Skills that PC shouldn't get?

[Steverooo]

In 3e I never saw intuit direction taken or used (big surprise), nor innuendo and read lips.

I took all three. One rank in each, to start, then increased Innuendo and Read Lips as the levels rose. Now you can do those two with Spot, and Intuit Direction with Survival... Now if they will just incorporate Rope Use into BOTH Climb and Survival, in 4e!...

 

[Steverooo]

But appraise, innuendo, intuit direction, use rope, decipher script, read lips? All just about useless.

Ahwww, PC!

Appraise can be used every time you find treasure (especially Objects d'art), and anytime that you want to know where something came from (as an Information-Gathering, Clue-Finding task). Innuendo was great! IIRC, you couldn't use it, unskilled, and it allowed "secret messages" to be passed (ala 1e Drow's "body language"). I tried to use it a lot, in 3e. Intuit Direction wasn't worthless, just too costly for the few uses it gave... Every been in the Teleport-linked Dungeon? Being able to find north is great, down there!

Read Lips useless?!? NO WAY!!! Every scout/spy needs it! Once, upon entering a town, my PC was quizzed by the guards, then saw people whispering about him... He took a seat at the fountain, and tried to overhear, but failed the check! Fortunately, he was able to use Lip Reading enough to get the vast majority of the conversation, found one of the troublemakers early, as was able to prevent himself from being hassled as an Assassin because of it!

Not bad, for two minutes' work!

Use Rope and Decipher Script are awesome skills, but the D&D implementations are wrong, wrong, wrong! They would be better served with a 4e rewrite (or, as I said, rolling Rope Use into both Climb and Survival).

For Decipher Script, there really needs to be a lower-DC task to recognize the language, as well as one to recognize magic. This would allow the skill to be used more...

"Hey! I found a scroll!" (Unrolls it, looks.) "It's in Draconic, and magical, but I can't make it out... Wizard, try your Spellcraft on it, if you don't have Read Magic memorized!"... or "These are Dwarven Runes, in the Angerthas Moria, but I can't make out anything but 'Balin Fundinal', or 'Balin, son of Fundin'!" Comprehend Languages isn't always available, especially if your Arcanist is a Sorcerer, y'know!

Now Rope Use won't see as much use unless the GM is or was a Navy Seal, 82nd Airborne, Marine, or Boy Scout, but just pick up any good survival manual, and LOOK at all the knots that there are to tie! Then look at the lashing chapters, and see what you can DO with some downed trees and rope!

Some of the problems with this skill are the DC:15 task to tie a firm knot... Ridiculous! One easy solution would be to allow everyone to tie the Granny Knot, Square Knot, and one other, with their first rank of skill, then three knots of choice/rank, thereafter. These three knots/level could then be used, without a roll. By the time the PC had the 13-or-so ranks required to "tie a firm knot", now, they would know how to tie 39+ knots without needing to roll.

Also, dieing because your rope came loose is no fun, and hurts the game, IMHO. The DC:15 roll is too high. Also, climbing on a rope without tying knots is impossible, as is building (most) shelters with Survival, without tying knots... So I would move the throwing-the-grapnel part of Rope Use to Climb, and the Knots-Tying part to both Survival and Climb... The downside is that you lose the +2 Synergy Bonus to climbing rope with 5+ ranks of Rope Use, but that could be changed to Survival, instead.

Next, the Craft rules for making stuff with saplings or trees and rope will have to be redone, the costs removed, totally, and the times drastically cut... As an example, if I were snowed in, and unable to walk out, but had some 550 Paracord and was camped under a tree, I could spend a day making a pair of snowshoes from woven branches and cord, tie them on, and snowshoe my way out! This is the kind of stuff that Survival is supposed to allow, but with the current craft rules, it takes money (!), bought materials, and TOO MUCH TIME! This is particularly ridiculous for Barbarians, Druids, and Rangers, who dwell in the wilds, and don't buy supplies for making gear!

