Nyaricus said:
You came in here with "Stop trying. Really." and want to claim that you are adding something here?
Well, yes. I believe that this proposal is a dead end and that it would be better for you to apply your talents elsewhere. It sounds as if I expressed that thought very poorly, for which I'm sorry. I have, despite that, offered several specific proposals to improve it.
I can't defend myself without changing the topic from the merits of your proposal to who's in the wrong, something that I have no desire to argue about. I do, however, owe you an apology for confusing you with someone else and mistaking this for a continuation of a thread lost to the crash. I incorrectly thought that you'd already seen my earlier posts on this topic and had chosen to ignore them without a response. I therefore didn't repeat what I had said before, and my initial comments seemed to come out of nowhere.
When you preemptorily dismissed every suggestion I made, with comments that they weren't pertinent, or weren't reasoning but "baggage," or that I'm in conflict with the very purpose of the forum, I felt insulted. You appear to be attacking my motives instead of my points and telling me that you think I have nothing to add here.
I think Primitive Screwhead is right. I don't like the course this conversation has taken either. I hope that addressing his points on their merits will help steer it back on track.
Primitive Screwhead said:
This would definately make it so experts are usually *experts* compared to the equal level fighter who happens to do some blacksmithing on the side, thereby acheiving the stated goals.
I believe that you are mistaken about this. Please let me explain why.
The expert with Skill Focus and the fighter with Skill Focus have
exactly the same bonus on their craft checks—under either this house rule and the RAW. If only one of the two has the feat, that one will be better, under either this house rule or the RAW. This house rule does nothing at all to stop a fighter from becoming an über-blacksmith. It doesn't even impose any additional cost. It does severely penalize an adventurer who puts a few ranks in the profession for flavor, takes up blacksmithing as a hobby, or becomes the village blacksmith when he retires. It does destroy the niche protection the game gives the existing classes.
If the complaint is that it's unrealistic for a fighter delving through a dungeon to improve at blacksmithing at the same rate as a full-time blacksmith, saying, "Ah, but he had the same Skill Focus as the expert before he went in," or even, "Ah, but he took a one-level dip in the expert class first!" doesn't adequately solve the problem. This is why I say that the proposal fails to achieve its stated goals.
The optional training rules on page 197 of the
Dungeon Master's Guide are, in my opinion, a much simpler solution without the undesirable side-effects. (I don't recall whether I said this before or after the crash, so I apologize if I'm repeating an impertinent comment.)
Lorehead, the key phrase in my quote about economic powerbase is "...forget building guildhouses,..."
Without the advantage Craft/Profession as class skills, you either need to up-level every guild member in order to have the economic wherewithal to build a guild. Now, if you want a campaign world without guild houses and the potential political plots that they can create.. no big deal. If, OTOH, you want a heavy population of political powers... then you need to have competant Experts.
Why? What is the reasoning behind this statement?
Absolutely nothing prevents a DM from saying that a certain guild is an economic powerhouse. Indeed, the
DMG discusses this possibility on page 138. Since D&D doesn't even try to be an economic simulation, each DM assigns political and economic power arbitrarily. Changing the skill system is beside the point; there is no meaningful link between the few economic transactions, involving the PCs, that the game bothers to represent and the economy as a whole. You could completely revamp Profession checks from top to bottom, and it would make no difference to how powerful guilds are in the setting.
With or without this change, the guild leaders couldn't be both low-level and relevant because a handful of ranks in craft skills make no real difference. Even forced to spend cross-class skill points, characters with a high Intelligence or Wisdom would beat the NPCs' skill checks a few levels later, to say nothing of how easy it would be to manipulate the low-level guildmasters in negotiations.
Also, the expert is too inferior a class to ever become competent. At best, you could design a completely new class around its skeleton, but any viable alternative to the PC classes would be as different from the expert as the bard and artificer are.
Change the fighter to a high-level rogue, and he'll not only be as good a blacksmith, he'll have more feats, know more skills, and be an order of magnitude better at everything else, even if he has to take Skill Focus at first level. Experts remain as useless as before; any character you could build as an expert, you could build better as a rogue instead. Even if you gave experts a few unique class skills for niche protection, and did not allow Skill Focus to make up the difference, that would at most encourage players to take one level of expert and then advance as a rogue from then on: even if they have to buy two skills cross-class from that point on, an exp 1/rog
n build remains superior to a straight expert build in every way. Thus, your proposal turns the expert into, at best, a one-level class like the 3.0 ranger.
Finally, you can't logically justify a important guild in 3E run by experts, unless you first rewrite the item creation rules from the ground up. Recall that, as soon as your bonus on a craft skill reaches +10 (which it easily can at first level), you can take 10 and create a masterwork item. For all but a few crafts with special rules, raising your bonus above that point only allows you to create items faster, not to create new items.
If a wizard learns to craft magic armor and weapons, he'll be able to take ten and create his own masterwork items
even if he bought his craft skills cross-class. At that point, expert sword-makers become economically insignificant, since even one magic sword can be worth more than all the masterwork swords the expert can churn out in a lifetime. More to the point, the PCs have long stopped using non-magical swords, so even if the experts can make them faster than anyone else, the players won't care. It won't ever be relevant to the game.
It sounds to me as if you're looking for a something that D&D simply can't provide without a major rewrite. This house rule certainly doesn't get you there.
Honestly, the tone you provide all us lovely ENnies is just downright rude.
