A Fighters skill points....

[FrankTrollman]

Just a soldier?

Excuse me, what's the "Warrior" class for if not for people who are just soldiers and nothing more?

A Fighter is, according to the PHB:

The questing Knight
The conquering Overlord
The elite foot Soldier
the hardened Mercenary
The Bandit king

According to Sword and Fist (page 53), Fighters also include:

Duelists
Gladiators
Pirates
Desert Raiders
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To put things in a literary context, let's look at Brienne from the Song of Ice and Fire. She's a Fighter, plain and simple. She is awkward socially, not particularly pretty, and has a low charisma. She is not blindingly intelligent. She is however:

Able to out-ride other knights who are themselves named characters (high ride skill).

Able to see farther than other people (high spot skill).

Able to climb a tree quickly in full armor (high climb skill).

Able to jump out of said tree, in armor, and land on her feet without hurting herself (high jump skill).

Able to leap off a cliff into the ocean and effortlessly swim to a boat (high swim skill).

She's normally intelligent (Int 10, +0 bonus), has no particular class skills other than combat ones (only has fighter levels), and has 5 skills raised up to the point of being noteworthy.

She gets 4 skill points per level.
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Literary challenge two:

Orlando Bloom from Pirates of the Caribbean.

There is absolutely no way he has levels in anything but Fighter. He doesn't have a whole lot of smarts going for him, but here's what he does have:

A really good Craft: Blacksmithing skill (Look at those masterwork swords he made!)

A really good Swim skill (consider how long and well he had to fight underwater)

A really good Sense Motive skill (he was able to counter the feints of Jack Sparrow)

A really good Spot skill (he was the only person to actually beat Jack Sparrow's palming of the coin)

A really good Escape Artist skill (without which he would have drowned).

A reasonably good Sneak skill (or if not using Arcana Unearthed skills, this would have to be hide and move silently).

Passably good skills in Appraise, climb, diplomacy, jump, listen, sleight of hand, tumble, and use rope - some of which could be explained by just having a good strength and dexterity, and some of which can't.

So unless you want to tell me that he's got an Intelligence of like 18, I'm thinking that he gets 4 skill points per level.
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Literary challenge three: Little John.

Little John is a strength based fighter who is specifically of below-normal human intelligence. That puts him at Int 8 - if we are generous.

He excells at:

Climbing
Jumping
Sneaking
Listening

Once again, this is modelled well by a base 4 skill points per level, and modelled poorly by a base 2 skill points per level.

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4 skill points per level is not unbalanced. It does our literary Fighter types better than 2 does. I don't see how anyone could have a problem with this.

People who are "Fighters" in stories have a very great tendency to be:

* Observant (who's the guy who says "do you hear that?" generally it's the hardened veteran and not the singer).

* Sneaky (I don't think for a minute that Roland has Rogue levels, but he sneaks up on people all the time)

* Physically capable (when it comes to riding, jumping, climbing, or swimming, the warrior in the party is supposed to be able to do that).

Now, you can do all that with the Ranger - but the vast majority of these guys in stories don't have animal companions or a connection to the wilderness, or any of that crap.

Just being hard core is supposed to give you all of the stuff that having 4-9 skills maxxed out gets you in D&D.

Fighters do "non magical physical stuff". Under the D&D rules, you need skills to do that. Feats alone do not cut it.

-Frank

 

[Celtavian]

First off it's a game not a book. It's amazing how well rounded and perfect a character I can write up for a story, but games rules wise they usually end up being epic or near there. Second, multi class!! It's what that feature is for.

Everybody I know plays this game to simulate fantasy books and movies they have read, and occasionally historical archetypes as well. I don't think it would be a stretch to say the player base is comprised mostly of lovers of fantasy literature and films.

Why shouldn't the classes reflect the characters the player base reads about and desires to simulate in this game? Why shouldn't they be epic?

Giving the fighter more skill points and a more well-rounded skill selection makes the class more fun to play. I don't see how it would break the game.

 

[jgsugden]

Fighters are not built around skills. They are built around feats. Those feats are rather nice.

If you want more fighter feats, especially high level fighter feats, I'm pretty sure you'll see some in the Complete Warrior, coming out pretty soon.

 

[Shard O'Glase]

On a game play level all classes should have more class skills(or the removal of class skills from the game) and more skill points. There just aren't nearly enough skill points to diversify the characters with.

