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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ferratus" data-source="post: 4921589" data-attributes="member: 55966">Well if a wimpy psion put a knife to my throat and tried to intimidate me, I might try to wrestle it away from him.   If Vanchku the burly half-orc brutal scoundrel is holding the knife, I might reconsider. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The psion though can not only read my mind to get my greatest fear, he can also make me hallucinate terrible monsters, or cause my body to release a flood of adrenaline into my system to increase my anxiety.   He can tell if I'm lying by snatching up my surface thoughts with an insight check, get me to like him by with empathic powers and a diplomacy check, or insinuate a psionic suggestion with a bluff skill check.  Psycho-metabolism channeling for athletics and acrobatics checks, etc.   Give me a skill and I'll show you how a psion uses his mental powers to make the skill check.  He still needs some proficiency in the associated skill, mind you.  All the telepathic power to beam images into heads in the world won't help him intimidate if he doesn't have the charisma to make particularly scary telepathic hallucinatory images.The existence of a power or ritual with similar flavour text does not preclude using a skill check.   For example, the monk has a featherfall-esque slow fall ability, and you can do a slow fall with an acrobatics check.   Brother Joe is the master of the slow fall technique, while Brother Bob occasionally fails or has a limit on how high a height he can fall from.The whole purpose of describing a skill check any way you wish is to have a creative and cinematic descriptions in the story.   That is why skills aren't about what you do, but about what challenges you overcome.  It is a deliberate design choice.   It is essentially doing for skills what we used to do in 2e with martial attacks.   The mechanic is very simple (roll d20 to hit, roll damage dice) but you were encouraged to come up with imaginative descriptions for what the combat looked like.  Of course, it usually defaulted to "you hit" because there was no way to inflict a crippling blow or forcibly move an opponent in the mechanics and people got tired of describing their attacks.  The only hit that mattered was the one where the enemy fell over, ran away, or surrendered because that is when your actions had a discernible impact on what happened next.Now you can just roll skill checks without describing them too, but I think skill checks are better for a highly creative but mechanically simple and abstract mechanic than combat is.  A skill check is where a player describes an event beforehand, and the DM sets a difficulty.  So the DM merely narrates the next part of the adventure assuming that you have succeeded or failed.  I wouldn't want what a lot of people seem to be asking for, which is to to have more powers which replicate the results of skill checks with concrete descriptions of what happens.  I think one should have utility powers replicate skill checks when it is appropriate to the class, but mostly utility powers should do what skills can't.   I also like the new skill powers, which enhance what skills can do.  Goal oriented spells (overcome obstacle x, influence person x, identify magical aura x etc) are best covered by skills in my opinion.(I wasn't preaching at Hussar, I just like talking about this topic.  This spiel was for everyone.)</blockquote>

Verification