Skills?

[Psion]

Heres the problem with this thinking in 3.5 - Skills is about all the Rogue has going for him. Bumping everyone's skill points make the rogue less powerful relatively - if everyone can be good at skills outside their expertise, whither the rogue? Even if the rogue bumps his skill points as well (and I can make an argument that the rogue needs more skill points, or at least some consolidated skills), more skill points all around waters down the big class feature of the rogue (those 8 skill points per level).

Waitaminnit... just a second ago, you were on about how the Bard and Rogue couldn't manage unless they pre-planned. Now it's "poor rogue" when the rogue gets more?

Sorry, I don't buy it, and I have play experience to back me up on this one. I bumped all classes by 2 points in my last campaign, and the more skill oriented nature of the game itself made the rogue's role more than adequate.

 

[Psion]

How do I challenge, in the same encounter, a character with a +15 skill check modifier and a character with a +0 (or even a negative skill modifier due to armor-check penalties) with the same environmental challenge, and have both be challenged, but not prevented from acting?

I covered this in a post you already responded to on the last page, but iwatt's got the right of it: differing benefits for different degrees of success. You don't all have to be the best, but if you are, you deserve to benefit from it.

As for ACP: I would hope if a character is going to bank heavily on skills that have an ACP, they would be smarter than to tromp around in plate mail.

 

[Jondor_Battlehammer]

Back on the notion of skill tricks, is it possible that these may become once per day tricks dedicated to a single skill, if the PC is trained in them?

 

[IanArgent]

Waitaminnit... just a second ago, you were on about how the Bard and Rogue couldn't manage unless they pre-planned. Now it's "poor rogue" when the rogue gets more?

Ehn? I didn't say anything about how the bard and rogue can't manage unless they preplan (though it is, to a certain extent, true, because they don't have enough skill points to cover all their bases simultaneously). And I'm "poor rogue" if EVERYONE ELSE gets more skill points (even if the rogue does). I don't want the rogue to get more skill points at any rate, it's a bandaid solution to a systemic problem.

I covered this in a post you already responded to on the last page, but iwatt's got the right of it: differing benefits for different degrees of success. You don't all have to be the best, but if you are, you deserve to benefit from it.

See my post at #249 in this thread. Once the delta between skilled and unskilled goes over about +15, the system breaks down, even more obviously when it is an opposed test. All you are suggesting is putting off the inevitable, because as it stands, the skill monkey can make a DC 15 test at level 2 with no immediate effort (take-0 on the roll) . Tacking on modifiers just hides that until later levels. Eventually you reach the point that you either have to set the base DC high enough that the skillmonkey can fail, or you allow the skillmonkey to breeze the check in favor of letting the rest of the party have a chance. For those following the nitty-gritty, the skillmonkey can take-10 a DC 35(!) check at 12th level with no spell or magic item assistance. that's a 50% chance of making a DC25 check with a cumulative modifier of -10 to his roll; a check that an untrained party member can't hope to make before adding the flourishes. At that point you might as well just make the fancy uses of the skill trained-only and be done with it, because the unskilled people can't make it anyway. Plus, I thought we didn't want superheroes in D&D.

This actually isn't entirely the fault of the skilled vs. unskilled issue - it's a fault of being able to ramp your skill bonus by 1 per level. That forces DCs to go ridiculously high ridiculously quickly. But I don't see any way to stop that in the system as it stands. Cutting max skill ranks in half, inasmuch as the DCs would only have to ramp half as fast. This is also an example of why NOT to give out more skill points - it just makes the problem worse, in that more skills can be maxed. Chopping max skill ranks in half, but leaving the same number of skills just doubles the number of skills a character will have; at the cost on not being able to advance half your skills each time you level, but still having to advance the other half! And it still does nothing to address the cross-class skill issue, where cross-class skills aren't worth the expenditure of skill points. Plus, once you've done this, you're halfway to the SWSE system anyway.

A +10 delta between untrained and focused is quite enough. The +5 difference between trained and untrained is enough for most purposes. If a trained character can make the check on a roll of a 10, the untrained character needs a 15, and the focused character makes it on a 5. If the 'advanced' use of a skill has a -5 penalty attached, the trained person has to make a 15, the focused person has to make a 10, and the unskilled person has to pray for a 20... If the highest skill check in the system is +25 before stat adjustment (30 levels gets you a +15 base check, +5 for training, +5 for focus), a -5 penalty is meaningful at all character levels.

