FireLance said:
Conceptually, skills could represent basic familiarity with a type or school or spell, e.g. divination, energy attack, influence others, etc. Feats could represent levels of power, e.g. ability to create 1st to 9th level effects, affect multiple targets, affect area, etc. The prerequisites for the feat could be x ranks in a skill. Say, the feat that allows a spellcaster to create a 1st-level effect requires 4 ranks in the Spellcraft (or whatever) skill. The feat that allows him to create 2nd-level effects could require 6 ranks in the same skill.
Under this conception, are the skills (say we have one for every school, because that's an existing construct in the game and is thus easy) ever rolled? Or are they just used to track what level the character has achieved?
Okay, so let's say that you had the skills:
Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, and Transmutation.
Now, it seems tempting to say, "Okay, they're all class skills for Wizard. There are eight skills, so we'll give him six extra skill points per level. That way, he can either max himself in all but two schools and ignore those two, or be a little less than max in all schools. We won't roll these skills, we'll just use their rank levels as prerequisites for wizard abilities."
However, at this point, the crocodile hunter jumps on-screen and yells, "Danger! Danger!" We can't give the Wizard six extra skill points per level -- that's a total infringement of the Rogue's niche. Furthermore, this allows the Wizard to trade off normal skills (which aren't really all that powerful) for the ability to max out
all schools of magic -- obviously a bad idea, since a couple of skill points per level is clearly unbalanced with "gaining access to an entire school of spells."
So we end up protecting these skills, saying that the Wizard can't buy them with normal skill points, and, conversely, can't buy normal skills with his "special" skill points... And at that point, I've got to ask what the point is in calling these things "skills" at all.
My main problem with a skill/feat system is that they are more suited for "always on" abilities and are hence should either provide a small benefit or one that only comes up once in a while. The power of spells are balanced by their limited availability. Imagine a skill that provides even the equivalent of Cure Minor Wounds. A low-level party could use it to heal up completely between fights. If we want to limit its uses via some fatigue or spell point system, then we might as well go back to spell slots again.
There are ways that you might limit uses per day based on skill effects (if you fail a cast, you can't attempt any magic again for ten minutes per point you failed the roll by, for example), but that doesn't work via the D&D spell system, because skills don't scale quickly enough. We've got to somehow get from the point where, at first level, first level spells are the effective limit of what you can cast (beyond, perhaps, some extremal results) to, at 18th level, 9th level spells are relatively possible to cast. There's only a difference of a +17 to your roll there -- not even the range of a whole d20! That effectively means that there's
no way to tie a skill roll at DC whatever to casting a spell, unless you want to accept the notion that an 18th level caster will always have a 15% or greater chance of failing to cast a 3rd level spell -- which seems ridiculous to me.
Seriously, I don't think that the D&D skill system is capable of this. Not without massive amounts of blood and guts, at least. It's probably technically possible to tear around a vast number of exclusive skills, synnergy bonuses, and class-special-abilities in order to force a system that makes a d20 + whatever >= DC system to work, but, honestly, I can't see it being something that anybody would be willing to slog through.
So what we're left with out of a feat/skill system is maybe a couple of simple "tracking" skills (that are largely unrolled, or are even used for other purposes -- like basing all this off Spellcraft), and then feats. But I don't think that there's a way to make that work either. Feats are too infrequently gained (for non-Fighters), too "small" (each one doesn't cover enough ground, if you want to balance against existing Feats), and too, I don't know, isolated in time to cover the complexities of the existing spell system. You'll end up breaking it up into unwieldy chunks that will, I predict, either be overpowered (everyone will always get Wizard-equivalency-feats), or underpowered (nobody would bother to get Wizard-equivalency-feats except for people following the Wizard class, who get them as bonus feats).
The former breaks the game, the latter removes the point of the entire exercise, which was to somehow make the magic system accessible through something other than "taking Wizard (or whatever) levels."
I'm sorry, I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade. I just don't see how it can be done within the framework of feats and skills. Please, prove me wrong!
