Feats that Should Be Skill Tricks

[krupintupple]

although i have witnessed how they can be abused - if you could call it such a thing - by powermongering and misbehaving PCs, i think they're no different than a set of class mechanics (tome of battle), or a new and divergent type of mystic font (psionics, warlock, shadowcaster); it depends how much bookkeeping you want to do, and i've found that skill tricks, if kept in the open, don't require much.

if anything, i'd wager that they've breathed newer life into the skill-based classes, and made skills a shade more interesting. given, they could just be accomplished by rolling them into the preexistant skill rules, but that's a very large "30+ individual writeups pill" to swallow.

i agree with you OP, Goad should be in there...in a rush and can't think of any others, but i'll post again after work!

 

[green slime]

...I think they're no different than a set of class mechanics (tome of battle), or a new and divergent type of mystic font (psionics, warlock, shadowcaster); it depends how much bookkeeping you want to do, and i've found that skill tricks, if kept in the open, don't require much.

I find some of the new mystic fonts to be quite flavourfull. Shadowcasters, or psionics, for instance. Because they can provide so much more flavour, I find them valuable additions. I just don't find the addition of "skill tricks" to provide enough flavour to justify their existance, and I still don't see how what they set out to achieve, can't be done within the existing mechanics, with a smaller effort. *Shrug* Different strokes...

 

[Starbuck_II]

By using a skill DC you're saying "This is possible, go for it". A prime fun-factor motivator during the design of 3.x

By using a skill tricks based on ranks, you're setting yourself up to say "Nope. You can't. Not unless you are really well trained." Which, by the way, is really a function of feats. Feats are binary (On-Off, Yes-No), whereas skills are graduated. Skill tricks break this game design, and lead to the path of madness.

I've had the latter happen more pften then the former.

If it is a rule then the DM will know what WotC deems fair and usually let you try it (at least with the feat).

I've had a time when we were in a house (wooden by the way) and the front door was arcane locked (or something) and the house was one fire.

For some reason he wouldn't let the players attack the walls to get out. He said it would be too mucfh work to work out how much (probably did'nt assume they would try it).

Maybe, he wasn't the best DM but still if there was a set rule describing this: he'd know how to instantly adjucate the situation.

 

[green slime]

I've had the latter happen more pften then the former.

If it is a rule then the DM will know what WotC deems fair and usually let you try it (at least with the feat).

I've had a time when we were in a house (wooden by the way) and the front door was arcane locked (or something) and the house was one fire.

For some reason he wouldn't let the players attack the walls to get out. He said it would be too mucfh work to work out how much (probably did'nt assume they would try it).

Maybe, he wasn't the best DM but still if there was a set rule describing this: he'd know how to instantly adjucate the situation.

?? But there is, surely? Firstly: A Strength check to break down the door, secondly, the DM decides how much hp the wall has, and assigns it an appropriate hardness (probably around 5 for a wooden wall). Then just attack it with an axe.... So he obviously didn't know much about attacking objects, which is adequately described in the DMG.

 

[Angrydad]

^ I wouldn't go so far as to call the DM incompetent because he doesn't know all the rules concerning attacking and breaking inanimate objects. Some players rarely try these tactics (mine sure don't) so I would not be very quick to answer a player's question about breaking through the wall. However, I would have said yes to their asking whether they could try, and then scrambled for a quick look at the hardness and hp values for most wood. And if I didn't feel like doing even that, I'd just make it up and later figure out how the system works for that kind of action. I would, however, call the DM's competence into question because he said no to something that should obviously be possible.

 

[green slime]

^ I wouldn't go so far as to call the DM incompetent because he doesn't know all the rules concerning attacking and breaking inanimate objects. Some players rarely try these tactics (mine sure don't) so I would not be very quick to answer a player's question about breaking through the wall. However, I would have said yes to their asking whether they could try, and then scrambled for a quick look at the hardness and hp values for most wood. And if I didn't feel like doing even that, I'd just make it up and later figure out how the system works for that kind of action. I would, however, call the DM's competence into question because he said no to something that should obviously be possible.

You are right. I just didn't express myself very well (again).

 

[roguerouge]

My thought is that there have been some feats, like Goad, that I'd like to see in the game but which are really a waste of a feat and better thought of as and more likely to be used if it was the application of a skill.

Part of the appeal of skill tricks to the 1 PC campaign I DM (for a bard 7/rogue 1 PC) is that I know that skills start to decline in importance in the higher levels in favor of magical solutions. (Either with scrolls or when you hit the level where your casters rarely use their first and second level spells in combats. See: Hide and invisibility, climb and spider climb or fly.)

I thought of skill tricks as a way to unlock new abilities and to keep skill points special and important.

 

[Shin Okada]

IMHO, the main problem of Skill Tricks rule is, it changes the way how skill points, which all the PCs, NPCs and most of the monsters have, are meant to be used. So if I introduce it to my game, as a DM I must either re-create all the NPCs and monsters with skills, or explain why they do not spend some of their skill points on taking tricks instead of increasing few skill ranks.

I don't think introducing skill tricks and changing some feats into tricks is a good idea at all. The opposite way could be more appropriate. I mean, some of the skill tricks could have been feats. And the author of CS could combine 3-4 skill tricks into one feat (something like tactical feats), instead of making up such unnecessary complicated new optional rule sets.

 

[Angrydad]

You are right. I just didn't express myself very well (again).

I understand perfectly well. No matter how high tech and amazing the internet is, there's still a certain inability to communicate a lot of subtlety or a really quick way to correct ourselves when someone doesn't quite get what we're saying. It makes what was already an extended conversation into the super-deluxe Director's Cut.

 

[taliesin15]

Preface my comments to say for those who don't know me, I am a kind of 3.0 Purist who uses some House Rules...

Virtually any Feat on the list could be done as a Skill, and has essentially been used this way in similar RPGs over the years (Ysgarth comes readily to mind)...some obvious ones are Run (you have Climb, Jump and Swim as Skills, why not Run?), the Item Creation Feats (building into the system a way in which Magic Items could be created faster and better with more Skill points) and Extra-Turning (one could easily imagine a different mechanic for Turning Undead where more Skill points in addition to ability bonusses means a better result)