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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreatLemur" data-source="post: 3687155" data-attributes="member: 28553">Hell, my solution to that was just to dump the whole class skill bit.  I don't really care for niche protection anyway, and it allows both unique character concepts and logical character advancement.  I'm finding that people are eager to take ranks in the skills that they previously rolled untrained, and failed at, which makes all the sense in the world, to me.But I do think there's a very good case to be made for having a few, very frequently-used skills increase by level rather than (or in addition to) feat/point expenditure.  Spot and Listen would definitely the best possible examples; who the hell isn't going to become more sharp-eyed and wary after years of adventuring?  Other passive skills like Concentration and Sense Motive would make sense, as well.I don't think it makes quite as much sense for active skills (such as Bluff, Jump, or Move Silently) to increase automatically.  They aren't really being used constantly, so it's very possible that they aren't being used at all (for example, there've been no Jump checks in my current campaign, so far).Knowledge skills, particularly, are an interesting question.  While obviously a character absorbs quite a lot of information during even a single adventure, remembering all of that is generally the responsibility of the player.  For example, if the Cleric knows from his Knowledge (religion) check that ghouls have a paralytic touch, and warns the whole party of this, the Fighter doesn't need to make a Knowledge (religion) check to know this fact later on; the player just remembers it, and the character certainly can, as well.  The Cleric's Knowledge (religion) skill didn't teach the Fighter skill anything about wraiths if the party has never encountered any.  Sure, the players can decide that the PCs have had loads of off-screen conversations about all the kinds of undead the Cleric knows about, but I don't see any reason that should be automatic.  The Fighter can spend the skill points if the player thinks that's appropriate.My problem with this justification, though, is that I wouldn't presume that.  Hell, the character might not even have a Rogue buddy, and lockpicking might not have been part of the campaign, so far.  It's common, sure, but not as ubiquitous as combat.That's certainly true.  It's a really severe absurdity of d20 that a character can't have a really high rank in a skill without also having a bunch of hit points and a somewhat high base attack bonus.  I've heard of a houserule that simply removed the level-based cap for skill ranks, to deal with exactly this kind of issue.  Sounds like a perfectly reasonable modification for NPCs, at least.  Also, it'd make sense to get rid of BAB and HP progressions for non-combatant NPC classes.</blockquote>

Verification