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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 3743238" data-attributes="member: 21673">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.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.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.</blockquote>

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