Skill Focus: Remove conditional penalties

[Stalker0]

Skill Focus is normally taken by those trying to max out there skill, but I don't it would also be nice if it could help those that take penalties. Basically your focused training allows you to overcome your innate weaknesses.

The change:

Skill Focus
Benefit: You gain a +3 feat bonus to a single skill. You no longer suffer any penalties to that skill due to ability scores, armor check penalties, or other conditional effects.


So for example, a paladin with skill focus in endurance could now wear full plate and shield but still have a good check.

A rogue could climb a slippery surface with no penalty.

A fighter with a 8 dex could take skill focus in stealth and still be decently sneaky, with no ACP and no penalty from his low dex.

 

[ravenheart]

This seems to be potentially troublesome with some conditional effects. Such as Intimidating a bloodied creature to surrender which normally is against the creatures Will +10 for it being a hostile situation. Besides, a rogue already has a hefty bonus to acrobatics with skill focus (+ skill training and Dex primary, c 8-10 at 1st lvl), and is by far better than the plate-armored paladin at climbing that slippery surface anyway.

But I like the thought of it canceling out armor check penalties and low ability scores!

 

[Stalker0]

But I like the thought of it canceling out armor check penalties and low ability scores!

You might be right, it may be better to stick with this part of the mechanic and drop the rest. This was the main part I was focusing on anyway.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, the "Other conditional effects" part could be a bit problematic. Besides, neither rule, nor guideline, nor munchkin can stay super DM from his appointed ability to decide how hard it is to do something regardless of what feats you took

 

[Starfox]

It is very hard to separate some conditional modifiers from the base difficulty, especially in a skill challenge. Say that one way to progress in a skill challenge is to make a DC 16 Athletics check to climb a tricky wall. What part of this DC comes from conditional modifiers, and which part of it comes from the more or less arbitrary DCs of a skill challenge?

I can see letting skill focus remove certain named penalties, like armor penalty etc, but I'd still be careful about this as it doesn't always make sense from a role playing perspective. These penalties are pretty small anyway.

However, letting a feat compensate for a bad ability score (such as letting you use +4 for your ability score modifier to the skill, regardless of your actual attribute value, or use a different attribute modifier) might work, but should probably be its own feat.

 

[bardolph]

Skill Focus
Benefit: You gain a +3 feat bonus to a single skill. You no longer suffer any penalties to that skill due to ability scores, armor check penalties, or other conditional effects.

This is a bit much to add for a single feat.

However, it may be useful to offset certain penalties for an additional feat, like "Armored Endurance," or "Spider Hands."