Iron Lore: Malhavoc's Surprise?

[JEL]

Why? What's the difference between one broad knowledge skill and three?

The one skill system lets you customize your character's knowledge base so that there's real difference between the one scholar and the other and does a good job representing a guy who puts a lot of value on his academic education without crippling his other capabilities.

A broad based three skill system would seem to penalize the character who really wants to have a liberal education while eliminating any real difference between scholars.

Though looked at another way:

Craft, Knowledge, Perform, and Profession with specialities do make a good amount of sense in terms of character representation and all of those are basicly some form of a broad based knowledge skill.

Because it makes it impossible to make a character who knows a lot about one specific thing. Honestly, I think the current knowledge areas are just about right, and as the gentleman above pointed out, it'll be easily house ruled.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Because it makes it impossible to make a character who knows a lot about one specific thing. Honestly, I think the current knowledge areas are just about right, and as the gentleman above pointed out, it'll be easily house ruled.

So you want a character who knows a lot about one specific thing and nothing about anything related to that and you aren't willing to simply not choose the additional specialities?

I find the current knowledge areas to be conceptually ok, but unless you're using something like AE Akashic and very low DCs I think it's just too expensive to be anything other than the guy who knows a lot about one thing and is otherwise entirely ignorant.

More importantly, I'm still not understanding how that relates to three knowledge areas over one with a lot of granulation.

Sigh, altogether a minor point, I suppose I should just get used to the fact that if you're a nerd posting to the internet about nerd things an Amen is the very last thing you're ever gonna get.

 

[JEL]

So you want a character who knows a lot about one specific thing and nothing about anything related to that and you aren't willing to simply not choose the additional specialities?

I find the current knowledge areas to be conceptually ok, but unless you're using something like AE Akashic and very low DCs I think it's just too expensive to be anything other than the guy who knows a lot about one thing and is otherwise entirely ignorant.

More importantly, I'm still not understanding how that relates to three knowledge areas over one with a lot of granulation.

Sigh, altogether a minor point, I suppose I should just get used to the fact that if you're a nerd posting to the internet about nerd things an Amen is the very last thing you're ever gonna get.

I don't like it for the same reason I didn't like how Perform used to be handled. It just doesn't make sense and it completely waters down character concepts (unless your concept was some sort of super genius who knows everything). And I have no clue where you're pulling "three knowledge areas" out of.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I don't like it for the same reason I didn't like how Perform used to be handled. It just doesn't make sense and it completely waters down character concepts (unless your concept was some sort of super genius who knows everything).

Well, then perhaps you aren't giving it a chance because of perform. There are big differences between performance and knowledge in terms of education. A performer picks up new skills laterally. That is, if I'm an actor as I act it's also probably going to be pretty easy for me to pick up skill in fashion, cosmetics, and various aspects of stage design or direction, not to mention dancing, acrobatics, stage combat, singing, and so forth. Certainly that's true if I'm a talented one. But most of these things I'm going to pick up because it's convenient or helpful.

Education, on the other hand, begets education. A historian is going to be close to as expert in politics, philosophy, and popular culture and is only going to get more so. Probably going to pick up a fair amount of science, environmentalism, religion, economics, and military science as well. As he gets better at history he's going to pick up more from other fields and because he's so good at the one knowledge he's never going to be a neophyte in the others and the time it takes him to catch up is going to be very truncated.

Now I'm not saying that someone who publishes in history is necessarilly going to publish in physics, though it does happen more frequently than you might think history of science is pretty interesting field and there are certainly physicists who do historical work as well, but I'd argue that publication fits under profession: historian or physicist. The actual knowledge and the ability to access it, understand it, or explain it is always going to be broader than the field of scholars who can work in it.

It seems to me that a one knowledge skill model with a high level of granularity simulates that very well. You've got this one skill and that represents your education. You determine what you've been educated in and what you're going to pick up. It seems to me that this works better than DnD because it doesn't make getting an education a cost prohibitive or structurally limited exercise. It seems to me that it also works better in terms of character concept because you get to determine what your specialties are.

A smaller list of broad specialities is an intriguing notion, but I'm not yet certain I understand how it competes. Particularly since in the one skill system I don't think you have to pick up more specialties if you don't want to and at least this way the guy who wants more granularity isn't crippled otherwise.

