Adventuring skills found to be less useful than first thought

This is a sister thread to http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=175432&page=1&pp=40 about skills used by PCs. Some skills in D20 Modern seem more useful than others.

Please vote for skills that should be useful, or seem useful, but aren't.

I gather this is d20m system based for the skills?

If so then, IMHO one of the problems with the experince system for some systems is that they reward combat only or mainly. This is one fo the things I attempted to change in my system.

Because of this then some non combat skills tend to be over looked or even ignored as the players try to optimise their PCs for combat based experience games.

If the skills use is rewarded then players will then attempt stuff out of combat and thus they will want to have a broader base of skills to access.

I voted for Treat Injury.

It seems like it would be an absolutely clutch skill for any game where magical healing wasn't available.

I'm not sure how I'd fix it, but the +1d4hp ability working once per day lays almost all healing off on surgery at the end of the day ... everybody constantly needs to go in for "Surgery" to be functional.

For me I say the surgery is just a catch-all for everything from getting stitches and an ace bandage to bullet removal.

It remains, though, that it makes d20Modern characters very finite because they have only (Hit Points)+1d4hp every day with which to get in fights. D&D characters, their hit-points are a renewable resource that run out only when the healer is out of healing mojo, and that resource is more important over the course of One Encounter, than over the course of the day.

d20Modern heroes have about one serious encounter in them a day unless you use a different HP system.

--fje

This is a really tough question to answer because it incorporates two factors.

1.) Perceived value
2.) Actual value

Our definitions of both can be wildly different. Let me just tackle a few skills I saw mentioned in this and the other thread.

The measure of the difference between these two values I'll give in 'cookies of disjunction'. A very scientific methodology!

Treat Injury
Some guys voted for this. I don't understand it. Its perceived value is, for me, exactly the same as its actual value. DC 15 for 1d4 hp once per day. It seems like you know exactly how useful this skill well be when you take it. Sorry guys, I'm gonna have to disagree if you voted this way. 0 cookies.

Survival
This is a crap skill if you are not playing in a natural environment. But don't you know it going into the campaign? Or do you take it often believing you are going to be in a non-urban setting before the DM pulls the tricky-switchup on you.
I take survival only for mutant characters that have the 'Scent' ability. Survival effectively becomes like a third awareness check along with Spot and Listen - it represents your highly tuned sense of smell. I know more or less what I'm getting out of this bad boy.
Because in some cases this might throw you (or your game might start in wilderness and end up urban) a single cookie of disjunction is appropriate

Disguise
I'm really surprised this is coming up. I get as much use out of this skill as I'd expect. Characters that I give high disguise to (charismatic characters) will basically only have a chance to use it when the other players aren't about because the other players will have comparatively poor disguise. If you are being recognized there is a likelihood the other players will to. As such it is a difficult skill to use in a group game (unless for some unfathomable reason everyone has taken disguise).
Yeah its not that useful - but how often do you disguise yourself in real life? 0 cookies.

Balance
I think I agree with Masada. I do not, as a GM, have a clear use for balance and if a PC of mine uses it either:
1) there is a rope bridge or the floor gives away sharply or the starship shakes - everyone has to take a balance check. You can't be too lethal about it because most players don't have balance as a skill.
2) the character has a skateboard or other balance dependant equipment. He has high balance to do special moves.
90% is case 1 - when I use a balance check it is a fluke occurance. A trap or something. And because of this I have to weigh in the factor that the character with balance won't be taking it.
Compare it to say JUMP. With the Jump skill a character with high Jump can Jump when he chooses to. But in the normal run of things a character with high balance will not necesarily ever use the balance skill without GM intervention.
This gets 3 cookies of disjunction

Investigate
I really like the idea of a detective character. I often take Investigate. I've actually only now realized that GMs can't tell the difference between Search and Investigate. Investigate is for profiling and crime scene analysis - because GMs are unprepared for fingerprint IDs and stuff unless you are playing a very police oriented game Investigate is basically useless even though in real life it is the primary way of catching bad guys.
I give Investigate five cookies of disjuntion

Knowledge Skills
Knowledge skills are great in premade adventures when the GM gives the players more background info on a group or organization based on some preassigned knowledge skill. For instance when playing a gang game that was premade Knowledge (streetwise) can be very useful as the GM may have some tables that allow you to roll a 1d20+ streetwise and you may know some stuff about local gangs just because you know.
Unfortunately most GMs are not that organized. They have no tables ready and when you roll they have to either say "That's not appropriate now" (which effectively makes your skill useless) or they have to do some kind of "ad-hoc info" which will never be quite what you want because it will ruin the plot information distribution times for the GM.
In conclusion Knowledge skills tend to have a high disjunction between what I think they should do and what they actually do. But with a caveat! Know your GM. An organized GM will make good use of the Knowledge skills.
Two cookies of disjunction

I figured I might as well put up my votes now.

