Well, not everyone enjoys ACTING. They enjoy taking on the role of the big, burly barbarian who hacks up his enemies, goes into rages and can make people do what he wants by threatening them....but they want to see the effects of that, not act out the exact words being said.What is the point of playing a "role-playing game" if you absolutely hate role-playing and try to 'get away' with not doing it?
The d20 mechanic really doesn't support well things that separate by a lot over level - if possible we should try to avoid a case where you start, say, at 7 better at your chosen skill vs bad skill at 1st, and that turns into 17 different at 20th.Alternatively I can live with pick X skills that go up 1 per level, all other skills go up 1/2 per level.
True. And I'm saying that mathematically speaking, that's probably a design flaw, depending on your goal.
Number inflation was a problem throughout 3e and 4e, with the designers not really cognizant of how fragile a d20 truly is as they went about giving various bonuses, often based on level divided by a small # (ex: 2, 3, 5) of varying types. And that applies just as much to your base skill difference.
Especially if you can then get, say, an ability score (let's say one is 6, the other is 20), an item bonus, a theme bonus, feat bonus, a divine bonus, or whatever other type of bonus you want.
So it depends a lot on what you want out of the system, but keeping the d20 in mind from the beginning (and thusly not doing a 1/2 level spread unless it's very much on purpose) is a good thing.
It does when one skill has +level and the other has +1/2 level, which is what I responded to1/2 level actually has nothing to do with it.
It kinda is, actually.That means the MAX difference at any level is 6 (stat bonus) + 5 (training) +4 (other stuff) = 15. That's a pretty wide range, but not outside a d20.