D&D 3E/3.5 the 3e skill system

[Weiley31]

My fave example of the skill prob in 3E was in Neverwinter Nights 1/Knights of The Old Republic 1

You didnt put your starting points into Persuasion? Well good luck trying to make those Persuade rolls succeed when you try to do the option for two important characters late in their respective games.

Neverwinter Nights 1 at least "had" a few items to give ya a slight chance. But even then the DC check is super high.

Honestly, I prefer the Profieciency system better.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I quit D&D/D20 after 1e, and did not return until 5e.

I like 5e, but I was thumbing through the various editions which I had missed, and I was struck by the way it seemed to do more than 5es, especially in the way it allowed you to customize your character.

How was it in actual gameplay?

The biggest problem is that, in practice, there were way too many skills for how many you could take. Most characters got 2 + Int mod skill points, which in practice meant you got two to three skills. 2-3 out of 36. And some of those skills (Knowledge, Profession, Perform, Craft) were further subdivided into multiple skills.

Overall there were two types of skills:

1. Skills that you benefited from getting as high as possible, or at least very high. Spot, Listen, Search, Stealth, Tumble, Use Magic Device, etc. A lot of them are opposed skills (where you and another character roll opposed checks.) In practice, you never really needed more than 10-13 ranks in a skill to always succeed, IMX. At that point with synergy and decent stats you could take 10 and get a 25 which is good enough for just about everything. In the meantime, characters with no ranks could virtually (or actually) never succeed on unskilled checks.

2. Skills that essentially had diminishing returns or that you only needed in order to get your Prestige class or only to get the synergy bonus (e.g., 5 ranks in Jump, you get +2 to Tumble). These skills you took to 5 or 8 ranks (level 2 or 5) and then switched to anything else. Some of the meaner Knowledge skills are the most common ones in this category.

There were also lots of other minor issues.

Cross-class skills were never worth it and always too expensive to bother with. Double cost plus capping out at half normal max ranks made them too expensive and too ineffective.

Lots of skills like Scrying, Decipher Script, Forgery, etc. were so rarely used that they essentially never came up. Most of those skills have rolled into another skill (e.g., Arcana) or have become tools in 5e.

Splitting Spot and Listen was an irritating dichotomy and almost never meaningful. 90% of the time, the thing you could spot you could also hear and vice-versa.

People had a hard time understanding Search vs Spot just like the do Investigate vs Perception. Lots of skills appeared to have significant overlap, which still continues (i.e., Persuasion vs Deception in 5e).

Use Magic Device and Tumble proved that if you want to give characters an ability useful in combat, you should just give them that ability straight up.

 

[Greenfield]

The thing is, this was functionally the case in 3.X too. Sure, in theory you got a certain number of ranks each level to put into any skill you wanted. But unless you picked a number of skills equal to the number of ranks you got at level up and always put your ranks into those skills, you fell behind the treadmill and didn’t have a reasonable chance of succeeding at level-appropriate challenges with the skill. Literally the only reason not to just pick a number of skills and keep them all maxed out was if you needed a few ranks in something else to qualify for a prestige class. 4e and 5e just removed the trap option of spreading your ranks too thin.

Could you walk me through that please? I'm not sure I'm getting what you wrote.

Let's look at the basic Fighter: 2 skill ranks per level, plus INT modifier and a possible Human point. Let's call it 3.

At first level the character starts with that, times four, so he has 12 points. He spends:
4 points in Ride (he's planning to work the Mounted Combat feat line).
3 points in Swim (Gotta counter the armor check penalty early)
2 points in Survival (gets him 1 rank + Wisdom b/c cross class)
2 points in Spot *Again, gets him 1 because of cross class)
1 point in Craft - Boyer/fletcher.

There are his 12 points. For anything else he has base ability only.

He'll gain three points per level from there on out.

So explain how he's going to "fall behind the treadmill" please. I'm not sure what that even means.

BTW, I'm not trying to challenge what you said, just to understand it.

 

[Greenfield]

Splitting Spot and Listen was an irritating dichotomy and almost never meaningful. 90% of the time, the thing you could spot you could also hear and vice-versa.

