D&D 3E/3.5 Danger Shy Students, Researchers, Inventors, and etc. Would DnD 3.5 support them or their Profession?

[a-d]

Afraid of that, just got confused because one of the characters I've been using a long time, a Factotum from the Dungeonscape book was given the 'fluff' ability to do any spell they saw so long as a class they had could cast it that I'd forgotten that wasn't a class ability.

The real ability was simply being able to cast any sorcerer/wizard spell without needing a spellbook so long as it didn't require experience to cast and wasn't beyond their current casting level. The idea of them having access to the entire sorcerer/wizard spell list from the start didn't seem reasonable to me so I 'fluffed' it as "You've studied magic so much you can reverse engineer a spell just by seeing it." So I had to see a spell before being allowed to use it.
But as said before, that's not the actual ability.

Because of that misunderstanding and an idle desire to make a story about a scholar focused on researching and inventing various things who rarely saw combat or became involved in dangerous events because such a person would probably only be at risk while on the road and traveling as part of a caravan would reduce such risks even farther, I wondered if there were skills from other classes which would enhance such a characters ability to learn.

But the first ability doesn't exist and and the existence of actual abilities capable of enhancing a character's learning ability is sounding less and less likely.

Well, aside from the spell, 'Scholar's Touch' which allows you to read entire books just by touching them.

...Or maybe Timestop, if it's side effects could be lessened...perhaps True Strike works like that? Speeding up only your mental processes to the point where for six seconds you've all the time in the world to consider where to move and how to use your weapon to hit the opponent...no, it only works for the first hit.
Unless you don't use it for the entire round? Probably not.

A spell for telepathy would allow two people to share information more efficiently, and Naruto's Shadow Clones, or at least the retconned versions of them would be extremely useful with their ability to transfer everything they learn back to the one who cast the jutsu.

 

[n00bdragon]

No. You cannot use D&D 3.5 (or any version of D&D that I know of) to support a game where your character learns and grows via study and training and not primarily through combat. Well, you can but your results will almost certainly be suboptimal. Why? Because D&D is a game, at its heart, about combat. Almost every rule in the game since Chainmail has centered around killing things and taking their stuff. As others have mentioned you can houserule stuff and "play it your way" but at some point you are no longer playing D&D and are in fact playing some entirely different game of your own design some setting ideas and perhaps select rules cribbed from your favorite version of D&D.

There's nothing wrong with what you're doing or the type of game you want to run but I would say any particular version of D&D is a bad fit for what you want to accomplish. Why not choose a (IMO) more appropriate system like FATE?