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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8394296" data-attributes="member: 907">The problem I mainly have is with the "funneling" of skill competency. Take a ranger, for example. A 1st level ranger is trained in 7 skills + Int modifier, plus a lore from their background. Assuming a +1 Int modifier, that's 8 skills, or fully half the skill list, where my skill modifier is in the +3 to +7 range, and an on-level/"mini-boss" skill challenge is DC 15. All in all, I feel reasonably competent. A wall? Yeah, I feel good about climbing it. No rations? I'll hunt for my dinner. A wild animal? I can probably figure out what's going on with it. A guard? I might be able to sneak by them, and I can probably tell by their uniform who they're working for. Now move up to level 8. At this point I probably have one skill at Expert (+12+stat), one at Master (+14+stat), and the rest at Trained (+10+stat). I figure it's likely that my Expert and Master skills probably use my better stats, so I'm going to assume either a +4 stat or a +3 stat aided by +1 item, so call them +16 and +18. My trained skills are a bit more spread around but likely not a 0, so they're maybe +11 to +14. But now the challenge that's supposedly the same, relative to me, is DC 24. With my best skill, I'm better off than at level 1 (I'm assuming it was a +7 then) – I've moved from 65% to 75%. With my second-best skill, I'm in roughly the same spot (say it was a +6 and now +16), I've moved from 60% to 65%. But all my other skills have fallen behind. My average skill had a 55% chance (+5 vs 15), and now my average skill has a 45-50% chance (+12 or +13 vs 24). Did I put my increases in Nature and Survival? Well, then I can forget about sneaking past a level-appropriate foe (because monster Perception goes up even faster than normal DCs). What's up with those giants? I don't know, I'm not good enough at Society to know.I'm considering adding a general feat that can upgrade a skill to Expert and possibly Master. That would allow for a way to expand your competence without multiclassing into rogue, and would also provide a neat thing to do with general feats which is otherwise something of an afterthought – it would be nice to have something other than Fleet, Toughness, or Canny Acumen as "power" options.</blockquote>

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