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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hellcow" data-source="post: 4119540" data-attributes="member: 15800">Another thing I'll point out about the principle of all rules applying to all people is that once you give the first-level commoner access to all feats, skills, combos etc that PCs have, you can then run into the logical question of how you ever get a 1st-level blacksmith who DOESN'T have a minimum +8 to his check. He's human, he's got the skill points, he's got two feats - if he's not putting at least one of them into Skill Focus, what's he putting it into instead? What about that other feat? The master guitar player is actually a good example of this. He's a human expert 3. That means that he's got 30 skill points you haven't accounted for, Klaus. Let's say one of them is Bluff - now he's got a +15 Bluff skill. Add on Diplomacy and he'll have a +17 there... +19 if you pick Sense Motive as skill #4. Again, you can CHOOSE as a DM to just ignore this - but the fact of the matter is that by the rules, he's got 30 skill points and feats beyond Skill Focus. As a professional designer, I've always been expected to fill out those slots - even when it was irrelevant to the story, and certainly when I don't actually WANT the character to be especially good at anything but that spotlight skill. Personally, I have played the other side of this argument quite often, showing the diverse potential of the 1st level expert and putting together combinations of skills. You can do a surprising amount with that first level expert. And you can make some very interesting and logical characters. Let's take our healer. She's sensitive to other people's pain and has a good bedside manner, so how about Diplomacy and Sense Motive. We'll give her "Profession: Chirugeon" to cover the general lore and techniques of a professional healer. Throw in Craft: Alchemy because she works with various medicines. And then, because she has a bad habit of pinching stuff from her patients, we'll give her Sleight of Hand. If she's human, we'll use the bonus points on Bluff, to help her say "This won't hurt a bit." But I can still make that same exact character today: it's just that if I instead simply say "Eh, this one just has a Heal +5" I haven't failed or left anything out... this one just has a Heal +5.Essentially, if you do strictly follow the rules - which you can always CHOOSE not to, but if you do - it's hard to say "I just want to make the blacksmith's apprentice, who isn't better than the blacksmith at ANYTHING, and who only has two ranks of Craft because he's still learning." With a masterwork tool and +1 Int or Wis bonus - assuming no special skills beyond Skill Focus - any commoner is going to have a +10 on their chosen Profession or Craft. I want the crappy guy, and I don't want him to have put those skills elsewhere, or used that feat on Toughness instead of Skill Focus - I just want him to be even crappier than that first level guy who's come up with a +10. He's a +2 check Blacksmith, plain and simple, barely skilled enough to work the forge. Again, COULD I do this in 3E? Sure, by just ignoring the rules and NOT addressing the skill points he should have as a 1st level human commoner. This simply means that's I'm NOT ignoring it - I'm setting his skill where I want it to be. Beyond that, once you divorce NPCs from class levels, you also avoid the question of "This NPC watchman spent 10 years fighting in the Last War. Why is he only 2nd level?" and conversely "This PC has only been adventuring for a week. Why is he already 3rd level?"Again, I know lots of DMs who HATE the idea of NPCs following different rules than PCs. I'm not saying "It's a revelation! All people will love it!" But I am saying that I like it - and that it works well with the underlying principles of Eberron.</blockquote>

Verification