Ahnehnois
First Post
One of my more influential books however, was the 3e Stronghold Builder's Guidebook. When you actually consider the resources it would take to protect something using traps, it's just impractical. They're extremely expensive, and usually very beatable. Obviously, this is not what Gygax was thinking.I guess I'm just pretty old school, with my formative years as a player/DM being in the early 80's, I just expect the world to be as filled with traps as Gygaxian D&D.
I added Search for Astute. Search is pretty useful. (And I use a different approach to languages culled from Kingdoms of Kalamar).- Good but a shade below Guarded Mind. Add Linguistics?
I don't know about that. I'm trying to avoid power creep by not having direct offensive combat effects. Moreover, given that my approach to Sneak Attack is much more crit-based, that would look more powerful in my game than it does to you.- Meh. Have it add to the roll to confirm a critical hit or something of that sort.
First, the odd quirk here is that I'm using the same list for three different classes: rogue, barbarian, and ninja. No Trace was written as the stereotypical ninja option. I wrote it with the restriction, because to my way of thinking giving a straight-up bonus to Hide would have made it an automatic choice.Drop the 'after not moving' clause. Though, you seem to find Stealth a lot more generally useful than I've fond it. Care to explain why?
Why? Hide/MS and Spot/Listen are probably part of the "Tier 1" of skills in my opinion. Both by frequency of rolling, and impactfulness of the outcome, they always come out near the top. For one thing, as you've noted with Initiative, going first in battle is really important for a rogue. But even more so, hiding allows you to potentially avoid one. Initiative doesn't (probably not, anyway). I find that rogues/rangers/monks and their ilk use stealth skills almost as much as one would hit the stealth button while playing Baldur's Gate.
It does seem a bit weak to me as well. However, this is for the barbarian, as well as certain wilderness rogue variants. I felt there needed to be something to cover the survivalist niche. I could see maybe combining it with Vigorous (saves vs poison and disease). At that point, it might be too much complexity, which is probably why I had them separate to start.- Very weak. I'm not sure what to add here. I'd say add 'Swim' as it seems in theme, but it would still probably be fairly weak except in a few wilderness heavy games. One possibility I've thought about is it adds a 'Jack of All Trades' bonus - you get to add the bonus to any skill check in any skill you aren't trained in. But I'm not sure how the math works out there. 'Craft' is also a possibility.
I took the restriction off of Escape Artist. Now less complex and slightly more powerful.- Good. Roughly as strong as Astute. Not sure what to do to bump it up, as its already complex.
This is one of the few taken straight from a 3e ACF. But you may be right. I just threw in Knowledge (Arcana), which to me is another one of those Tier 1 skills.- Good, but not good enough. Possibly add spellcraft to recognize a spell? If not merge with Trap sense and call it 'Danger Sense'.
Always a challenge that power creep, yes. If I change trap sense, I've moved away from the original baseline. That being said, trap sense was kind of a dumb ability and I've rarely seen it used. Might as well throw in the Search bonus for traps and secret doors.- Really weak by itself compared to broadly useful abilities like Sixth Sense, Guarded Mind, or Dauntless. Not sure what to do about it, but maybe merge with the above as per the suggestion in 'Spell Sense' or have it also add to Search to detect a trap. In general though, this is the sort of power creep that makes me leary of the otherwise interesting idea and makes me want to throw out Gaurded Mind and Dauntless as too potent and rebalance to nothing better than the original Daring.