Just Another User said:
Why not? For some reason glass become more slippery at high levels?
The glass wasn't particularly slippery at this point, actually; IIRC it was a DC 10-15 balance check, or something similar. If I was to run a
level-appropriate encounter for higher level characters, I would probably have "slipperier" glass - otherwise it wouldn't be a level-appropriate challenge. (For those of you unfamiliar with the Shadows of the Last War - there is a town that was buried under a magical glass flow; think lava except glass, not rock. It's not a smooth plate of glass; that would have a much higher DC. This is a situation where I could ramp up the DC to make it level-appropriate; except, that, I can't because the entire freaking party would fail the check except the one guy trained in balance (if I have one guy trained in balance in the party). As an adventure designer for the mass market, I always have to leave the DC for a terrain challenge at DC 10-15 no matter the level I'm targeting because I can't guarantee that
anyone in the party can beat anything higher.
Just Another User said:
I mean, I understand nastier monsters, I understand stronger magic, I understand more complicated traps, but a sheet of glass is a sheet of glass and (like many other things) there is no reason to give it an higher DC only becasue the PC that walk on it have an higher level, just give it the same DC, the rogue will be totally unhindered (and what is the problem with it?) and the other PCs either had put some ranks in their Balance (and then deserve to pass it without problem) or not (and then deserve to have the same problems they should have at 2nd level. This is why nobody bother to increase his skills if not to max them, because adventures give absurd DC to encounter, so at 20 level to have 8 ranks in I.E. Balance means you have wasted 8 skill points because if there is an encounter that need Balance the adventure will give it a DC 35 or near so, And of course in the new edition you need to give PC automatic bonus in everything to give them a chance to succed in those overblown DCs. Maybe if they keep some reasonable DC the PCs would not put all their skill points in X + INT skills so a fighter could even put some ranks in disguise or a wizard some ranks in balance, for example. So what if the skill monkey would pass those challenges without breaking a sweat? He is the skill monkey, it is what is supposed to do. People don't complain if a fighter defeat an average monster with ease, or if a cleric heal a condition with a single spell. Then every now and then you put the DC35 skill check, that only the skill monkey can hope to succed, but not every single time, maybe that could help solve some of the problems with the skill system.
Yeah - I'm arguing exactly that, except that since mass-market modules can't make any assumptions about the skill level of a party, they have to either put in DC 10-15, or DC of APL+20. That's bad design. The fighter can defeat the average moster with ease and the rest of the party cannot despite the fighter not having any better a BAB than the
wizard than +10 at 20th level. It's not about the skillmonkey being better than the rest of the party, it's that he doesn't need to be
that much better than the rest of the party. (Don't get started on bonuses; every type of bonus that can be applied to BAB can also be applied to a skill check, only larger and at lower levels). Plus, the utterly ridiculous cross-class skill rules mean that the figher can
never have a level-appropriate check in disguise, nor the wizard a level-appropriate check in bluff.
Just Another User said:
I'm one of those, if something is a challenge for the expert there is very little a non-expert can do in the same situation, if you build a cell that challenge Houdini don't expect Bob the jasnitor to be able to evade from it) but even so there is a lot of thing someone can do even if he fail his balance check (for the previous example
1- casting spells, if he can
2- throwing-shooting things at the enemy.
3- "walk" helping with his arms (like a horsie) unless I mistaken that is +4 to balance
4- just crawl and fight prone (disadvantageous!? well, yes. I thought that was the idea)
5- use your immagination (slide on the glass? try something to improve friction ("I should have some honey in my backpack, maybe if I put some on my boot's soles...", slip a fifty to your GM, etc, etc)
And the same is , i suppose, true for other situation, you had to use your brain to solve the problem or find a way around it, not just roll a dice and do nothing if you fail.
You're quoting a post of mine very early into my thoughts on this; they've evolved somewhat since that post. The biggest problem with the skill system as it stands in 3.5 is that there is no way to predict within a 5-point range what the skill level of either the party or the individual character is. You can't set a DC for a level-appropriate challenge without knowing what the expected skill check is going to be. There are a mess of skills that don't get picked up because they aren't used in modules. They aren't used in modules because the module writers can't set a DC with any degree of accuracy.
This isn't a problem in handrolled adventures, the DM can target his party with exactly the right level of challenge. But
I don't have the time to go through even a published adventure and hand-tune the DCs to make them appropriately challenging for my players; especially if it would require changing an NPC or a monster. Anything more than about +/-5 from the DC that
should be challenging will throw the entire expected outcome off.
WotC (for better, IMHO) is targeting the players (including the DM) who don't necessarily have the time to invest more than about 4 hrs every couple of weeks in their game. That means a redo is necessary for the skills system to make it more predictable when designing adventures.
My predictions for the 4th ed skill system - Skills and BAB values and advancement rates will be very similar to each other throughout a characters career, as will the magical temporary and permanent buffs to each; there will be no more than a 10-point difference between max-skill character and unskilled character at any point in advancement; and that there will be applications of skills that the unskilled
cannot use. Oh, and that decisions made at 1st level will not hamper you at 15-level, and that expert knowledge of the skill system will neither be necessary to generate a highly effective character, nor to generate a challenge appropriate to that character or the rest of their party. I don't know if it will look exactly like SWSE; but I suspect it will because it is simple and fairly elegant. The player of the character has to make 2 decisions about their skills once they've chosen a class (what trained skills do I want, and what, if any, skills do I want to focus on); and the DM can generate appropriate DCs based on the party's level without having to understand all the subtleties of the current system.
The game
has to attract newbies, otherwise it will die out, because the grognards will become bored, and there will be no new blood to
be the next generation of grognards. This is what almost killed 2ed, and did kill Rolemaster. I played both Rolemaster and MERPS, and the only reason I did was that I lucked out and got a GM who
had an intimate knowledge of the system; so that he could painlessly bring me into it, abstracting away the complexity of the system. I
never read a single Rolemaster/MERPS rulebook, the closest I got was to read the spell list my Monk had at one point. Likewise the campaign of WHFRP I was in. I literally
never read the rules; I never had to because the GM of that campaign was good enough that I never had to. I'm not that good; I failed to bring a complete gaming newb into D&D 3.5 because I could not abstract away the complexities of the system, and it eventually destroyed my campaign. It wasn't just skills (though they were part of it); it was the whole complex ball-of-yarn-wrapped-around-sacred-cows that is 3.x. I started with 1ed AD&D, played some 2ed, and had a gamingasm when 3ed came out because of it's relative simplicity. But it has never, even in its earliest days of 3 books, ever approached mechanical simplicity. I don't expect 4th ed to be the Zen of gaming (as far as simplicity goes of the games I've played Shadowrun sits as the reigning king of
mechanical simplicity; but it's not the right system for high-fantasy gaming), but I do expect it to get rid of a lot of the needless complexity and awesome variability that 3.x has in the skill system.
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Advise as good for RPGs as for aircraft.