People had a hard time understanding Search vs Spot just like the do Investigate vs Perception. Lots of skills appeared to have significant overlap, which still continues (i.e., Persuasion vs Deception in 5e).

Use Magic Device and Tumble proved that if you want to give characters an ability useful in combat, you should just give them that ability straight up.

I guess I'm looking at this from a different perspective.

You talk about splitting Spot and Listen. Running from earlier versions to the later ones, 3.* didn't split them. Later versions joined them.

In a dark place or where line of sight is obscured, such as the classic dungeon crawl, Listen counts much more than Spot. On a wind swept savanna Spot is more useful, at least during the day time. Separate situations give distinct advantages to one or the other.

Search v Spot is pretty easy: Spot notices details. Search is a more hands-on experience, poking and probing, lifting things out of the way, sorting through or shifting to get a better angle.

As for skills like Tumble: We don't want to give them an ability useful in combat. We want to give them the choice of working in that direction. It was never supposed to be universal (everybody has it) nor automatic.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Could you walk me through that please? I'm not sure I'm getting what you wrote.

Let's look at the basic Fighter: 2 skill ranks per level, plus INT modifier and a possible Human point. Let's call it 3.

At first level the character starts with that, times four, so he has 12 points. He spends:
4 points in Ride (he's planning to work the Mounted Combat feat line).
3 points in Swim (Gotta counter the armor check penalty early)
2 points in Survival (gets him 1 rank + Wisdom b/c cross class)
2 points in Spot *Again, gets him 1 because of cross class)
1 point in Craft - Boyer/fletcher.

There are his 12 points. For anything else he has base ability only.

He'll gain three points per level from there on out.

So explain how he's going to "fall behind the treadmill" please. I'm not sure what that even means.

BTW, I'm not trying to challenge what you said, just to understand it.

I'll second that. As a party grows, different people specialize in different skills. One guy is the face man, one or two walk point, one is the designate searcher, and so forth.

I don't see how anyone can 'fall behind'.

 

[Greenfield]

My fave example of the skill prob in 3E was in Neverwinter Nights 1/Knights of The Old Republic 1

You didnt put your starting points into Persuasion? Well good luck trying to make those Persuade rolls succeed when you try to do the option for two important characters late in their respective games.

Neverwinter Nights 1 at least "had" a few items to give ya a slight chance. But even then the DC check is super high.

Honestly, I prefer the Profieciency system better.

You're comparing a computer game (NWN) to the RPG.

There isn't a Persuasion skill in D*D 3.*. There's Diplomacy. There's a "Persuasive" feat, which adds to the Diplomacy and Bluff skills (I think), but I don't think that's what you were talking about.

Still, the problem you're complaining about only happens in the electronic environment, where the DM can't award circumstance modifiers for good role playing, and you can't talk people into things unless you're a trained con-man.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I was thinking about leveling the 5e skills:

Untrained: No modifiers.
Trained: Attribute mods.
Expert: Attribute & proficiency mods.
Master: Attribute & proficiency mods plus Advantage.

 

[dave2008]

I was thinking about leveling the 5e skills:

Untrained: No modifiers.
Trained: Attribute mods.
Expert: Attribute & proficiency mods.
Master: Attribute & proficiency mods plus Advantage.

I generally like the idea, but I don't think you want master to add advantage. The reason is that it can be cancelled by disadvantage. If you don't want to double prof. bonus, why not just make it an additional +2 or something.

 

[tetrasodium]

While there are some legitimate gripes about the 5e skill system, it's generally an improvement over 3.5 in almost every way. Others pointed out the way you needed to max out skills or were mostly just wasting points, synergy bonuses & the way you needed to plan ahead with spending so you could qualify for certain feats/PrCs was problematic as was tracking synergy bonuses & the like.

 

[Weiley31]

I generally like the idea, but I don't think you want master to add advantage. The reason is that it can be cancelled by disadvantage. If you don't want to double prof. bonus, why not just make it an additional +2 or something.

Expert should basically be like Expertise or doubling prof.