Skill System Modification->What do you think

[thullgrim]

Hey what do you think about changing the way skills work? Or at least the ways a character obtains them. For instance, as it stands now every member of every class gets the exact same class skills. This only makes a little bit of sense. What I am thinking of doing is giving every class a core set of skills, and then allowing each class to choose an additional number of skills which would also be class skills. For instance the Core set of skills for a fighter would be Climb & Ride, the player would then get to choose 6 more skills that would be considered class skills for his character. In addition, all classes would receive an across the board increase in the number of skill points they get. Each class would get an additional 4 skill points at first level, and 2 each additional level. The caps for max ranks would still be kept in place.

edit: fix spelling error in the thread title

 

[DaR]

Re: Skill Sustem Modification->What do you think

Hey what do you think about changing the way skills work? Or at least the ways a character obtains them. For instance, as it stands now every member of every class gets the exact same class skills. This only makes a little bit of sense. What I am thinking of doing is giving every class a core set of skills, and then allowing each class to choose an additional number of skills which would also be class skills. For instance the Core set of skills for a fighter would be Climb & Ride, the player would then get to choose 6 more skills that would be considered class skills for his character. In addition, all classes would receive an across the board increase in the number of skill points they get. Each class would get an additional 4 skill points at first level, and 2 each additional level. The caps for max ranks would still be kept in place.

I wouldn't do this IMC, but it may work for you. One of the principles in D&D is niche protection. If you give everyone more skill points, then let everyone pick their own subset of class skills, you're basically eroding the purpose of particular classes. In this case, the Rogue suffers quite a bit, as suddenly Fighters, Rangers, and other classes can get access to skills that were previously Rogue specific. And only the Rogue had the skill points to max out any significant number of his class skills. But now, a Ranger or Bard, for instance, could pick up all the skills that the party would normally rely on a Rogue for, leaving the Rogue's only real advantage as his class special abilities, which are good, but not all that great in comparison to other classes by themselves. The Bard and the Expert NPC class also suffer a bit, though not as much.

The place I could see this being most advantageous is if you were going to be running a game with only two or three characters, and thus being able to do some selective cross-specialization would improve their effectiveness substantially.

As I said, this may work for you, but if I were going to make a change that altered the balance of the various classes like this, I'd go so far as to make all class abilities, including hit dice and what not, get bought with skill points.

-DaR, who could just play M&M instead, or use TheCustomHero or a similar system for D&D, too.

 

[Drawmack]

Check out the CoC system - might help you with this one. Basically you're looking at turning every class into a form of the expert class.

 

[ichabod]

I like the idea, but DaR has some good points. I think a toned down version would work better. Don't change the skill points granted each level. Let classes with 2 skill points a level take any one non-restricted skill as a class skill, let those with 4 skill points take any two, and those with 8 take any three. In return, they lose a like number of skills that are normally class skills.