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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manabarbs" data-source="post: 6258043" data-attributes="member: 6717251">3.5 makes it tricky to model people who are absolutely world-class at one skill or another but who aren't also incredibly resilient to attacks and surprisingly competent with a weapon compared to an average person. The way that skill ranks interact with levels and the way that levels interact with BAB and HP works great for modeling adventurers, which is what it feels most designed for, and where it matters most often, but isn't quite as perfect for modeling random NPCs.I would say that people really going in on a focused area of knowledge are not only taking skill focus, but are maybe even taking levels of a special NPC class that boosts that.Another thing worth thinking about is that people with very advanced degrees (or who are otherwise extremely well-studied in an area) do usually have impressive levels of knowledge in a fairly broad topic, but they typically only have truly world-class knowledge in a field that's much, much narrower than anything than what a typical D&D skill covers. For example, my own education represents a reasonable number of ranks of Knowledge (Computer Science), Knowledge (Psychology), and Knowledge (Linguistics) (not the Linguistics skill itself, which covers different things.) All three of those are much narrower than any D&D skill, and even while I'd say that I'm comfortable with those subjects, and my job requires significant knowledge in those areas, there's still huge blind spots in those fields where I don't know very much at all. Meanwhile, the stuff that forms the basis of my actual specialization is just tiny wedges from each of those areas - wedges so tiny that you'd never, ever call them full "skills". (Also, at least in the American University system, very advanced degrees generally represent having demonstrated the ability to help push the field forward, at least in tiny ways, more than just additional accumulated skills and knowledge, although those are generally required to be able to do that.) Most history PhDs I know - to use a field that has a clear existing knowledge skill associated with it - probably do have lots of ranks of Knowledge (History), but what makes them PhDs specifically is that they have an astronomical number of ranks of Knowledge (One very specific aspect of history).</blockquote>

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