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General Tabletop Discussion
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Proficiency vs. Ability vs. Expertise
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<blockquote data-quote="Esker" data-source="post: 7644304" data-attributes="member: 6966824"><p>Alright, fair enough. In the spirit of talking more about changes that might better achieve your stated goals, rather than the spirit of criticizing the need for the change in the first place, let me see if I can accurately characterize what you want to get out of these changes, and also summarize, as a rogue fan, and a fan of maintaining game balance more generally, what side effects I would want to avoid. And then I'll see if I can offer any suggestions that manage both.</p><p></p><p><strong>The Goals:</strong></p><p>1. Make skill proficiency a bigger factor compared to ability mods, when rolling skill checks.</p><p>2. Maintain uncertainty in outcomes, avoiding foregone conclusions resulting from modifiers that get too big</p><p></p><p><strong>Side Effects to Avoid:</strong></p><p>1. Ripple effects that cause aspects of the game unrelated to skill checks, to require major rebalancing</p><p>2. Substantially changing the relative frequency with which skill checks in general succeed or fail</p><p>3. Cutting into the rogue and bard's distinctiveness as skill monkeys</p><p></p><p>Before I suggest other solutions, is this a fair characterization of the priorities here? I get the sense that you may not be fully on board with my #3, so if you have an <em>active </em>goal of reducing rogues' and bards' ability to stand out from other classes in the skill domain, then we probably indeed have nothing further to discuss, since I'm not interested in ideas that make rogues just different kinds of fighters, or bards just different kinds of sorcerers. But if you are receptive to ideas that both achieve your goals and avoid my pitfalls, then I'm interested in continuing to think about it (I have an idea brewing already, but want to do some math with it before presenting it to see whether it does what I think).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Esker, post: 7644304, member: 6966824"] Alright, fair enough. In the spirit of talking more about changes that might better achieve your stated goals, rather than the spirit of criticizing the need for the change in the first place, let me see if I can accurately characterize what you want to get out of these changes, and also summarize, as a rogue fan, and a fan of maintaining game balance more generally, what side effects I would want to avoid. And then I'll see if I can offer any suggestions that manage both. [B]The Goals:[/B] 1. Make skill proficiency a bigger factor compared to ability mods, when rolling skill checks. 2. Maintain uncertainty in outcomes, avoiding foregone conclusions resulting from modifiers that get too big [B]Side Effects to Avoid:[/B] 1. Ripple effects that cause aspects of the game unrelated to skill checks, to require major rebalancing 2. Substantially changing the relative frequency with which skill checks in general succeed or fail 3. Cutting into the rogue and bard's distinctiveness as skill monkeys Before I suggest other solutions, is this a fair characterization of the priorities here? I get the sense that you may not be fully on board with my #3, so if you have an [I]active [/I]goal of reducing rogues' and bards' ability to stand out from other classes in the skill domain, then we probably indeed have nothing further to discuss, since I'm not interested in ideas that make rogues just different kinds of fighters, or bards just different kinds of sorcerers. But if you are receptive to ideas that both achieve your goals and avoid my pitfalls, then I'm interested in continuing to think about it (I have an idea brewing already, but want to do some math with it before presenting it to see whether it does what I think). [/QUOTE]
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