D&D 4E Obligatory dump stats in 4e: the irrelevance of Intelligence

[Nifft]

It's really more a matter that the line between Int and Wis, as defined in D&D, has always been blurry at best.

Mental ability has never been well understood, let alone well modeled.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Spatula]

I for one am glad that I no longer have to make my fighter a genius in order for him to be an excellent athlete.

I hate it when my characters are incompetent at large swathes of day-to-day adventuring life, so in 3.X I often felt forced into putting a higher number into Intelligence than I otherwise would have wanted to for the concept.

Hah, yep. Needing Int for skill points, combined with the skill granularity in 3e combined with the number of skill points that each class got, meant that "physical" classes needed lots of skill points to have decent non-hitting stuff physical abilities. Which meant you needed a high Int on top of whatever your class needed. The poor monk got hit the hardest there.

All in all I don't really look at 3e's skill system as the pinnacle of design, although it was certainly a lot better than 2e's NWP and the DM fiat of 1e.

I really liked the fact that every stat in 3.5 was somehow useful.

Really? Of what use is Cha, if you don't need it for your class abilities?

1. The game is about killing things and taking there stuff. Last time I moved I thought my stuff was kind of heavy, carrying capacity matters once you start picking up the loot. Heck the wizard in his cloth armor is the pack mule of the D&D universe since he has no other weight obligations. I will also point out Strength is the default hit someone with a stick stat, so if you are in a bind you might need strength.

Buy a pack mule (that's what they're bred for), buy magical containers (that's why they exist), use Tenser's Floating Disc (ditto). Or have the fighter carry everything - his armor & weapons probably aren't even close to hitting his load limit. Or, ignore encumberance. I don't doubt that some groups track how much weight in coins they're carrying, but I do not think it's the norm. Also, a wizard never needs to hit someone with a stick, he can use magic missile at-will.

Now if the benefit was but dude all the cool skills are under int, I might say okay that is the benefit right there. But it seems all the suck skills are under int so I'm even more underwhelmed.

If knowing stuff is "suck" then sure, but not every character concept is so dismissive of knowledge.

 

[Ahglock]

If knowing stuff is "suck" then sure, but not every character concept is so dismissive of knowledge.

Knowing stuff is not the suck, but it is not particularly pertinent to the majority of challenges facing the adventurer. It may be a skill set that comes through in key moments. But overall you are sneaking, climbing, swimming etc. And the knowledge skills usually at best give a benefit to the active skills being used. Though I guess you can always work it into a skill challenge.

But if you would like to explain how knowledge history has come into play as often to and as strong as an effect as Sneaking has please fill me in and maybe I can use this to enhance my GMing style.

 

[theNater]

Knowing stuff is not the suck, but it is not particularly pertinent to the majority of challenges facing the adventurer. It may be a skill set that comes through in key moments. But overall you are sneaking, climbing, swimming etc. And the knowledge skills usually at best give a benefit to the active skills being used. Though I guess you can always work it into a skill challenge.

But if you would like to explain how knowledge history has come into play as often to and as strong as an effect as Sneaking has please fill me in and maybe I can use this to enhance my GMing style.

So I don't know about History, but Arcana and Religion checks can give you information about monsters, including common tactics and vulnerabilities. Knowing when you first bump into a monster that it likes to use area-affecting powers can save the party's bacon.

Nature checks can provide such information as well(about different monsters), but is wisdom based, which is why I didn't include it in the previous paragraph.

 

[Lizard]

Knowing stuff is not the suck, but it is not particularly pertinent to the majority of challenges facing the adventurer. It may be a skill set that comes through in key moments. But overall you are sneaking, climbing, swimming etc. And the knowledge skills usually at best give a benefit to the active skills being used. Though I guess you can always work it into a skill challenge.

But if you would like to explain how knowledge history has come into play as often to and as strong as an effect as Sneaking has please fill me in and maybe I can use this to enhance my GMing style.

Don't know about your games, but I make a lot more knowledge checks than I do hide checks.

DM:"The gnolls have raided Village To The West."
PCs: "Is that typical for gnolls in this area?"
DM:"Knowledge local?"

If we find out that, for example, the gnolls normally don't act in this way, we will start looking for clues as to what's driving them, etc. We might find an odd sigil in the ruins. Knowledge (Religion) tells us it's a sign of a forgotten cult. Knowledge (History) tells us the cult was strong ages past, when gnolls were a power to be feared. And so on.

