Seminar Transcript - Reimagining Skills and Ability Scores

Knightfall · Jan 29, 2012

Morrus said:
I love the idea of not having a skill list at all. It's simply the ability scores, with bonuses to certain actions, and those actions are open-ended and infinite in possibility.

It's a great concept and it allows for a lot of customization. You seem to want to use +2 as your baseline, but another DM might want to use +1 or +3.

Knightfall · Jan 29, 2012

Another aspect I really like: The idea of ability score caps for mortal characters. If you want to go above those numbers, you have to quest for a magic item that will allow you to do so. Awesome!

Another thought:

I wonder how Large-sized characters will work regards to ability score bonuses/penalties. Will all small, medium, and large characters use a +1/-1 default or will larger PCs have +2s?

Stalker0 · Jan 29, 2012

I generally like the ability score idea they are going with, my only real concern is will ability scores be too important?

For example, in 4e one of the "issues" people quoted was because your primary ability score was so important you would always do your best to raise it, even only taking races that had a bump to that score.

If the majority of your attack,damage, and even saves is your ability score, would that phenomena be even worse?

Ahnehnois · Jan 29, 2012

I liked a lot of what I saw in this transcript. The basic flexibility of the skills and the six saves I think are both doable and new.

Siberys said:
I'm a little worried about the "at-will feats" bit - I hope every class gets at least one for free. Otherwise it'll feel like too much of a feat tax. First house rule? I dunno. Gotta see the playtest first.

Reserve feats in 3e worked great. They were nice, but hardly mandatory. I hate feat taxes, but you seem to be assuming that an at-will ability is necessary to play an effective character. I hope that isn't the case.

Dragonblade said:
Two things concern me:

1) With the new emphasis on stat importance, rolling is a horrible idea. To always be second best to the guy that rolled better than you did for the life of your PC? No thanks. Point buy absolutely has to be the default for this.

2) Feats. It sounds like feats will be incredibly important to customize your PC beyond your choice of class and theme. So how fast do you get one? Considering it sounds like bonuses won't advance much, I'd like to see a feat EVERY level. And you should start with more than one or two.

I kind of agree with these points. Throughout D&D, there has always been a bizarre cognitive dissonance associated with rolling ability scores; you preach balance balance balance and then someone rolls (or "rolls") great ability arrays. Rolling can be fun; I do it for my non-D&D games sometimes, but it is hard to see balance coming out of it.

I'm also strongly in favor of the feat every level approach. It's easy to remember, and it lets you advance a character without giving him a 5% increase in chance to hit or a new set of spells every level.

Oh and racial penalties need to die in a fire!

I get that some races are naturally better in some areas and providing a bonus acts as positive reinforcement when playing classes that use that particular stat. So playing a halfling fighter as opposed to say a rogue is already a sub-optimal choice.

Therefore, having a racial penalty is like being double punished for playing against type. I'd like to make more races viable to play more classes, not less.

This one I disagree with. I want race to really matter. I don't want my halfling fighters to be anywhere near as strong as my human fighters (let alone my half-orcs). What's more important is that each class isn't totally dependent on one ability score. If there's advantages to playing a strong bard, then a half-orc can be an effective one. If combat allows Dex to be important, a halfling fighter can be effective. Similarly, the big casters need more MAD so mental stat mods aren't such a big deal.

I'm A Banana · Jan 29, 2012

I'm a little wary about the "skills are just situational bonuses" thing. There's a possibility of things like (exaggerating for effect) "+2 to Intelligence at night, under a gibbuous moon, when wearing purple, but not in front of someone to whom you are indebted, and only while the King of Gerunthy still reigns from the Throne of Skulls."

Too narrow and weird, right? And what if a bonus-seeking player munchkins the situation to max out their fiddly little bonuses? Or if they seek bonuses that hit a certain situation, or ability score?

This is probably a solvable problem, but it is something to watch out for. It would be really easy under this system to grant bonuses that are too fiddly, or too broad, or easily exploitable. The burden on the DM to keep these in line would be pretty great.

avin · Jan 29, 2012

I'm open minded. Even being a skill-system fanboy I can easily deal with no skills and, to be honest, when I started we never used skills on D&D.

Themes? Cool.
Ritual for creating magic items such as Flametongue? NICE!
Will read it again.

The only little bit I didn't like is CHA save against fear

Kaodi · Jan 29, 2012

I despise the idea of " charisma " now somehow equalling " courage " . This is in direct contravention of so many real world examples where charismatic leaders turn out to be complete cowards.

Rolling as default, as has been mentioned, is not something I am a fan of.

And I am not sure, as a game balance issue, how it is going to work out for flavour choices to once again compete with game choices in feats...

Not saying I do not see things I like do, but I feel the first two problems I have mentioned are important...

Siberys · Jan 29, 2012

[MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION]; It's not that I think it's necessary. I just think "out of spells, switch to crossbow" was lame and needs to go the way of the dodo.

Remathilis · Jan 29, 2012

Ladies and Gentlemen, the future of D&D is... Castles & Crusades

6 saves?
No skills?

Somewhere, [MENTION=10177]Treebore[/MENTION] is laughing maniacally...

the Jester · Jan 29, 2012

Kamikaze Midget said:
I'm a little wary about the "skills are just situational bonuses" thing. There's a possibility of things like (exaggerating for effect) "+2 to Intelligence at night, under a gibbuous moon, when wearing purple, but not in front of someone to whom you are indebted, and only while the King of Gerunthy still reigns from the Throne of Skulls."

Too narrow and weird, right? And what if a bonus-seeking player munchkins the situation to max out their fiddly little bonuses? Or if they seek bonuses that hit a certain situation, or ability score?

This is probably a solvable problem, but it is something to watch out for. It would be really easy under this system to grant bonuses that are too fiddly, or too broad, or easily exploitable. The burden on the DM to keep these in line would be pretty great.

Well, my homebrewed system uses something very like this. Basically, you choose a "secondary skill" for your character that describes what you did before you became an adventurer (or what you do alongside adventuring). You might choose blacksmith, farmer, weaver, sculptor, diplomat, historian, messenger, cartographer, thief, goldsmith, priest or whatever- it's your old job.

Now, let's say the dm calls for a Charisma check as you navigate through a halfling shanty town. If the dm agrees that your secondary system applies directly, you get a +3 bonus to your ability score when you make your check; if it applies indirectly, you get a +2 bonus. So if your secondary skill was thief or messenger, you might ask the dm if you get +3 ("Sure," I would reply if I were the dm); OTOH the dm might say, "Well, messengers only come to this area rarely- you only get +2." (Or he might deny you outright, if you were a diplomat or goldsmith.)

In practice, this is very easy to adjudicate, and as long as you give the pcs the choice of what the skill is, subject to dm approval, they probably won't get screwed by it.

Re: All the people worried about rolling stats- point buy will be there as an option. Just use it. Rolling has always been either the primary, or at the very least a primary, means of stat generation by RAW; in practice, many groups prefer point buy, but that certainly isn't every group. (I'll never allow point buy in my campaign, for instance.)