On a game balance level the fighter doesn't come remotely close enough to owning combat to suck as bad as he does outside of a fight so he needs more skills.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Frank, I'm not going to play the "stat literary figures" game with you. It's silly. Not only has someone else pointed out that literary figures are impossible to stat in most cases (what was Gandalf?) but I question some of your choices. (Brienne, for instance.) It's just not a worthwhile discussion, because it all comes down to opinion.

Fighters do "non magical physical stuff". Under the D&D rules, you need skills to do that. Feats alone do not cut it.

No, feats alone do cut it. If a fighter wants to be good at a skill, he takes Skill Focus, Deceptive, Persuasive, Acrobatic, or Cosmopolitan with his normal character feats. Having fighter feats every other level means he'll still get good feat chains, and he's now good at skills too.

No, a fighter can't use every feat he has for combat, and also be maxed out in half a dozen skills. But he can use several feats for combat, a few for skill boosts, and have a pretty high skill bonus to several skills.

If the fighter needs more skill points to shore up his one weakness, then I think it's time we start a petition for the wizard to get at least a 3/4 BAB and infinite spells. While we're getting rid of class weaknesses, we may as well do the job proper.

 

[TuDogz]

Fighter skill points are fine. It is hard to feel sorry for a class that has 18 feats by lvl 20. And if a fighter is feeling down about his skill abilities then he can boost his Int early with stat placement or in later levels with an inherent bonus. My only complaint is the skill list is too limited. I would expand it to include more of the physical skills like tumble and balance. They seem inherent to combat and in most cases when you learn to fight the first things they teach are how to take a hit, fall and move.

 

[FrankTrollman]

Lord Pendragon: that's stupid.

If a character doesn't have a Combat Schtick and a Noncombat Schtick, that character is broken, and no fun to play.

A Fighter currently only gets feats, and only gets a combat schtick.

If she spends her feats to get a non-combat schtick, she no longer has a combat bulge over a Warrior - and is thusly bereft of a Combat Schtick.

As long as the Fighter only gets Feats, and doesn't get enough skills to be non-viable in noncombat situations (including scouting), she is a broken character.

You apparently want the Fighter to be a broken character - but you still haven't explained why it is somehow balanced for a Fighter to be bad at one of the two basic aspects of the game (combat or non-combat).

So the ball is in your court:

Why is it a good idea for a Fighter to be bad at combat situations, non-combat situations, or both?

Before you answer, recall that the Rogue and the Cleric and the Wizard are all good in both combat and non-combat situations.

-Frank

 

[Norfleet]

No, a fighter can't use every feat he has for combat, and also be maxed out in half a dozen skills. But he can use several feats for combat, a few for skill boosts, and have a pretty high skill bonus to several skills.

Well, unfortunately, there aren't, at present, any feats which actually improve your skillpoints. That'd make a pretty nice L1 feat idea, though, a feat which gives you +4 SPs, +1 SPs/lvl, but it doesn't, at present, exist. That means a fighter's feat resources are, essentially, not convertible to skills. The fighter skill selection is also incredibly, horribly, BAD: You have 7 choices: Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Jump, Ride, and Swim. Many of these skills can completely unusable: Swim, for instance, is pretty much useless for a typical heavily armored fighter, which could very well be many of them. It's also not terribly useful if your primary area of operations happens to be someplace devoid of large bodies of water, like a desert. Handle Animal and Ride are of little to no value if your character is not planning on entering the mounted combat feat branch. That means that of the 7 skills you can seriously pick from in the first place, 3 or 4 of them can, and probably will, not apply to the character and campaign.

On the flip side, the two skills which *DO* translate directly into combat usability, Tumble and Bluff, aren't on the fighter skill list.

Essentially, fighters find skillpoints to be nearly completely useless, barring heavy use of the Cosmopolitan feat, if available, or multiclassing, and this requires very careful manipulation because the fighter skill list has a very poor rate of overlap with that of other classes that multiclass well with it.

 

[Thanee]

If you want to fight and have skills... play a ranger!
(Little John would be a ranger, too.)

If you want to be a fighter with skills... play a human with decent intelligence!

Bye
Thanee

 

[Psiblade]

In 3.5, with greater weapon focus and greater weapon spec fighters do rule in combat. Fighters will most likely land second and sometimes third attacks. Fighters outside of combat do have a problem in role play situations. Intimadate does help, but it is still limiting to just one type of character. I did like the fighter variants in Dragon a couple issues ago. I would like a way to customize fighters a little better.



-Psiblade