Could you explain more about the watering down of character concept?

And I have no clue where you're pulling "three knowledge areas" out of.

The 'a few broad based areas' from your original post. Three seemed like a decent number to assign to it, but if you have a more specific one in mind then please go with that. I was simply assuming far fewer than the current DnD system.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I don't like it for the same reason I didn't like how Perform used to be handled. It just doesn't make sense and it completely waters down character concepts (unless your concept was some sort of super genius who knows everything).

Prior to the modern university system, that's how scholars worked. They knew a bit of everything. a) they were supposed to; b) the only way to find out what you wanted was to go looking for it. They didn't have textbooks and other roadmaps.

If I can get on my soapbox for a moment... It was a purer education. Specialization has increased the rate of advancement at the expense of wisdom.

At any rate, D&D's knowledge skills are better at modeling specialists, something that didn't really exist in the time frame D&D is supposed to be using as a model. Never liked it much, myself, conceptually. Roll that up with the skill point problem, and I'm sold on IH's skill system already.

 

[Celebrim]

So if the classes get more skill points, and 1 skill point can be used to buy ranks in all of your most relevant skills, and all the classes are combat monkeys...

Isn't Intelligence going to be even more of a dump stat than ever?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

So if the classes get more skill points, and 1 skill point can be used to buy ranks in all of your most relevant skills, and all the classes are combat monkeys...

Isn't Intelligence going to be even more of a dump stat than ever?

You're missing two things in this equation.

First of all skills are far more valuable than they have been in the past. Mearl's last designer diary made it very clear that the two innovations of easilly available skills and more powerful skills are highly dependant on each other. They're also more resource intensive since there is no magic to replace or supplement them and DCs are almost universally variable and scaling rather than fixed.

Second, there's an Incredibles style issue going on here, if everyone is a combat monkey than noone is.

Now the analogy isn't perfect, but when you look at the classes and builds revealed thus far there hasn't been anyone who wasn't at least as much of a skill monkey as a combat monkey. The Berzerker build has six maxed out skills, a similar archer build is going to pick up close to nine or ten, and even the Harrier has at least 8 skill points before you factor in intelligence and skill groups.

Skill groups and optional skills were one of the first considerations Mike described when meeting the picture challenge earlier in this thread. The skills a character posesses and can bring to a party are obviously a pretty important dynamic in tactics and team building.

Now none of that may provide the incentive that the desperate pressure to increase spell save DC does for wizards, but when you look at the promised lack of skill replacing spells even should an archer not decide to invest any points into intelligence he's still not going to use at as a dump stat since even a minor penalty on skill points is going to make it harder for him to enjoy the skill groups that are one of the chief benefits of his class at the lower levels.

It's also very possible that IH simply isn't going to have a dump stat dynamic. Attributes are point build and apparently generously so, but, AFAIK, we've yet to see a starting character with two eighteens or a twenty which seems to indicate that the rules explicitly encourage 'liberally educated' characters over DnD's specialists. We just don't know enough about how attributes are handled to say.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Isn't Intelligence going to be even more of a dump stat than ever?

Intelligence is a dump stat in your game?

Maybe it's the science geeks I've managed to play 3e with (everybody wants to be smart and a skill-monkey), but everybody has high intelligence.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Intelligence is a dump stat in your game?

Maybe it's the science geeks I've managed to play 3e with (everybody wants to be smart and a skill-monkey), but everybody has high intelligence.

I am somewhat familiar with that "problem". I always try to give my characters (and NPC) a high Intelligence, though sometimes a high Wisdom or Charisma would probably make a better (rounded) character (or NPC).

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I am somewhat familiar with that "problem". I always try to give my characters (and NPC) a high Intelligence, though sometimes a high Wisdom or Charisma would probably make a better (rounded) character (or NPC).

I had one character that went completely the other way, a sorceror that was dumb as a box of rocks, but I didn't find him interesting to RP for very long, and the mechanics problem of my skill points became an issue for me. For one thing, despite my high charisma, I couldn't capitalize on Bluff, Diplomacy, etc. That was maddening. And attempting to RP flirting with a contact to get information went badly (if amusingly for the rest of the group) when I realized I had no idea how people without the brains for wit interact with women.

In retrospect, it was sort of a fun experience, but I started to hate that character by the end.