Death to the Skill Monkey...

[sirwmholder]

When I began gaming... my DM at the time told our group that a well balanced party consisted of a Priest, a Thief, a Warrior, and a Wizard. In 3.x we were introduced to the generic classes Expert, Spellcaster, & Warrior... ( Priest and Wizard were combined but otherwise very similar ). Now in 4e we are being told of the 4 roles... Controller, Defender, Leader & Striker.

With all of the roles being Combat roles it seems as though the expert is no longer a defining party role. Now out of every edition I have felt it was odd to balance a skill class against combat classes... so this is a change I agree with. However, since I haven't seen it mentioned I was curious how everyone else felt about this change.

William Holder

 

[olshanski]

I think that the way character generation is created, there is a stong incentive to specialize... a group of 4 specialists will usually far outshine a group of 4 generalists....

A fighter doesn't excel by taking weaponfocus (axe), weaponfocus(sword), weaponfocus(bow), weaponfocus (spear)...
A fighter excels by taking weaponfocus(sword), Specialization(sword), improved critical (sword), improved weaponfocus(sword).

So what you have are character that choose to excel at a certian type of fighting (archery, melee, conjuration, evocation), and you have characters that excell at a broad range of skills... (diplomacy, sense motive, etcetera)

Whenever there is combat, the skillmonkey basically sits idly, and whenever you have a skill-use area, the person with the skills gets to shine and everyone else gets to sit out.

I'd much rather have a complete separation of combat and non-combat abilities... so that each character has a chance to be equally effective in combat, and each character has a chance to be equally effective outside of combat....
Perhaps you have a melee fighter that is great with negotiation, a wizard that is great at disarming traps, an archer that is great at stealth, and a conjurer that is great at balance and climbing.

 

[HP Dreadnought]

With the relative increase in the value of skills and their refinement, I would speculate that each class becomes an "expert" with the skills tied to its particular role.

The need for a single 'does everything' skill specialist is gone and would be inappropriate for the 4e model.

 

[Lackhand]

When I began gaming... my DM at the time told our group that a well balanced party consisted of a Priest, a Thief, a Warrior, and a Wizard. In 3.x we were introduced to the generic classes Expert, Spellcaster, & Warrior... ( Priest and Wizard were combined but otherwise very similar ). Now in 4e we are being told of the 4 roles... Controller, Defender, Leader & Striker.

With all of the roles being Combat roles it seems as though the expert is no longer a defining party role. Now out of every edition I have felt it was odd to balance a skill class against combat classes... so this is a change I agree with. However, since I haven't seen it mentioned I was curious how everyone else felt about this change.

William Holder

Nod. To wax tangential, I was sort of hoping for two tracks here -- you pick a Class class, and a Profession class, and level them up either separately (for a low powered game) or together (as the default, for a gestalt-like game). Profession would be all your skills, class would be your combat statistics, each would be balanced against like, and everyone would live in happiness forever.

Sigh.

I don't think you're crazy, I think this is a real shift; I think the 'expert' character is being spread out among the party, so that everyone knows how to do a little bit of something. I think there's still a place for specifically smooth-talkers and lock-pickers, mind you.

 

[FabioMilitoPagliara]

they said that roles are balanced both in fight and out of fight

 

[Masquerade]

I agree with the OP. All characters being able to contribute uniquely both in and out of combat is a good thing.

 

[sirwmholder]

...Whenever there is combat, the skillmonkey basically sits idly, and whenever you have a skill-use area, the person with the skills gets to shine and everyone else gets to sit out.

I'd much rather have a complete separation of combat and non-combat abilities... so that each character has a chance to be equally effective in combat, and each character has a chance to be equally effective outside of combat...

So far the general consensus is this is a good change. It allows for each character to have a skill focus different from everyone else. See... that's how I feel about it... but when I proposed this very change, several months ago in a 3.x homebrew, it was met with a lukewarm response at best.

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=203343

I'm just glad to know I'm not alone in wanting my character to use skills to show personal growth and interest outside of Combat.

Thank you for your time,
William Holder

 

[Lord Zardoz]

First, some half remembered info.

My current understanding is that 4th edition will have three types of encounters. Combat encounters, Social encounters, and Skill Challenges. The Skill Challenges (for lack of a better name, also, I cannot recall what such encounters were referred to as) would be the means by which a DM would put the players in peril with rock slides, a forest fire, or confront them with things like a locked door.

