Drago Rinato
Explorer
Maybe Arnold and Phelps can have the same STR score but have had very different training... in D&D there is a ultra generic Athletic, weight lifting have really specific training.
D&D 5E Skills in 5e
Sadrik
First Post
I dont think that is what he is saying. It is not only the stat that makes him good, it is also not all skill that makes someone good. It is both. It has to be both. A 6 STR gamer is not going to be a great swimmer either.
In the basic game though, where skills are just stats. Stats have to represent skill and stat rolled in one. It cannot be only how strong you are, it has to represent how you use the stat/skill to the best of your ability. You dont have to be a roided out 2x4 to get have a high strength. A high strength can represent a tremendous amount of training in strength stuff. I would leave it to the player to decide how they look.
Sadrik
First Post
I also liked this. It was clear and allowed and disallowed certain rolls based on how skilled you are.
Yes, but the current system says that even if you can't possibly be a good swimmer, you are because you have a high strength. It's easier just to remove it from the equation since skill always surpasses any type of physical characteristic anyway.
However, that's not how I do things myself, I simply make it a choice. The player defines what the 20 str means, not the system and certainly not to all things. Potential is all it is.
Blackwarder
Adventurer
What about having abilities "unlock" certain skills? or instead of skills they unlock traits? so a str 13+ can unlock lifting and str 16+ can get a breaking bars trait etc...
Just throwing it out there.
Warder
Just throwing it out there.
Warder
Li Shenron
Legend
In 3e the same principles applied to feats, but you still had to pick those feats, and IMO that was fair otherwise you'd unlock tons of them.
It might work for skills to, but OTOH you already have something similar in the fact that with a certain ability score you're limited to a maximum DC (unless you get external help). So there is already an intrinsic "unlocking" of e.g. the ability of breaking down a wooden door, then an iron door, then a stone door etc.
Explicit, blunt unlocking (instead of the current implicit "soft unlocking") can have some benefit for certain gaming styles, but might also put more stress on the players and waste more time when they are assigning/increasing their ability scores. It also delivers a 'feel' that the game does not encourage trying for tasks, if that's what a gaming group is looking for.
I looked at something similar for my own game where skill points were both a total and a selection process. Let's take an athletics skill for instance, where you might have several different athletic activities under it, like swimming, climbing, lifting, etc. The skill points you put into that skill would increase the overall number. You put 3 skill points into athletics over various levels. Whenever you perform an athletic activity you roll using the +3 to athletics. In addition, each skill point is used to select a particular skill feat. So someone with 3 points in athletics could choose something unique like advanced swimming which allows the character to do something special with the skill (what might have been a feat in 3x like holding your breath for a long time underwater). I then gave the rogue a class ability which took it even further and allowed them to do truly unique things with the skills, like walk on walls or spot invisible creatures.
It's a little over the top and doesn't appeal to some types of gamers. Nor do I think that 5e should use any such thing. It was part of my project to get rid of "feats" and integrate them into various other components of the game, like ability scores, skills, class abilities, etc.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
It's reasonable though. 4e had the machinery to do a similar thing using prereqs (and 3e too in essence) where you could level and class limit feats, and/or put ability score reqs on them, so "Walk on Walls" could be a Rogue, level 5, DEX 13, STR 13 feat. 4e basically chose to not do much with prereqs and let players decide what they think is appropriate though. For one thing 4e was to some extent undermining class differentiation (IE you could be a perfectly good 'thief' who's class was 'fighter'), but they also (correctly I think) decided that level limits were kind of silly if feats are written well, and that actually stating that you have to have DEX N to walk on a wall when it still devolves down to a skill check didn't matter that much.
Obviously people might like to make it matter more, but remember, the more prereqs you put on things the more character concepts you are basically stating are out of bounds. 4e ultimately got a lot of criticism for feet prereqs and other similar arbitrary limits that amounted to "play this way".
Sadrik
First Post
I am very much against prerequisites in general. I would much rather see smart game design where you rather than requiring a 13 you instead get the benefit by having a +1 or more from a stat. Take a hypothetical lame feat... Prerequisite 13 INT, you gain 1 language +1 per INT bonus you have. Why does a prerequisite even need to be on there?
Smart game design over needless prerequisites, I would rather see prerequisites only be there to show chains of feats.
With regards to skills I don't like having prerequisites too. They are needlessly complex, and would require book look ups during play. Better to have smart game design, that looks at DCs and how they interact with potential bonuses. It will be a lot easier to do that now that the math is flat on these checks (no +1/2 level with a potential +5 or skill ranks of 2 + 1/2 level or 3 + level). With those wacky scaling mechanics out of the way you can look at potential DCs over a campaign and write DCs with a real understanding of what characters would potentially have as a bonus, because it will not be that different at 1st or at 20th.
Smart game design over needless prerequisites, I would rather see prerequisites only be there to show chains of feats.
With regards to skills I don't like having prerequisites too. They are needlessly complex, and would require book look ups during play. Better to have smart game design, that looks at DCs and how they interact with potential bonuses. It will be a lot easier to do that now that the math is flat on these checks (no +1/2 level with a potential +5 or skill ranks of 2 + 1/2 level or 3 + level). With those wacky scaling mechanics out of the way you can look at potential DCs over a campaign and write DCs with a real understanding of what characters would potentially have as a bonus, because it will not be that different at 1st or at 20th.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I don't understand what was so "whacky" about scaling or how flat math fixes it. All that flat math does is allow weird situations like "I'm a level 1 ranger, and I can track better than that 20th level ranger over there!" That doesn't seem in any way a good thing.
I'm neither a fan nor a critic of prereqs. They can be used in various ways depending on what the goals of the system are, and not having them or having only a few that set up feat chains are perfectly valid choices. OTOH you could virtually build all your classes, races, etc around using a prereq system, or do other things with it, and those would work too. Given that any 'lookups' are things that happen in chargen I don't think there's really any significant added complexity.
Honestly, I think the scaling in DDN will be MORE complex than the scaling in 4e was. Instead of just knowing that a bonus is DEX + .5 level + skill, you now have a variable stat bonus, some sort of skill bonus based on needing to stack various feats etc to keep improving (since you WILL want some way to be better than EVERYONE else at high enough level). You're actually putting more of it on adding up various feats, and forcing the players to add in STAT bonus at play time instead of ahead of time, even though 99% of the time the same stat will apply to any given skill. I don't honestly see any benefit so far to the DDN skill system over the 4e one, which is simpler, quicker, and in the vast majority of cases does exactly what you want. The only time the 4e system COULD hypothetically seem odd is if your wizard for some weird reason at level 20 has to get through some low level lock, and finds it easy to do so. This is a vastly corner case situation as 99.9% of the time the rogue will simply be there to just glance at the lock and defeat it. No skill system is perfect, but 4e's at least was fast and simple to run. DDN's is a step backwards so far.
