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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3742934" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe, but I sort of hope not. I think it would be good for the game - and in particular, for the flexibility of building NPCs and monsters - to divorce hit dice from some notion of skill/experience/prowess.Thus, for PCs, I think that things will be as you say - a PC will have a few good skills, and the rest will default to a level-based bonus a la Star Wars Saga.But for a monster, I hope it will be possible to have a creature with a high hit dice, and perhaps a few good skills, without that therefore defining a default leve/hit-dice based skill bonus for the creature. For example, a Troll or Minotaur should have a reasonable number of hit dice to reflect its size and toughness (the alternative is giving a very high Con, but at a certain point this becomes a bit inane, eg if Str is 25 but Con 80), and a good Survival skill bonus to reflect its ability to track and live in the wild, but shouldn't get the default skill bonuses that a PC of the same hit dice enjoys. In the case of the PC, that default bonus represents generic heroic capability - the monster having no such capability should not enjoy the bonus.As per my earlier post, however, that wouldn't mean that the GM couldn't give a particular Troll or Minotaur a particular skill bonus if that was appropriate for that monster (given it's in-game history, background etc and how that fits into the challenge the GM is trying to set for her or his players). What the rules then need to do is tell the GM how to calculate a challenge level/XP that corresponds to the skill bonus assigned.</blockquote>

Verification