Basically, the more we know, the better prepared we are for what we will face. If we just go charging in without any prep work, the DM will quite rightfully hand us our heads, since we won't have determined the likely opposition, prepared the right spells, got silver or cold iron weapons, and so on. And this is just for a typical H&S adventure. For a city/diplomatic adventure, Knowledge becomes even more valuable. Who is the Baron related too? What's the proper way to impress a visitor from Farfarawayistan? Is an alliance between the North and West sensible, or is someone pulling the strings? This is all set-up for in-play; it tells us what kind of questions to ask when we roleplay encounters, gives us circumstance bonuses for knowing how to treat people properly, gives us hints as to who is the best person to follow discreetly (which is where sneaking comes in, finally), and so on.

Basically, for any game which is more than 10 x 10 room, orc, chest, knowledge skills are vital.

 

[mattdm]

I would actually suggest a warlord instead of a fighter for that archetype--anyone who spends as much time in combat "telling people stuff" is very warlord-like. But yeah, it looks like History is the only "knowledge" skill you can pick up as a class skill--although a 3e fighter would have been picking up Knowledge skills cross-class anyway. Arcana, Religion, Nature, and Streetwise are the "knowledges" you'd be missing. Streetwise doesn't really seem up her alley, and you can get one of the other three with a multicassing feat, so it's not horrendously painful.

So, part of the problem is that "warlord" isn't a great name for the class. I don't think "smart, tactical fighter" — I think minor military leader who has carved out a despotic regime in a war-torn region. Barbarian leader, although optionally with at least pretentions to sophistication. (That'd fit the points-of-light setting very well, which I think makes it even more confusing when it's not that.)

And another part of the problem is that this class addresses the smart fighter pretty addequately in my mind (either as a base class or multiclass), but that wasn't the real problem in the first place — it's the poor rogue.

 

[mattdm]

So:

i) You need an Intelligence of X to gain the Linguist feat, and the Linguist feat is the only way ever(*) of learning new languages?

What is X btw? 11, 13, 15 Int?

(*) At least until splat books come out.

Keep in mind that the default setting has only a few languages by design. If language has a more important role in your game, a corresponding rule to expand language abilities makes sense.

 

[Spatula]

Knowing stuff is not the suck, but it is not particularly pertinent to the majority of challenges facing the adventurer. It may be a skill set that comes through in key moments. But overall you are sneaking, climbing, swimming etc.

I've made a hell of a lot more knowledge checks over the past 8 years than I ever have swimming or climbing checks.

Aside from the obvious applications - knowledge skills tell you stuff about unfamiliar monsters & effects (3e and 4e) and in 4e they power rituals - Arcana comes up a lot in the 4e stuff I've seen. You can use it to deal with magical traps, and it factors into a lot of the sample skill challenges.

 

[Nifft]

Knowing stuff is awesome. However, only one guy needs to do it.

If you want to sneak somewhere, everybody has to be sneaky.

If you want to act in the surprise round, you need to personally have Perception.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Blackeagle]

Don't know about your games, but I make a lot more knowledge checks than I do hide checks.

Basically, for any game which is more than 10 x 10 room, orc, chest, knowledge skills are vital.

I think this depends not just on what sort of game you're playing and what your DM lets you do with knowledge. In the Ptolus campaign I'm in, almost every character has Knowledge (local). We get a lot of use out of it too, in a city campaign local knowledge and gather info are practically uber skills. Not too many of the other knowledge skills though (I think the wizard's got Arcana and the Druid's got Nature, but that's about it). That doesn't mean we don't use them, we just spend gold pieces hiring loremasters and librarians to use them for us.

From the description though, I think we tend to use them a little differently than you do. The only time we've ever used a knowledge skill to find an opponent's vulnerabilities was with the Will'O'Wisp. Instead they tend to get used a lot more for story purposes, giving the players the information to know what course of action they want to pursue next. For instance we recently hired a librarian to research an ancient warlord to help decide whether we could trust the undead abomination he became to keep his end of a bargain.

In any case, in 4e most of the knowledge skills seem to have been merged with other skills to produce skills that are useful for both knowing and doing stuff. Instead of Knowledge (nature) we've got Nature, instead of Knowledge (local) we've got streetwise, etc.