dave2008
Legend
That was not the system @Jd Smith1 was proposing. I was responding to his / her proposal.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.Expert should basically be like Expertise or doubling prof.
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 skillsI was thinking about leveling the 5e skills:
Untrained: No modifiers.
Trained: Attribute mods.
Expert: Attribute & proficiency mods.
Master: Attribute & proficiency mods plus Advantage.
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?
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.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.
This is fundamentally a pretty good idea. Personally, I would recommend:I was thinking about leveling the 5e skills:
Untrained: No modifiers.
Trained: Attribute mods.
Expert: Attribute & proficiency mods.
Master: Attribute & proficiency mods plus Advantage.
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.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.
I think I see where our trains of thought part ways.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.
If I wanted average my character wouldn't be an adventurer.