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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8953261" data-attributes="member: 6790260">In theory, a comprehensive and detailed skill system that was meant to meld naturalistic development (growing in those areas which the character had invested their effort) with meaningful and diverse applications. In practice:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">no one but a handful of classes (and all but Rogue being at least part-caster) had enough skill points to do much, as most only had 2 or 4 skill points per level,</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">the skills were less "comprehensive" and more "massively over-specialized,"* and</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">naturalistic growth meant consigning yourself to both poor current performance and stunted future growth, because dabbling in skills never gets you enough bonus to do remotely well, and the game's incentive structures like PrCs and feats had narrow, specific requirements.</li> </ul>And even then, most of the things skills could do could be completely trounced with a 1st or 2nd level spell; some things could be trounced with a cantrip. Some of the "trounce a thing skills do" spells were even actually good spells worth taking on most characters, like invisibility or fly (both 3rd level, to be clear) while some first-level spells were useful enough to justify a wand or scroll kept in the backpack after (say) 6th level just to pull out to deal with the issue when it came up. (A first-level CL1 spell is 750 gp for a 50 charge wand; characters have a WBL of 19,000 gp at level 7; a scroll is less efficient per casting, but if you only use the spell very rarely, it may be more efficient, being only 25 gp per scroll, 12.5 gp+1.25 XP to craft.) It even gets worse in PF, since you can craft items with spells you don't know simply by upping the DC for the crafting check!Similar arguments apply to feats, where most feats were trash and the powerful ones usually disproportionately (or even exclusively) benefited casters. The idea was for feats to be awesome, hence why Fighters got so many of them, but they were designed so conservatively and with such an emphasis on the idea of only getting the good stuff after 2, 3, 4, or even more feats already sunk in, that it undercut any chance it could have had to accomplish that goal. As is the case with much of 3e's design, it has wonderful goals and terribad, constantly-sabotaging-itself execution from nearly the ground up.*With such greats as Use Rope, Decipher Script, Forgery, and one from 3.0 that was so useless even 3.5e dropped it, Innuendo.</blockquote>

Verification