Vigilance
Explorer
Salcor said:Yeah pretty much. It seems like for a modern game that is probably the most accurate way of depicting skills, feats, talents, etc. It almost seems like for this system you might be reverting to the CoC D20 way of doing it. Perhaps your occupations and life path identify what you class skills are, and then your 'class' identifies your BAB, Saves, HPs, etc.
I'm not doing a full-on lifepath. I've just broken out Occupation into two things: Background and Occupation.
Background will give you some bonus skill ranks and some wealth, while occupations will give you wealth, perks and enhanced skill and feat access, basically modifying your class.
This solves the idea that class=profession to me nicely, and puts classes on the job of identifying your adventuring role.
For example, if your Occupation is Assassin, do you get up close and deliver a devastating series of hits with a sword (Powerhouse), take out the target with a well-placed shot from a distance then run like hell (Speedfreak), wade in through the crowd Terminator style to get to your target (Tank), brilliantly bypass the target's alarms and slip poison into his cognac (Brainiac), weasle your way onto his cooking staff (Empath) or make the target fall in love with you and kill him on your honeymoon (Star).
On another subject I was looking at your blog about adding the combat skills (firearms, weapons, unarmed). Now you said that you are viewing those not as a skill based combat system but to identify what weapons a character can use. So would it be that for a character to use a handgun they need firearms rank 1, and to used autofire they need firearms rank4. Also how does that apply for unarmed combat, does unarmed rank 1 = nonlethal punching at 1d4, and unarmed rank 6 = combat martial arts with 1d4 lethal damage?
salcor
I actually posted the Unarmed SKill on my blog to give folks an idea of what I was going for.
As you can see, the Unarmed Skill determines your base unarmed damage, and then brings together a series of abilities (disarm, trip, grapple) that are often spread out all over d20 books in a confusing mess between combat, feats and skills.
These are brought together under the skill and given a clean, unified resolution method. No more hunting for the grapple rules in one place, the trip rules somewhere else and when you find them, realizing knowing how one works doesn't help you AT ALL to figure out how the other works, because they're written like they come from completely different games.
The Firearms and Weapons skills will be similar, bringing things under the skill that used to be all over the place, like burst fire and weapon proficiencies.