NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 3993923" data-attributes="member: 29398">OK...say I hypothetically want to change how skills work: in order to make every stat point important (instead of every even stat point) I want the roll to be *under* the relevant stat, modified by your skill level and a difficulty modifier applied by situation. (it also puts a crimp on roll-high cheaters if that's an issue)  Sounds simple, right?  Well, it's not:Knock-on effect #1: in 3e, stats can easily get too high for this to be practical.  When stats top out at about 18-20, no real problem; but in 3e a stat approaching 30 or even more is not at all unlikely, and low-to-mid 20's are relatively commonplace.  Add a reasonable skill modifier and the d20 roll becomes too insignificant.  How to fix: well, the only real way is to get rid of most stat-boost items and a lot of racial templates that give highly-skewed stats; a huge knock-on effect for something so trivial.  Or, fix by using a bigger die - a d30, perhaps - but that increases the randomness even more; probably not a good thing.Knock-on effect #1a: now the high stats have been reduced, the average party ability has been weakened slightly, meaning the CR numbers are now a bit skewed...does this require encounter adjustments, or ExP adjustments, or...???Knock-on effect #2: Some stats may now not make sense to be applied to some skills; e.g.  Wisdom as the base stat for Listen, and this would need a review.  (side note: Listen is one skill that really doesn't tie well to *any* stat)And so on.The reason I use this example is that ever since 3e was released I've wanted to come up with some significant way of making an 11 more useful than a 10, or a 17 more useful than a 16, other than when taking ability damage.  3.5's setting the stat-buff spells to a fixed-number increase didn't help here!On-the-fly thought here: one could make odd stats useful with skills simply by having the stat bonus - for skills only - become tied to odd numbers...11 = +1, 13 = +2, and so on.  Hmmmm......Lanefan</blockquote>

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