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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ZSutherland" data-source="post: 3686708" data-attributes="member: 7638">*above bolding is mine*On the whole, I agree with your point, Bagpuss.  I think the Saga skill system would not be at all beneficial for D&D specifically.  I can, however, also see a fantasy game that isn't laden down with the heavy tropes and traditions (both good and bad) of D&D making excellent use of such a system.However, a friend of mine (a bit of a twink) had the same gripe as you do about getting relatively "worse" at skill use against even level competition over the course of levels.  We talked it over for about 4 hours.  It doesn't "reflect the Star Wars genre reasonably well."  It fits it nearly perfectly.  The heroes in Star Wars spend most of their time dealing with mooks (stormtroopers and the like), and here their particular skills work pretty well.  They easily bluff the Imperial soldiers after arriving on the Death Star in Ep. IV with nothing more than stormtrooper outfits and a flimsy story about a defective comlink, but have a much harder time with the detention center guards (who probably have perception as a trained skill), so the encounter degrades to combat where the heroes have the advantage.  Finally, a much higher level Luke fails miserably on his Persuasion check against Jabba after going to some trouble to ensure a circumstance bonus (gifting Jabba with the droids and appealing to his vanity), and so again the encounter degrades to combat.Yoda and Dooku have a similar encounter towards the end of Ep. 2.  They pit their Force skills against one another, realize that they can't really do anything to each other that way, and default to lightsaber combat as the only way to decide the issue.This happens again and again throught out all the movies and quite a bit of the EU that I've read (mostly just the Zahn novels).Also, I think the slower progression of skills is fitting for Star Wars (though not from D&D).  I told my friend he was thinking of it too much as D&D in space.  This is not really a game where your characters go from miserable wretch to demi-god between 1 and 20.  This is a game where at 1st level, nearly all heroic characters are at least generally competent at a wide variety of tasks and skills (just by nature of ability bonuses and untrained checks), and expert (perhaps highly expert w/ SF) at a few skills.  From here, there's not a whole lot of room to get better.Take a level 1 non-heroic character with a 12 dex (so, your very average twi'lek).  His trained skill is stealth (he's a footpad) and he took Skill Focus as his first level feat.  His bonus at level 1 is +11.  He is not trained in Pilot, but we assume he can do average tasks such as drive an airspeeder in normal traffic conditions.  He has a Pilot bonus of +1 for tasks that can be performed untrained.  Somehow, our non-hero manages to make it to level 20.  His Stealth bonus is now +21 (we'll assume he put all his ability boosts elsewhere for some reason) which is a 47.62% improvement.  His Pilot bonus is +11 - a 90.91% improvement.  The disparity is because he was already near the top of the Stealth curve at level 1 for his size and a non-hero, whereas he had lots of room to improve as a pilot.This is very divergent from D&D's "You're level 1.  You suck at everything and it will be a miracle if you survive to level 2" advancement feel, but that doesn't make it bad.  Just makes it bad for D&D.</blockquote>

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