as can dungeoneering.

There are also a few skills that got left out, my group has felt the lack of appraise and knowledge engineering. I don’t think these need to be their own skills necessarily, but a mention of them with the other skills would have been useful. My group uses dungeoneering for architecture knowledge and streetwise for appraise (after all, items are only worth what people will pay for it).

Lastly, there’s the lack of craft and profession skills. My group has often joked that each one of our characters is the greatest craftsman of all time (after all, there’s nothing to say we aren’t!!). Still, I am in the camp that says good riddance to these skills. I don’t think players should have to spend game mechanics (skills) to gain something that is mostly flavor and has little mechanical use in the actual game. Still, I think it would been nice for WOTC to mention some alternatives, even if its just a flavor thing. Even the idea of letting characters pick one background profession or craft would have been nice just to put the issue to rest.

And let me close on this section by saying I do not like Religion as an int based skill. I understand that intelligence needs some skill love (I still think int is the biggest dump stat now, but that’s a topic for another day), but it’s pretty strange that an untrained wizard has as high a Religion knowledge as a cleric (and since I put my 8 into int frequently, sometimes more). If nature gets to be wisdom, then religion should be as well.

The Increase in Skill Power

While the skill system had several changes, likely the biggest change is the effect of all the changes around it. Terrain is now more of a threat in 4e, heck even gravity got an upgrade, doing d10’s instead of d6’s. Further, magic is no longer the swiss army knife of adventuring. With these changes, adventurers are forced to fall back on their own skills to get more things done, and this is one of my favorite things about 4th. I have seen the frustrated rogue in 3rd edition whose skills just stopped mattering once wizards got their magics going. While a 4e rogue might feel a little down that he no longer has a +40 to bluff checks, he can also go up to high level npcs and not expect each one of them to have lie detection spells out like candy.

Ultimately I think this is the hidden secret of 4th edition. Skills are powerful, and offer a lot of flexibility if players take advantage of it. Further skills (and ability checks) can allow you to perform increasingly cooler things as you get higher levels. For example, a high level fighter with good strength can rip through solid stone walls without any problem….no powers required (check the DMG if you don’t believe me).

However, this aspect of 4e hasn’t gotten a lot of press. In some ways I think this is just a carryover from 3rd edition. People are used to “weak” skills, and so are focusing on the flashier power system. I think its also a problem with WOTC’s presentation. WOTC provided lots of DCs to tell DMs what challenges to throw at their party, but they didn’t offer enough examples of what players can do with their skills to spark the imagination. For example, what can I do with a 30 arcana check? I can cast some rituals and identify some magic items, but is there a DC where its suggested I could do slight alterations to my spells? Is there a point where a high enough endurance DC might help me not die? I don’t think WOTC should be too concrete, the free form nature of skills are one of their strengths. Still, it would be nice to have a guide, similar to 3e’s epic level handbook that basically shows a player that once your skills are high enough, the mundane goes out the window and you can do things that are truly “epic”.

So….what about Skill Challenges?

I think I’ve written more than enough articles about skill challenges, so I’ll let this one slide…for now. Instead I’ll close by saying I hope this article encourages people to take another look at the skill system. I meant it when I said it’s the hidden secret of 4th edition, and a lot of players may find that extra nugget of “roleplaying” they feel has been lost if they spark up the imagination and give skills a try.

Overall I am quite happy with the Skill system in 4e. I don't have that many really strong opinions on it so will put down some more random thoughts:

-I am personally glad Craft and Profession is gone because in my eyes they didn't make sense. I just can't wrap my head around the idea that the actual skills involved in something are useless/irrelevant as long as you have this abstract "Craft" or "Profession" skill.

As such things like Craft and Profession in my 4e games are run as Skill Challenges with the skills being used being the ones that would be of actual use in that Craft of Profession.

-I quite like Skill Challenges, though I run them quite loosely, I don't think up the math before hand or have any real big, "okay it ends here" type stuff. I run it more as a adaptable method of adding roles to the narrative/RPing.

-One thing I would like to see is some manner of Sub-Skill system, basically it be a way to further specialize your Skills. Essentially each Skill would be divided up into the different properties that make up that Skill and you could add extra bonuses to some of them. Quite similar to Storytelling Skills in many regards.

For instance in Thievery you could add a bonus to Lock-Picking. So while overall your Thievery Skill would get higher you would have these added bonuses in these specific skills.

I could see this work in both Character Creation (choose 3 Skills and from each a Specialization Sub-Skill) and in feats (can add +2 to 3 Sub Skills).