Craft (pharmaceutical): This skill is basically replaced by Treat Injury. In the core rules, it's only purpose is to make antibiotics. It can give a fair bonus, but you get more from Treat Injury, which also doesn't cost Wealth to use. The only use for Craft (pharmaceutical) for a PC is to give it to a non-healer PC. However, wouldn't the party have someone with Treat Injury anyway? It's basically an NPC-only skill, and only useful for groups that don't have a healer.

A lot of third party supplements have used Craft (pharmaceutical) for making other drugs, which may have beneficial or negative effects.

Craft (structural): making something with this skill takes a lot of time and money and generally doesn't make your group more powerful. For this skill, you're better off hiring a contractor.

Craft (writing): Pure flavor.

Forgery: A great way to get into trouble, for some of the same reasons Sleight of Hand gets you in trouble in DnD. (In D20 Modern, Sleight of Hand has additional uses that don't cause trouble.)

Handle Animal: Training an animal takes so long and is so hard that you usually want someone else to train the animal. "Illegal" animals that NPCs won't train include things like lions, crocodiles, etc ... these just cause trouble. You do need the skill to order a trained animal to attack, but the DC is only 10 (15 if the animal is injured), and the animal's CR won't improve.

Knowledge (any): Hard to use. Some of the skills, like Knowledge (streetwise), are relatively easy to make useful. (You need the skill to find the black market.)

Navigate: The one use of the skill is very limited unless you're running a military campaign.

Perform (any): Like Craft (writing), this is pure flavor.

Having so poll that so lacks in voters has considerably reduced both the merits of any analysis of the results (as it could be that only an unusual sub-set of the population is voting). In the 3.5e D&D variant of this poll there were hundreds of voters, and the skills were separated into blocks by differences of at least five votes between one skill and the next (based on the number of votes). This one has no more than 6 votes for any given skill, and each division is by a difference of a mere one (1) vote.

Due to the lack of votes, I'm only presenting the table in a more readily understood format rather than attempting an analysis of the results, as I did in the other poll.

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Question: Which of these skills seems less useful than it should be?


Little things I noticed:

Knowledge seems to be far less useful in d20 modern than it is in d20 D&D (3.5e). It ranks among the least useful here, while it was a second catagory (Useful) skill in d20 D&D (just under Open Locks and Disable Device - the equivalents of Repair / Demolitions in D&D - both of which scored high in both polls).

Having not played d20 modern, I am not used to how often such skills as presented above come into use or their potential for usefulness. In d20 D&D every Knowledge skill has associated synergy bonuses for other skills - and sometimes for class features as well. Also, most knowledges have creature types associated with them, granting one with ranks in it the ability to know potentially crucial facts about a type of creature (such a fire vulnerability, spell resistance, acid immunity, weak vs silver weapons, etc). I would suppose, based on what I am seeing, that this is not the case in d20 modern.

Concentration also scores lower than in the d20 D&D poll, but then most of its usefulness in D&D lies with its ability to allow casters to cast despite distractions (such as being damaged). As d20 Modern is a (very) low magic system, I would expect Concentration to be lower in usefulness.

Craft was treated as a single skill in d20 D&D - not surprisingly as there are a multitude of potential crafts, the list of which has never been finalized or even ennumerated. Thus it scored low, albeit not in the rock-bottom of the skill list. In d20 modern the Crafts are ennumerated, and each has its own potential to rise and fall on this list - and as such they can be found at several levels, from Craft (structural) at the bottom to several Crafts in the middle of the list. As magic is less common, the ability to craft would have more importance, I would presume, and it seems this list bares that out.

Otherwise it seems that if a skill scored high in one list then it often scored high on the other list.

The main exception that jumps out is Forgery - scored among the absolute useless skills on the d20 D&D (3.5e) skill poll. On this poll is scored near the top - amongst the more useful skills (albeit not the most useful skills. I'm not sure if that is a glitch in the data due to the low number of voters or if it is an indication that Forgery is more useful in a low magic setting or if the rules on how / when forgery can be used make it more useful in d20 Modern than it is in d20 D&D (3.5e).

craft builds the stuff, treat injury uses the stuff. So I can't see how craft (pharm) replaces treat injury????

Craft (wiriting) can be used to forge the paper docs, so I would have a syngery skill for having 5 ranks in this for that purpose. But yes otherwise fluff.

naviagate- hum yep has been tech replaced by GPS or devices like that. Still if they don't have access to this then you still have to get from a to b using a map.

