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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1803544" data-attributes="member: 5171">I believe that d20 Modern was a conscious attempt to break away from the archetype concept and get people to start defining their character as a person, not a Strong or Tough -- especially since most character concepts require multiclassing.Bull.  I mean, it depends on what you define as "almost as competent", but seriously... bull.  A Smart Hero takes those bunch-o-skills, throws down Savant on top of one or two of them, and blows the lid off the skill contest.  A Smart Hero doesn't even need a fantastic Int score to have a buttload of skills -- he has every skill the Strong Hero has, and he's better at a lot of them, because he didn't need to spend a bunch of ability score points on Int.If you seriously believe that you can make a Strong Hero, give him a high Int and good profession, and make him "almost as competent as the Smart Hero", then you haven't actually played a skill-based game in the system.  Unless you're defining "almost as competent" as "I can get as many ranks in one skill as the smart hero can in that same skill", which is a comparison narrow enough to be useless.Again, I've played a Strong Hero with a high Int. It was fun, and I liked being able to hit stuff, but nobody confused me with a Smart hero.(I was actually a combat medic -- max'd out ranks in Treat Injury, and Craft<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />harmaceutical, a Treat Injury boosting feat, and then Personal Firearms and CMA.  For a 2nd level character, I was pretty uber, in terms of having skills and hitting stuff.  But that's all I could do.  I was still a Strong Hero -- good in one area, decent in one area, and useless in many other areas.)You're being overly specific.  Let's make the argument "Can I play a Smart Hero who is useful in combat", not "Can I play a Smart Hero who gets iterative attacks at sixth level".  The former is useful.  The latter is not.The easy answer to the question I think you want to be asking is "Not really, unless you multilcass."  I don't see that as a big loss on my part of the argument, because I also don't think that your high-Int Strong Hero is really shaking the Smart Hero's rafters.  Your Strong Hero-with-Int has a few of the Smart Hero's tricks.  Can I make a Smart Hero that has a few of the Strong Hero's tricks?  Absolutely.  Give me a good Dex or Strength, a few Int-using feats like Improved Trip, and a few picks from the Strategy Talent Tree, and I can hold my own.  But that will, quite honestly, bear as much resemblence to the raw combat power of a Strong hero as... well, a Strong-hero-with-Int bears to a well-crafted Smart Hero. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Which come up about ten times as often as the average skill check in a normal game.Asked and answered.  Twice, actually.  For the third time:Int does not make you better at climbing.Int gives you more flexibility in choosing to learn stuff.  Int gives you the chance to learn more things at once.  What you choose to learn is up to you.This is a reasonably realistic way of simulating reality.You obviously don't like this way of simulating reality, but every time you've argued against it, you bring up a Strong-but-dumb hero and a Weak-but-smart hero, completely mixing up your argument and proving only that smarts can't overcome being fundamentally inclined toward sucking at a given skill.  Every time someone brings up two heroes who are equal except that one is smarter, we get white noise in response.  Perhaps in your mind, the hero who is exactly the same as the other guy but smarter (in game terms, he was built with more points, and they all went into Int) should get no advantages whatsoever unless he has Knowledge skills.  Maybe that's your understanding of reality.  It's not the understanding of reality shared by the game designers or most of the people on this thread, but if that works for you -- "Intelligence doesn't help unless it's related to studying something -- it's useless as far as actual physical activity goes" -- then take it and run with it.As for Int not helping you learn how to hit someone, look at the talent only available to Smart Heroes in d20 Modern -- Exploit Weakness.  And the Field Scientist, which is entered most easily from the Smart Hero class, gets Int as a bonus to Defense as one of its abilities.  You have to work for those abilities (because, in the minds of the designers, combat abilities should be fairly expensive and hard to come by, especially combat abilities that let people overcome bad physical ability scores), but they exist.So, no opinion on the Con == Free Hit Points thing, then?  Because those bonus hit points scale with level, just like those free skill points that apparently killed your parents when you were just a boy, causing you to swear an eternal oath of vengeance against them.</blockquote>

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