(What I do is say that such "Barbaric, primitive, or simply rustic" crafts are worth 1/10th the normal price, and therefore take 1/10th the time. They are not as good as store-bought, and sometimes tend to come apart, but can be made more quickly. I disallow Masterwork, without the appropriate skill(s), but I DO allow Survival to be substituted for Craft (Whatever). This makes these three classes (as well as Clerics of the Travel Domain) much more potent, in such situations (as they should be, IMHO - when you're down and out in the wilderness, shouldn't the Barbarians, Druids, and Rangers be providing the solutions?)

Anyhow, Rope Use isn't useless, to me. Knowing how to tie those Timber Hitches on those saplings can turn them and a piece of rope into a sled, or those branches and that cord into snowshoes, or even that pot on the fire and some rope into a sled (melt the ice in the pot, form the shape with the rope, pour the melted snow over the rope form to make an ice sled)!

All IMHO, of course. YMMV.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

In my own experience, most skills are potentially useful--though I would say profession and (to a lesser degree) craft skills aren't very useful for PCs since PCs are usually adventurers who make their living by their swords, wits and spells rather than their profession skills. What stops skills from being really useful is not having any or enough ranks in them.

Use Rope? Well, my characters have very rarely used it because none of them have any ranks. When they want to tie someone up, they use masterwork manacles (and if he's a rogue, they just beat him unconscious because some DMs in my area seem to have the impression that all mid-level rogues have enough escape artist to slip out of the manacles without effort). But if any of the characters had maxed use rope, they'd keep the foes tied up. They'd also be able to tie fancy knots that would give them a good deal more flexibility when climbing cliff faces, etc. But they don't have it and they make do.

Similarly Innuendo was a skill that I could see a very clear use for (and Ortwin did a fantastic job of demonstrating that use in Sepulchrave's latest update of his story hour). But my characters never had enough ranks to spare so we made do without it.

Decipher Script? It was rather neat having a wizard with enough of this that, in our last game, we didn't have to break out the comprehend Languages scrolls. It enabled us to spend our resources elsewhere. I've also seen situations where it could be used for deciphering codes that comprehend languages wouldn't work on--since it's a code rather than a language.

I've seen jump put to some rather impressive uses too--an enlarged monk leaped up twenty feet to try to grapple a flying half-fiend sorceress and a pair of barbarians leaped 15 feet onto a raft that some swamp goblins were using as a firing platform. Not too shabby when you don't have fly (or you do have it but you only have one prepped and you don't think that six goblins on a boat who you can eventually whittle down with archery are worth that resource when you could run into a flying Ogre Mage later in the day). The other nifty thing about jump is that you can make a leaping charge over that chasm on round 1 rather than casting fly and waiting until round 2 to attack.

Climb? Again, it's nice to be able to climb across the wet cliff face instead of having to use spells that you may later miss when you face the first combat. If I used Overland Flight, of course, that wouldn't be an issue, but my character finds quickened rays of enfeeblement more useful.

For the most part, IME, if you have a skill, you'll find uses for it. If you don't have it, you'll work around it.

 

[Steverooo]

Skills that a PC shouldn't get?

I don't really think that there are any! The closest I can come to is Professions, generally...

It has always bothered me that a Fighter cannot have Profession (Bodyguard), for instance (since Profession isn't a class skill for Fighters)! I have spent a lot of time pondering why... I've also wondered why a PC with high Animal Handling can't earn more than an NPC without it who has Profession (Driver).

I finally decided that the Fighter can work as a bodyguard, without the Profession, and that the Animal Handling PC can most certainly go ahead and do the Professional Driver's job. I have also decided that the Professional Driver NPC can also hitch a wagon without Rope Use, care for the horses without Animal Handling, and do whatever else Pro.Drivers ought to do. Likewise, Pro.Sailors can climb the rigging, tie the knots required, and navigate, even without Climb, Rope Use, and Survival!

In other words, Profession is pretty much a "downtime" and NPC skill. To tell mid-to-high-level PCs that they'll be paid in silver pieces per week, just because they don't have X Ranks in Profession (Whatever) hurts the game, and imposes restrictions, not options!

