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

[dave2008]

Expert should basically be like Expertise or doubling prof.

That was not the system @Jd Smith1 was proposing. I was responding to his / her proposal.

 

[tetrasodium]

I was thinking about leveling the 5e skills:

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

That could work if you paired trained with the old style +int mod skills count as "trained" but I think it might need a bit more like restricting it to class skills

 

[cbwjm]

I liked the change in pathfinder where you never gained 4x your skill points at level 1. Instead, class skills just had a +3 class bonus when you add a skill point. Cross class skills only cost a single skill point and you could have the same number of skill ranks in a cross-class skill as a class skill, you just didn't gain that +3 bonus.

 

[Nagol]

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?

Annoying., It greatly increased initial char creation time for limited effect and because it existed, it was used to gate prestige class entry, often in obscure and unintuitive ways.

It was nice later on that one could be somehere between an expert and a novice, but generally most players increased the same skills every level (once their prestige class requirements were met). There were a few skills, such as Concentration that effectively had an upper limit on their effectiveness and investment slowed or stopped once that hit in favour of others.

The knowledge skills were poorly designed and/or described and there were obvious balance issues both in terms of what high ranks could accomplish and between the effectiveness of skills compared to other in-game resources.

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

So, this character is very likely to reach a point where his bonus is too low to have a reasonable chance of success at level-appropriate checks in most of these skills, assuming he survives long enough. There is no way he’ll be able to keep up in Survival and Spot because they’re cross-class. If he puts his three ranks into Ride, Swim, and Craft every level, he can keep up with level-appropriate DCs for those three skills, though thanks to the armor check penalty and only having put 3 ranks in Swim at first level instead of 4, he’s always likely to struggle at level-appropriate Swim checks, and having only 1 in Craft means at best he will be 15% worse at it than anyone in his party who maxed it out.

Unless he needs something weird like 6 ranks of Craft (basketweaving) to qualify for the prestige class he wants or whatever, the optimal thing for this character to have done would have been to put 4 ranks into each of 3 class skills, and put his 3 ranks per level into those three skills every level-up. Less than that, and he’ll fall behind the expected progression, especially if he takes any cross-class skills. 4e recognized this problem, so it removed the “option” to screw yourself over by not just keeping the skills you want a chance of succeeding at maxed out and ignoring everything else. But people didn’t like that skill training was just a flat +5, so in 5e they kept skill training binary but gave it level-based progression.

 

[Charlaquin]

I was thinking about leveling the 5e skills:

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

This is fundamentally a pretty good idea. Personally, I would recommend:

Untrained: Ability mod only
Novice: Ability mod + half-proficiency bonus
Proficient: Ability mod + proficiency bonus
Expert: Ability mod + double proficiency bonus

This would be in line with 5e’s math, but give a bit more granularity to characters who aren’t bards or rogues.

 

[Charlaquin]

Sort of. It's definitely true with opposed skills because monsters and NPCs would often have them maxed out - and for monsters it was based on hit dice, not CR, and that meant they could grow even faster than PC scores in some cases.

But many other skills had suggested DCs that weren't level-dependent. Some tasks could only be accomplished by high level PCs, but that was because they involved lots of difficulty. There were skills that a PC could taper off investing in once they achieved their desired level of competence.

True, but those level-dependent checks still happened, especially if you played published modules. So, if you wanted to be able to reliably succeed on those checks when they came up, the smart move was to max out the skills you wanted to be competent at and let your party cover the rest.

 

[Greenfield]

So, this character is very likely to reach a point where his bonus is too low to have a reasonable chance of success at level-appropriate checks in most of these skills, assuming he survives long enough. There is no way he’ll be able to keep up in Survival and Spot because they’re cross-class. If he puts his three ranks into Ride, Swim, and Craft every level, he can keep up with level-appropriate DCs for those three skills, though thanks to the armor check penalty and only having put 3 ranks in Swim at first level instead of 4, he’s always likely to struggle at level-appropriate Swim checks, and having only 1 in Craft means at best he will be 15% worse at it than anyone in his party who maxed it out.

Unless he needs something weird like 6 ranks of Craft (basketweaving) to qualify for the prestige class he wants or whatever, the optimal thing for this character to have done would have been to put 4 ranks into each of 3 class skills, and put his 3 ranks per level into those three skills every level-up. Less than that, and he’ll fall behind the expected progression, especially if he takes any cross-class skills. 4e recognized this problem, so it removed the “option” to screw yourself over by not just keeping the skills you want a chance of succeeding at maxed out and ignoring everything else. But people didn’t like that skill training was just a flat +5, so in 5e they kept skill training binary but gave it level-based progression.

I think I see where our trains of thought part ways.

The 4e model presumes that everyone gets a bonus to attack, AC and skills every two levels. It also presumes that it gets progressively harder to do anything, every two levels.

That's what you're talking about when you reference "level appropriate checks".

My view? It doesn't get any harder to saddle, handle or ride a horse (Ride/Handle Animal). It doesn't get any harder to follow tracks in the wild or live off the land (Survival). The target DC to Tumble to/past/through an opponent's area doesn't go up with levels. It doesn't get any harder to Craft Alchemy (or anything else for that matter) at higher levels.

Knowledge checks may go up as you need to track down more and more obscure bits of lore. Spot, Listen, Hide and Move Silent results need to go up only as the opponents' ability to oppose does, and since they don't get auto-bumps in those areas as they advance any more than the PC's does.

Hills and trees don't get any harder to climb, water is still water so Smim checks don't necessarily go up.

I could go on, but I think you see where I'm going.

In the auto-advance world you need to auto-advance. In the world of progressive/selective skill advancement, the target numbers don't all advance so you general skill base doesn't need to.

They're different models all the way through. I happen to prefer a model where I decide what my character gets good at. You seem to prefer a model where everyone follows a statistical average.

If I wanted average my character wouldn't be an adventurer.

 

[Nagol]

3.X does have effective auto-advance in some skill areas though. For example, the difficulty in knowing anything about a creature is based on a DC of 10? + Hit Dice. Higher level threats typically have more hit dice (often many more than 1:1 to level) so knowing information about your foes becomes progressively harder at higher levels. Having middling ranks is about the same as having none.

It may be just as easy to learn about orcs at level 10 as level 1, but the propensity of orcs as a frequent encounter typically drops off.

 

[Jd Smith1]

If I wanted average my character wouldn't be an adventurer.

I am exactly the opposite: adventurers make predicable Hollywood films; ordinary men make history.