Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 307137" data-attributes="member: 2011">Sure.Skills are tight in 3E. Most classes cannot even afford what their players consider the basics, let alone additional skills such as Sense Motive.Bluff is mostly good for a Rogue, but rarely good for anyone else.So, here you have a skill (Bluff) which can be extremely high with little effort for a Rogue and most other characters cannot afford more than a little Sense Motive, so his Bluff almost always works unless it is ludicrous.On the other hand, people pull Bluff and Sense Motive out whenever they want some weird initiative / decision making type of things to occur.Which means that your combatant types such as Fighters, Paladins, Monks, etc. suck at these types of confrontations and Rogues tend to excel.Why should Rogues almost always win these types of things? It doesn't make sense. Yes, they are supposed to be sneaky and dexterous, but that should not overlap into being QuickDraw McGraws virtually every single time. There should be a lot of Rangers and Monks who are just as fast or faster than Rogues, but not in this situation. Why?I would never have combat events revolve around opposed skills that most characters cannot afford to purchase.In fact, in our campaign, characters gain a bonus to Spot (+1 at levels 1, 4, etc.), Listen (+1 at levels 2, 5, etc.), and Sense Motive (+1 at levels 3, 6, etc.). The reason is that without this, a lot of classes at high level have to take a bunch of cross class skills in these, just in order to have some minor ability to be perceptive.That's nonsense.I am a 20th level Wizard who has adventured for 5 years and I still never notice the Bandits hiding in a tree, even though I have been ambushed like this dozens of times.Or, I am a 20th level Wizard who has parlayed with Kings and Dukes and Merchants and I get faked out every single time by a low level punk Rogue trying to sell me spell components.Or, I am a 20th level Wizard who has adventured for 5 years and I still never bother to look up in a cave to see if a Piercer or some form of Slime is up there.Like Driving a Car is a skill that most modern people acquire to some level just by doing it over and over again, Spot, Listen, and Sense Motive should be skills that all adventuring classes acquire over time (to varying levels of success), just because they use them repeatedly while adventuring and they are often critical to success. This should be just like BAB and Saves. Some classes are better, some are worse. But, all gain at least a little bit of it as they level up.The problem is that opposed skills can result in astronomical DCs relatively quickly due to adding a D20 to a modifier when opposed skills are class skills instead of cross class skills. It's a generic game design problem. IMO.</blockquote>

Verification