 

[eryndel]

I have to jump in and argue against the "uselessness" of Diplomacy. As a DM, Diplomacy is my best tool to prevent Charisma from being used as a dump stat. Well, really the Diplomacy table, because few of the people I "force" to make diplomacy rolls actually have the skill, but nothin irritates me more then that fighter who wanted an 18 Str and 4 Cha try to talk his way out of a situation.

But I digress...

Werner

 

[Altalazar]

Jump, Balance, Climb, and Swim are pretty close to worthless. Ride is a bad skill for everyone but the cavalier type. Spellcraft is sadly rarely used. Unless you have lots of downtime, Crafts are going to be largely useless. Forgery is not going to come up often. Profession is not going to be used much. Unless you've got a DM who knows what he's doing, skip Sense Motive, he'll just never let you use it. Use Rope is kinda a waste.

See, now I made a character for OA 3E that had jump, balance, and climb as his primary capabilities. He was a "monkey" race thief. He also had some simple magic items that added to jump, balance, and climb. That plus his racial bonses and his thief skill points made him have rather sick levels in all of those skills. It is amazing what one can do with a little creativity and a 59 jump skill (or whatever it was) The balance and climb complemented it - jumping up to a narrow ledge would be tricky without 30+ climb and balance to go along with it. Such high skills basically allows him to MAKE the skills useful even in situations where ordinary levels of those skills would be useless. He would jump and climb and walk around in places no one else could reach. It made him rather tough to take out in combat, though he didn't do much harm himself (well, except with a sneak attack).

So don't discount skills - if you can get creative and if your DM can see the light, you can make just about any skill useful, I think.

 

[Desdichado]

I think Use rope is about the only skill my players don't use.

I think Use Rope is darn useful. You obviously need more swashbuckling, swinging around on ropes kinda action.

 

[Len]

This sounds more like a list of "skills that I don't use much in my particular campaign". Of the skills mentioned above, in the last few weeks my group has used:
jump, climb, swim, appraise, use rope, escape artist, heal (constantly!), handle animal, disable device, open lock

(But appraise is only because one of my co-players can't see a piece of treasure without asking the DM what it's worth. He won't even wait for my character to finish searching the room for traps before running in and appraising something.

)

 

[Dark Jezter]

Skills that I've found mostly useless...

Appraise: I've not seen this skill used once in either of the campaigns I'm currently involved in.

Balance: Ditto.

Decipher Script: The bard with Comprehend Languages as part of his spell list has made taking this skill unnecessary.

Forgery: Perhaps if I was running a city-based intrigue campaign this skill would be useful, but IMC, nobody wants to take this skill because they know that it will only come in handy every once in a great while.

Gather Information: Wizards and clerics have access to enough information-gathering spells that this skill is of limited use. Mostly, this skill is used by my PCs to find adventuring opportunites.

Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering): Why would I want to take this skill again?

Knowledge (Nobility and Royalty): The only reason I'd want to take this skill would be the +2 synergy bonus to Diplomacy that a social-oriented character would benefit from.

Profession: Haven't found much reason to invest in this skill other than giving flavor to your character. The money you'll make from using a Profession skill is tiny compared to the money you'll make adventuring.

Slight of Hand: Another skill that will be used very seldomly. The party's rogue could use this skill to perhaps remove a key from the pocket of a napping guard. Most of the time, though, it'll be of little to no use.

Use Rope: I've seen this skill used once to tie up an enemy who surrendered.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

See, now I made a character for OA 3E that had jump, balance, and climb as his primary capabilities. He was a "monkey" race thief. He also had some simple magic items that added to jump, balance, and climb. That plus his racial bonses and his thief skill points made him have rather sick levels in all of those skills. It is amazing what one can do with a little creativity and a 59 jump skill (or whatever it was) The balance and climb complemented it - jumping up to a narrow ledge would be tricky without 30+ climb and balance to go along with it.

Ah, a person after my own heart. Vast quantities of Jump, Balance, and Tumble are *so* much fun. Climb, not so much, but it's cool, too.

Brad