You do need to make some uses of skills "trained only", I'll admit, so you can set DCs low enough for low-level characters to be able to make them, but untrained characters still can't make them. Guess what, SWSE does that.

 

[BryonD]

No your assertion was that the claim I made that this happens is untrue. I know it IS true because it happens to ME all the time. Your claim that it is untrue is calling me a liar and I don't know how you can competently do that without having sat at my table.

I never said that. You said it can't be done and I said it can. Your statement is not factual and mine is.
I never said that the claim that you don't experience it is untrue.
So that is two unfactual claims you have now made.

I'm not going to play this game further.
If you have a comment on the actual topic, please express it.

 

[BryonD]

If you just change the DCs to get the result you want, then there's no incentive to allocate resources to skills. If the party is always just good enough (or if the challenge is always just a touch too hard), then skills are pointless. They have zero mechanical worth if you're going to precisely tailor every skill based challenge, so characters might as well sacrifice skills and devote the resources to other abilities. Unless of course you do that for every sort of challenge, and then the entire rules system and Game element is negated.

Agreed. I think this is a bad idea.

But it is no different than giving everyone enough ranks to be able to likely pass any likely tasks. That was the point.

 

[BryonD]

See my post at #249 in this thread.

Here is the impass. Just as I was replying to Zimri, Saying that you have not made it work does not remotely mean that the system breaks. If the system was broken then no one else could do make it work. This is not the case. Not remotely.

 

[BryonD]

How do I challenge, in the same encounter, a character with a +15 skill check modifier and a character with a +0 (or even a negative skill modifier due to armor-check penalties) with the same environmental challenge, and have both be challenged, but not prevented from acting? Without having to rely on the magic-item christmas tree? Or when the casters are out of magic?

There is a vast array of answers to this.
And it has been covered well.

But the bottom line is that it is an absurd limitation to force a rule stateing that no PC should ever be required to find a different way to skin a cat.

 

[Rystil Arden]

IanArgent, it's interesting to read your arguments here, but I have a thought. It seems like your arguments are always based on artificially raising the DCs for an encounter so that the best characters have an X% chance. But why is it not OK if the Rogue can auto-succeed at the low DC check? I don't think there's a problem at all if the DC 15 challenge is an automatic success for the skill monkey and a risky chance for everyone else. In D&D, you can have fun with a DC 15 Balance check on a shaky ship for a variety of levels--you don't need an arbitrarily shakier ship that constantly ramps up its DC to be equal to 10 + 5 + 1/2 level. That may keep the target number the same, but it eliminates all accomplishments for the skill monkey player because the challenge aribtrarily scales to meet her.

It's the same problem as one might encounter in battle--in some games, every time the PCs level up, suddenly every NPC they ever encounter is also one level higher, so the PCs never get a chance to feel like they've grown because the game environment keeps everything in stasis.

 

[BryonD]

If I mess with the DCs, I am hard-capped by the system at right around DC18 or so if I want an unskilled person to ever make the check. Softcapped at DC 15. Skillmonkey can "take 0" against a DC 15 test at around 10th level assuming a +2 stat bonus. He can "take 0" against it at 5th level if he takes 2 feats. He can take 0 against it by 3rd level with an 18 in his stat. If it's a skill for which there is a synergy bonus, the minimum level is 2. I need a minimum DC of 20 to challenge skillmonkey at this point, and that's the maximum DC I can expect the rest of the party to pass. Once his skill check breaks +15, the rest of the party struggles. Once it breaks +20 (at a minimum of 7th level and a realistic max of 15th level), the rest of the party cannot keep up. That is an inescapable function of the skill system as it stands - too much variance.

Feature, not bug.

If any balance check that the skill monkey can possibly be made is a balance check that ANY character can make with a decent roll, then the balance monkey can never be the really heroic example in his area.

Players at my table face situations where only a few can possibly make the roll. The others do not sit and their hands and whine about lack of direct ability to take on the single task. They find other ways to help the stars of the moment or other ways to avoid the need to make the check.

And you know what? It is great fun for everyone. The players that can not make the roll and challenged with coming up with smart solutions and the players that can njoy getting the chance to shine.