Overall, I really like the changes they are making. I haven't had a chance to play Star Wars (kept meaning to, but only so much free time), but I might incorporate some of these into my D&D games.
One thing that does stick out to me is the no skill ranks thing. Of course part of it is the curmudgeon in me saying "But I like skill points!" but whatever. The one more objective thing I am wondering about is how this system handles characters who change focus as they progress. This happens to me as a player a lot, but I have seen it in others as well. You begin developing in one direction, then after several levels realize you want to focus on something else and quite often wind up multiclassing.
I'm interested to know how this system handles that? Do multiclassing characters just gain more trained skills? Do other ones suddenly become untrained? Are you locked into what you start with? I'm more just curious how that would work.
Gentlegamer said:
Each skill will have trained/untrained uses, so even if the skill roll bonus difference is not great, the uses of the skill will be. Also, talents and class/race abilities will further add different utilities and specialties to skills.
This is of course a "wait and see" issue for me, but this actually worries me some. On the face of it, it appears to be simplifying character creation by adding complexity to actual game play. I'd much prefer the other with spending more time up front, so actually playing goes smoothly.
If the skills have a list of a whole bunch of uses where some can be done trained, and some untrained, and ESPECIALLY if talents add even more uses to the skills, that becomes awfully unwieldy in play. I know in D&D there are plenty of extra skill uses that I never use because they are complex to actually use, or obscure - either because the use isn't conceptually obvious from the skill, or because "Complete X" book has an extra use for that skill, and "Complete Y" has two others.
The only cases where I have found special uses of skills to be interesting is when they were integral to the character. For example, in my games, no player or DM has ever used Feinting until I made a character that focused on that one single special skill use. Having the majority of the skill system focused on special uses worries me that it'll make actual play more complex as we have to look up which special uses out of which book can be used by whom. But like I said, until I see the actual full system, it's a worry not a complaint.
Felon said:
Can't say I think Sense Motive belongs in there with the rest. I can easily envision a scout being great at hearing squirrels fart at 100 paces, but knowing squat about reading body language and facial expressions.
Very nicely put. I'm all for some skill consolidation (we've actually had instances in D&D of players asking "What do I roll to smell?" with of course many snides responses). But personally, I see Sense Motive as less about seeing the little twitches of body language as it is about interpreting them. In my games when I've toyed with combining skills, I use that exact technique - is it very easy to think of someone good at one skill and terrible at the other (beyond impairments, of course like a blind man being good at listening), and you summed that up exactly. It's hardly a stretch at all to think of either someone excellent at noticing things, but socially inept at sensing motives, or someone who can read any person like an open book but can't notice someone sneaking up on him in squeaky shoes.
Actually, I can see Sense Motive being consolidated with Bluff and Diplomacy more than Search, Spot, and Listened. That makes a lot more sense to me.
(BTW, I really wish our confused smiley looked confused instead of like he's about to throw-up. That's a really crappy smilie and is a pet peeve of mine. Er... anyway...)