Skills will work mostly like Saga, with a minimum base rating for the skill, which is probably similar to Bab, and a trained rating, which would add +X. The logic is that if you throw an obstacle like a loose rock wall that the party needs to climb, it is not really ideal if only 1 or 2 people in the party are able to climb it. Also, since various Skill Challenges could show up in combat (think of a sword fight on a narrow beam over a lava pit, where you need to make skill checks to stay on the beam), it is hard to put a level appropriate Skill obstacle into a fight when you have one guy with max ranks in the skill.

If I recall correctly, the gap between an trained check and an untrained check will be +5 for the trained guy. Significant, but if we assume that a typical skill DC will be scaled so that after adding the untrained / character level bonus, a typical challenge needs an untrained character to roll a 10, and a hard skill check calls for a 15, the +5 bonus for being trained can be significant.

Now for speculation:

I suspect that for skills which can be used untrained, or generally obtained as a cross class skill in 3rd edition, everyone will have a reasonable chance at overcoming a level appropriate obstacle. This would probably cover Climb, Swim, Balance, Ride, Spot, Listen, Bluff, Sense Motive, Mundane Knowledge skills like History, Craft, Profession, Hide, and Move Silently. I also suspect that some classes will automatically be trained in some skills (Rogues would get Spot, Listen, Hide, Move Silently, Wizards would get Knowledge, etc). Some races will probably have a flat bonus to some skills (Elves and Move Silently, Dwarves with Craft). Some skills will be class limited / trained only (Disable Device, Pick Pocket, Spell Craft, Forgery). And some classes will simply allow for more skills to be fully trained (allowing for Rogue and Ranger to retain their edge over fighters when dealing with skill checks).

I suspect that if someone really wanted to be a hard core skill monkey type, they will be able to build such a character by using Feats to be considered Trained in more skills, thereby getting a bonus to those skills.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[wingsandsword]

One of the big weaknesses of 4e to my eyes is that the game is built entirely around balancing combat to the point that every class is defined exclusively by it's combat role. 3e was certainly built around balancing it around combat, but not exclusively, there was plenty of room for non-combat aspects to characters, but with 4e it looks like some of those like the various non-combat oriented skills are being removed.

Even back in AD&D, the thief wasn't there to be a "striker" or whatever, he was a trap expert and climber and lockpick and scout, with combat as a secondary role and backstab a nice bonus if you could pull it off. Fighters (and fighter-types like Paladins and Rangers and Monks) were the ones that shined when the party got into melee. Thieves and Clerics could help some but it wasn't their specialty, and Wizard spells sure were nice in a fight but it was clear that a Wizard wanted to avoid fights when possible because of their low HP and AC (in my AD&D days, we always used the expression "Armor Class Mage" to mean AC 10). A lot of the appeal of Clerics and Wizards and their magic was the non-combat spells to help the party out. A lot of the appeal of thieves was their skills and ability to get into and out of places, not being seen, with backstabbing being just another of their perks, not the whole point of them.

One thing I saw as a big improvement of 3e over 2e was breaking out of the rigid Warrior/Priest/Rogue/Mage set of only four character groups and everything had to be one or the other. 3e and 3.5e expanded classes wide open and added countless PrC's that were more built around flavor or style than a rigidly defined role (Horizon Walker, Dragon Disciple, and Exemplar come to mind). Later base classes like Archivist freely blended from concepts of Priest and Mage. For much of the 3e era it felt like classes were created because the setting or genre being depicted needed a class that felt like it, not like it was a mechanical necessity to create a class to fill a specific role.

I always liked the "skill monkey" characters, the ones with useful skills for any occasion, and were well rounded. Those characters might not be as mathematically optimum as a specialized character when initiative happened, but they sure were useful to have around.

Then again, Noble and Bard were two of my favorite classes. . .

 

[Thyrwyn]

. . . but with 4e it looks like some of those like the various non-combat oriented skills are being removed.

My impression has been, not that they have been removed, but that they have been divorced from class. The balance dynamic has always been that as long as the character's class allowed the character to shine somewhere, then the class was balanced. Game sessions looked something like a long series of monologues, with each character taking the stage to meet certain challenges while the rest took a seat.

The new dynamic is that each class should give the character something worthwhwile to contribute in every challenge. We have had detailed discussion of the combat roles in the Races & Classes book and elsewhere, as an example of this philosophy. Game sessions will (hopefully) be more like dialogues or conversations. My impression has been that the same will be done with non-combat roles.