When people don't max out skills...

[MerricB]

I've recently realised that Wizards have actually done some very subtle* things with their setting of DCs for various tasks.

A DC of 15 for Tumble is easily attainable - a DC of 25 is less so.

However, a DC of 15 is sufficient for most uses of the skill. Thus, a high-level character who doesn't want to devote all of his skill points to the skill can diversify without losing total effectiveness.

Similar points apply to Concentration and Spellcraft. There are higher-level uses, but you can decide "that's the level that I want" and then go and concentrate on something else.

I rather like that feature of D&D 3e - you can get benefits out of skills without needing to commit to them for "life".

(*subtle to me; I might just be blind )

Cheers!

 

[Anax]

Hehe. Yup, this is a nice feature--and like most choices in D&D3E, there's always a certain amount of angst involved in the choice (at least for me.) For example: my monk character has a pretty darned good Tumble skill: currently +20 at level 10. This means she can always tumble past a single opponent easily. If she takes the -10 penalty for accelerated tumbling, she'll still succeed most of the time. She can tumble past two or three enemies fairly easily, can tumble through a single enemy pretty well, and can even (using the epic SRD's DC 35 check) stand up from prone as a free action 1/4 of the time. So, there's sort of a tension here between "Should I just stop now, or keep on working my way up to truly heroic levels of tumbling?"

In fact, this is pretty different from the 3.0 version of Tumble, too. With the 3.0 version, once you hit 15, you're golden for most uses. In 3.5, the added difficulties for faster tumbling, tumbling past more opponents, etc. set up a more nicely smooth transition, which I think is a good thing. If you *only* have a few levels (like the way old Tumble worked, and like many current skills still work) at, say, 15 + something, 25 + something, etc., then it's much easier to reach a cut-off that makes you feel happy. If you have a smoother progression going up (+2 for each additional person to tumble past in a round works very nicely), there's no clear place to stop.

You still, as you say, get benefits of skills without committing to them for life: but instead of thinking "Well, I need an extra +10 before this becomes *really* powerful", every little bit you add lets you do things that are even more impressive.

For other skills, I've routinely stopped at around +15 modifiers in order to branch out into other abilities--but there are a few central skills on each character I make that are part of the definition of the character, and will stay maxed out for all time, probably.

 

[Soldarin]

There are 2 different types of skills, when looking at maxing out skills: those with 'fixed' DCs, and opposed checks. With 'fixed' DC skills you'll eventually reach a level where further skill ranks don't add anything useful (barring ELH), whereas opposed skills require constant increases to stay ahead of the competition. Pretty obvious, probably, but most of my players failed to notice this at first.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Yea I've noticed that too. One comment though on concentrate. When trying to cast a spell while getting whacked by sharp pointing objects it's best to have maxed out the skill