Huh. I tell my players that Knowlege skills are a lot more important in d20 Future than in D&D, and I call for Knowledge checks all the time. Possibly it's just because of the way I interpret them.

Arcane Lore - I include in this knowledge of not only psionics, but also knowledge of rumored conspiracies, secret organizations, speculations about pre-cursor civilizations and crypto- and xeno- zoology.
Art - Never comes up.
Behavioral Sciences - It makes sense that this would give a synergy bonus to Sense Motive, but I haven't codified it in my spreadsheet. Whoops, there I just did. But otherwise any practical use of this skill would usually be handled with Sense Motive.
Business - Players have asked for information about markets, and I made them roll on this skill to see what they knew, but we haven't done a lot of commerce.
Civics - Questions of legality have come up quite a number of times.
Current Events - I'm running a Star*Drive game, and in that setting the GM has lots of information he'd like to impart, given an excuse. A player who wants more background information, or wants to give the GM an excuse to impart some data can often roll on this to see if they've seen some relevant item on The Grid.
Earth and Life Sciences - My game is probably more science-heavy than most. This skill, which covers a dizzying array of science specialties, is called upon frequently in dealing with xenoforms, environments and facilities on alien vessels, planetology, ect. From examining the geothermal energy in one of Bluefall's abyssal planes to analyzing the environmental impact of the asteroid that hit the Spes colony on Hammer's Star, ranks in this skill have paid off again and again.
History - Again, in Star*Drive, loads of history. I give a lot of information to the players in the form of power point presentations, but some questions the players have are answered by them rolling on this skill.
Local - I don't use this much. These are spacefarers, and they aren't in one place very long.
Physical Sciences - As with Earth and Life Sciences, the party often finds reasons that it would be handy to know physics, chemistry or astronomy, all of which are covered in one skill in d20 Modern.
Streetwise - This hasn't come up often, since my players have usually been more interested in using their knowledge of Civics to skirt the law than in outright defying it. But I would think people would find this coming up frequently for more seedy characters.
Tactics - Blood & Space 2 has a rule for using this to get an advantage in combat, though my players seldom use it for that. But it's the skill I have them roll on for most things military or combat related. For example, if you're being shot at, you can attempt to identify what kind of weapon was being used by the sound of the blast. I also allow players to make checks on this skill to determine the effectiveness of their own attacks -- noticing whether or not a creature shrugs off laser damage, for example.
Technology - This skill gets a good deal of use. Often when a player wants to know what a device does, identify what sensor systems appear to be installed on the gun drone that's currently pinning them down in the flight deck, or know what environment the treated surface of an object they found was meant to withstand, this is the skill I ask them to roll on.
Theology and Philosophy - This has been useful for roleplaying purposes, since there are religious and philosophical motivations to the behavior of many NPCs.

Often, I'll call for the better of two skill checks. If you actually have Craft (mechanical) then identifying a mechanism will be easier than the same check using Knowledge (technology). If a character wants to examine a weapon, he can use his knowledge of tactics, or his knowledge of technology in general to tell him something about it, depending on which would give the biggest bonus.

As for some of the other skills deemed by some to be less than useful, I'm wondering if at least for d20 Modern certain skills ought to be combined, like they did with Disable Device and Open Lock. The system seems to be built on the idea of broad skills. Some candidates I have in mind:

Acrobatics - Covers Balance and Tumble.
Athletics - Covers Climb and Jump, and possibly Swim.
Legerdemain - Combines Sleight of Hand with Escape Artist. There isn't really one good word to cover them both, but often these two disciplines are studied by the same people.

Mind you, the system is also designed around a default of DC 15 for most skill uses. I use a complex skill check system, which is handy for translating Alternity adventures, and makes it worthwhile to get skill ranks above 15.

Aussiegamer said:

craft builds the stuff, treat injury uses the stuff. So I can't see how craft (pharm) replaces treat injury????

Click to expand...

Read it again It's pointless because Treat Injury treats disease, not just injury. Treat Injury is the good skill; Craft (pharmaceutical) is the useless skill.

naviagate- hum yep has been tech replaced by GPS or devices like that. Still if they don't have access to this then you still have to get from a to b using a map.

Click to expand...

In the game rules, a GPS only gives a +4 bonus to the skill check.

Johnny Angel said:

Acrobatics - Covers Balance and Tumble.
Athletics - Covers Climb and Jump, and possibly Swim.
Legerdemain - Combines Sleight of Hand with Escape Artist. There isn't really one good word to cover them both, but often these two disciplines are studied by the same people.

Click to expand...

Nice ideas

"Elusive" for SoH and EA?