Musings on the skill system
- Thread starter Erpegis
- Start date
Mustrum_Ridcully
Legend
Judging from the KotS skill list and pregens, there is no indication that there is a kind of "Background" feat, so it is definitely a house-rule. (And as a house-rule, it should probably not be a feat, but just a informal reminder to give your character a little more flesh then just saying "My character loves Longswords and slashing people with it."...Christian said:Smart-ass.
Just to clarify (for me and the other six people on the Prime Material who haven't managed to either buy or download the core rulebooks)--was that a proposed house rule, or is there actually a "Background" feat in the PHB that's intended to be used for this sort of thing?
For me, a good chunk of the fun with this kind of background skill (as with any other kind of skill) is working on and improving it during the entire campaign, bit for bit.
It helps that my DM has taken a page from Feng Shui's book, and allows any skill to have both a Knowledge and Contact element. I.e. if you have Perform Dancing, you know a lot of performers and patrons of the arts, and if you have Profession Sailor, you know a lot about various ships and their crews, etc. This distributes the knowledges and NPC interaction quite a bit more among the party members. Real nice in e.g. urban campaigns. where information and contacts are key elements.
And, for me, being able to grow these elements as the campaign goes on, has had a real nice feelgood feeling to it....
It helps that my DM has taken a page from Feng Shui's book, and allows any skill to have both a Knowledge and Contact element. I.e. if you have Perform Dancing, you know a lot of performers and patrons of the arts, and if you have Profession Sailor, you know a lot about various ships and their crews, etc. This distributes the knowledges and NPC interaction quite a bit more among the party members. Real nice in e.g. urban campaigns. where information and contacts are key elements.
And, for me, being able to grow these elements as the campaign goes on, has had a real nice feelgood feeling to it....
The thing with the new skill system is that is very easy to include new skills. Everybody has 1/2 level + attribute to try anything. If you want a bonus, just spend a feat into Anything.
You want to make a sword. 1/2 level + int mod. It takes a week. You spend half the value in materials. If you have a Craft feat, you spend 4 days or 1/3 of the materials, and adds +5 in your test. The DC for the test is 15.
But i think i will go with free bg skill, with the ability to get more with feats. If you are a Blacksmith in your background, you add +5 in tests to make things, knowledge of iron and forging stuff, appraise armor and weapons and stuff like that.
The sailor background lets you pilot and repair a ship, balance in uneven floors, climb ropes...
Just don't add both bonus. If you have Athletics and Sailor, you adds just +5 in your test. And the bonus that a bg gives, if a skill cover that activity, is very narrow. If you are a sailor you have +5 to climb ropes, or balance in situations similar to those in a ship.
You want to make a sword. 1/2 level + int mod. It takes a week. You spend half the value in materials. If you have a Craft feat, you spend 4 days or 1/3 of the materials, and adds +5 in your test. The DC for the test is 15.
But i think i will go with free bg skill, with the ability to get more with feats. If you are a Blacksmith in your background, you add +5 in tests to make things, knowledge of iron and forging stuff, appraise armor and weapons and stuff like that.
The sailor background lets you pilot and repair a ship, balance in uneven floors, climb ropes...
Just don't add both bonus. If you have Athletics and Sailor, you adds just +5 in your test. And the bonus that a bg gives, if a skill cover that activity, is very narrow. If you are a sailor you have +5 to climb ropes, or balance in situations similar to those in a ship.
And please, don't forget that there's this ritual called Enchant Magic Item found on PHB page 304.
Enchant Magic Item
Level: 4
Category: Creation
Time: 1 hour
Duration: Permanent
Component cost: Special
Market Price: 175gp
Key Skill: Arcana (no check)
You touch a normal item and turn it
into a magic item of your level or
lower. The ritual’s component cost is
equal to the price of the magic item
you create.
You can also use this ritual to resize
magic armor (for example, shrink a fire
giant’s magic armor to fit a halfling).
There is no component cost for this use.
Enchant Magic Item
Level: 4
Category: Creation
Time: 1 hour
Duration: Permanent
Component cost: Special
Market Price: 175gp
Key Skill: Arcana (no check)
You touch a normal item and turn it
into a magic item of your level or
lower. The ritual’s component cost is
equal to the price of the magic item
you create.
You can also use this ritual to resize
magic armor (for example, shrink a fire
giant’s magic armor to fit a halfling).
There is no component cost for this use.
helium3
First Post
I'm not very upset about the seriously pared down skill list, since I've found that it's a lot easier now to incorporate skills into the game. Not sure exactly why this is, but I think it was something to do with adding half your level into your skill check modifier. This tends to keep the skills within a certain range, which I think allows for the generation of the table in the DMG that describes easy, medium and hard skill DC's according to level. I find that table VERY useful and in the first two encounters of the first game I've already used it a couple of times to let characters do weird things that weren't expected.
Also, the inclusion of passive perception checks is real nifty. It's not like you couldn't do this in 3E, but for some reason it just never occurred to me to do it. The passives are nice because they're an easy way of subtlety directing the flow of an encounter by giving the correct character useful information that they can then act on.
Also, the inclusion of passive perception checks is real nifty. It's not like you couldn't do this in 3E, but for some reason it just never occurred to me to do it. The passives are nice because they're an easy way of subtlety directing the flow of an encounter by giving the correct character useful information that they can then act on.
I am seriously thinking about stealing a page from Shadowrun and having PCs pick free "Background" skills/knowledges during character creation. These would be non-adventuring skills and entirely defined by the players. If they want to take 'saddlemaking' or 'wines of the south country' or whatever, that's fine.
The expectation is that these skills would never be useful in combat and only rarely be useful during general non-combat stuff. As the characters continue to do stuff in game, they may request or I (as the DM) might toss them freebies as appropriate. Spend a couple of months on a boat, and they all get Profession: Sailor as a trained skill. Why not?
The further we get from combat, the less I'm afraid of the god of game balance.
The expectation is that these skills would never be useful in combat and only rarely be useful during general non-combat stuff. As the characters continue to do stuff in game, they may request or I (as the DM) might toss them freebies as appropriate. Spend a couple of months on a boat, and they all get Profession: Sailor as a trained skill. Why not?
The further we get from combat, the less I'm afraid of the god of game balance.
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Wolfwood2 said:
I agree. If any sort of Background skill/feat is introduced, it should probably not apply to combat-related rolls (Attacks, Defenses, Saves, etc.).
That said, I was looking to implement something similar in my game as well. But it would only give a +2 bonus and players could have more than one.
I was thinking of handling them like the Keywords in HeroQuest. So you get one Background for your Upbringing (general knowledge you gained while growing up based on region, social standing, etc.) and another for your Occupation (or training prior to adventuring).
With the bonus being only a +2, I wouldn't have to worry about them stacking with other skills or abilities mods. It would be a nice little boost the PCs got every now and then.
I view these as sort of general knowledge anyway and assume the PCs are focused on their current occupation of being a Wizard, Fighter, Warlock, etc. So I have no issue with them being 'rusty' in the farming skills they honed back on the family farm.
The idea that they would maintain those skills at a 'trained' level (+5) while focusing on dungeon crawling out the wazoo strikes me as a little inconsistent.
So +2 kills 2 birds with one stone (for me at least).
My biggest issue with the removal of Disguise is that there are now no disguise rules in the books at all, as far as I can tell, with the exception of the Change Shape ability doppelgangers have. A paragraph or so under Bluff would've been fine, but I don't like having to make a houserule for how a staple of adventuring fiction like that works.