Though I agree in general, what I find I don't like about the skill system in 4E is that (player placement of a Skill Training or skill focus feat aside) that every character of the same class has the same skill proficiencies. What if you want to play a social rogue, or a knowledge-heavy rogue, instead of a stealthy theiving rogue?

I'm not advocating a return to skill points, or deletion of the half-level bonus to untrained skills. What I'd prefer to see is that the character class allows choice of N trained skills from a subset M out of the total set of skills. That wuold allow for a slight bit of character differentiation by skills without forcing the use of feats to do so.

I think that the difference between a PC who has specialized in a skill and an untrained PC is still too big, and the recent backgrounds subsystem has made it slightly worse because some backgrounds hand out an extra +1 or +2 to skill checks for certain skills.

In addition, after mulling over rituals for a while, I thought it was a missed opportunity that the skill challenge mechanic was not more closely integrated with the rituals sub-system to have a more free-form and flexible way to manage out-of-combat magical effects. This line of thought probably belongs in the discussion of the rituals sub-system, though.

I think there's an important distinction to make between 4th and earlier editions between what's missing and what's merely absent. Missing implies it should be there. In many cases, you could make a strong argument that things like skill points, crafting skills or profession skills aren't so much missing as they just aren't there.

The skill system was the thing I was most skeptical about when 4e was previewed, now it's one of the things I appreciate about it.

In a lot of ways, I now feel it allows for more flexible characters simply because of the availability of skill training as a feat. In core 3rd edition, if you wanted a fighter with stealth, you would have to make a multiclassed Frankenfighter and invest skill points in multiple skills, and wind up taking a lot of other rogue characteristics in the process. The most optimized way to do it would be to take Rogue at level one for all the extra 1st level skill points, so you don't even start out as your main class. Here, you just take one feat (or there's even the option to just play an Eladrin.)

The +1/2 level thing isn't all that bad given the cinematic nature of the game. Heroes are supposed to be able to have some chance to succeed at something... only 'comic relief' and film noir heroes are completely clueless or useless in a wide variety of cases. As for 6th level Barbarians having a +3 to Arcana... well, to that I say "Conan." He seemed familiar enough with magic to know how to deal with it at times. He at least understood what was going on. Not bad for a barbarian.

Honestly, I'd be a bit worried about the ability of a warrior to function in society if he didn't pick up anything at all about the sort of things he encounters on a regular basis, or in some cases about the thing that is the equivalent of 'technology' for his world. Compare a +3 to a +12 and it's roughly the difference between the average person talking to their mechanic about what's wrong with their car... you know enough (you hope) to follow along and possibly know when the mechanic is just making stuff up to stick you with a large repair bill. If he's going around adventuring in a magical world, it makes sense that the character learns a little about what magic does.

I'd dare say that in that sense, it's more organic to character growth than investing skill points to a set list of skills. As you get more exposure to your world, you tend to pick up knowledge about your world in general.

The +1/2 level bonus solved a problem I sometimes had in 3E skill point system - why don't people pick up typical adventuring skills?

A Wizard or a Fighter should, after 10 levels and several ambushed they probably survived in that time, have a little training in these skills. But in 3E, trying to train the skills would be extremely costly, making this less "skills I picked up on a little" into more "skills I had to focus training on to get at least a little done."

All the skills currently present in the skill system look to me like "adventuring" skills - skills that the average adventurer in an average career would definitely pick up a little - some he would really train in, some he would just pick up by watching others or being forced to make use of them.

In this context, Craft or Profession skills don't work with the half level bonus, though. Craft (Basketweaving) or Profession (Apothecary) are not skills you pick up a little while traveling the world and fighting dragons or demons. You need to conciously focus yourself on them to improve them. If they ever introduce a Craft/Profession system, it probably shouldn't use the half level rule - and it might even be removed from the entire level-gaining process. Instead of gaining XP and levels, you have to spend time training or practicing them. But I somewhat doubt that WotC actually will spend so much effort on them. (at least for putting them into official rules - the designers and developers might have their house rules...)

A lot has been said about Skill Challenges in other threads, but regardless if or how people house-rule them - I think the core idea of using skills to solve a more complex non-combat encounter is sound and I like it.

My main problem with skills is that they do so little to create variation between characters of the same class. Individually the skills are more useful, so useful that some are required according to one player "Im okay that the Tom is dropping his wizard, but somebody needs to take skill training in Arcana, or we will never know what any new item does"