NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 3749353" data-attributes="member: 21673">Feature, not a bug. As I've said, if you know within +/-5 or so what the party's skill level is, adventure design is much easier (not harder). Yes, the DCs have to change, but because the skill bonuses are more predictable, the DCs are much easier to set - game design can spend more time on other things.NPCs (and monsters) no longer follow the same design sequence as PCs. At any rate, in 3.x, skill level is STILL tied to class level, so the "greaters cook on earth" has to be a high level expert. And again, NPCs have never used the same craft/profession skill as PCs anyway, so no big loss.This really is a good thing for adventurers (who are not average and do not lead average lives. An adventuring wizard PC is going to be a good deal more athletic than the one who stays homeewr, because he spent a good chunk of his life walking or in the saddle. at any rate, for me Fun > Realism.Feats are much "cheaper" (more available) in SWSE than in 3.x. For that matter, this is already a problem in 3.x, the rogue doesn't have enough skill points to cover all the bases anyway. Compression of skills will probably solve this problem more than increasing the number of feats avaialble. Also, game design should not require that all PCs be focused in every class skill. Focus should be optional, not mandatory. To make skill checks more important, have the skilled PCs make more of them; just as the fighter's BAB is important now not because the wizard is around +5 behind the fighter for the "swet spot" of 3.x play, but because the fighter can more reliably hit the higher AC creatures, and do more damage when he does. If skill challenge DCs for trained characters are calibrated at what the "skilled" character with a decent stat bonus can make, the untrained will have a hard time making the DC on anything like a regular basis. Really, a +7 differential (+5 skilled, +2 stat) is enough for this. And that makes Skill Focus special.It may be cool in theory, in practice it sucks. Especially for new players. Also, it makes it much easier to min/max. Past time for it to leave.Pure min/maxing. Plus, it mucks up adventure design - being able to figure out what is an appropriate DC becomes that much harder if you have to target both the person who full-maxed the skill, and the one who half-maxed it. There is a feat that makes you trained in a skill. Plus, if there are less possibilities to train skills than skills available, characters can be differentiated.Just as a tangent, SWSE characters get 17 feats in 20 levels as opposed to 7 for D&D3.x characters. 10 of them are bonus feats drawn for your class(es), but most classes have a fairly large list of bonus feats. I'm hoping that they go with one of my house rules and move feats to an every odd, instead of every 3, level progression, for a grand total of 20 feats,but I don't anticipate that. There's also less "chained" feats (Running Attack, the equivalent of both Spring Attack and Shot On The Run is obtainable at 1st level), but many feats are less powerful either because of rules changes or because the feat changed. Running Attack no longer cancels AoE, and Rapid Shot just adds a die of damage to your siongle attack (where most ranged weapons do 3dX of damage) instead of adding a second chance to damage.</blockquote>

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