House rule: any class, any skill choice

[Emirikol]

Anybody foresee any problems with the following house rule? "Up to their limit, any class may choose any skill in which to be trained."

Anticipated problems? Unbalancing?

jh

 

[TheNinjaD]

I don't see how it would be unbalancing. It seems to me that class skills are really more for flavor than anything else.

 

[Stalker0]

I've thought about this idea as well. Because character concepts are described by rolls, such as defender and controller, the class skills don't seem as critical for "niche protection."

Further, stats will allow certain classes to be the best at certain skills. A wizard can take athletics, but he's likely never to be as good as his strength heavy fighter buddy.

Now, the only issue I can see is that a lot of people will take perception, as it its the most common skill. Further, you may want to maintain the wizard having to take arcana, the rogue taking thievery etc just to maintain that consistency.

 

[Emirikol]

We did this "no cross class skills" thing in 3E and it seemed to work really great. Plus it gave players a chance to diversify their characters and explain why in their backgrounds.

As for 4e, I'll definately have characters keep the "required" skills as listed (e.g. wizard-arcana, Rogue-thievery).

The "limited skill selection" seemed like an unnecessary rule when I read it in 3E and still does in 4E.

It makes the multiclass feats even weaker (heh..no worries there). I'm sure there will be some rule-breakage books out soon "complete Multiclass handbook" or something though that will rectify it all

jh

 

[King-Panda]

In my campaign, I allow my players to choose from the entire list for their skills, except for those gained from their class (cleric has to take religion, etc). By using class skills, you are pigeonholing your players into making cookie cutter characters. If the players as a group happen to not have one crucial skill, like arcana or something, then that is up to them.

 

[Fredrik Svanberg]

Yeah I don't see a problem with this either. I will probably allow this for when we're converting the 3.5 campaign into a 4e one, just to make sure people get the skills they want.

 

[Deodanth]

I quite agree that doing away with class skill restrictions would take the wind out of the sails of Multiclass feats.

Does anyone else have a problem with a fighter/ranger/rogue being able to cast rituals at first level, after spending only one feat? (Train Arcana or Religion skill & take Ritual Caster feat).

 

[GameDoc]

I quite agree that doing away with class skill restrictions would take the wind out of the sails of Multiclass feats.

True. What if you said that the skill training for a multiclass feat defaults to the a certain key skill (like it already does for the cleric, rogue, and wizard ones), and that a character can pick any different skill as an alternate only if they are already trained in the default one?

You would then have to designate what skill you felt is key for the other classes. With the paladin and ranger, those are already defined (religion and dungeoneering/nature respectively).

You would then only have to designate the default skill for fighter, warlock, and warlord. Endurance for the martial classes and arcana for the arcane one seem appropriate.

 

[Deodanth]

You would then only have to designate the default skill for fighter, warlock, and warlord. Endurance for the martial classes and arcana for the arcane one seem appropriate.

For Warlords you could use the Military skill, which is my house-ruled knowledge skill to cover martial knowledge and scouting, as well as monster lore for natural humanoids

 

[harmfulguy]

I think I might allow some degree of cross-class training, but more limited than for class skills, as they were in 3/3.5. As I see it, the general training and abilities of a class lay a foundation for the skills on the class list; without that foundation, learning a skill is more difficult. A character could take time out from their normal class training to learn an entirely new skill, but would have to learn it from a much more basic level, making the training less effective. I'd probably only grant a +3 Training bonus to outside-of-class abilities for standard Skill Training, and only an additional +2 for Skill Focus.