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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreatLemur" data-source="post: 3445303" data-attributes="member: 28553">Oh, Christ, no kidding.  Why is Blue Rose / True20 seriously the only d20-derivative to do this?  3-18 always seemed like a weird and illogical range, anyway, and these days it only makes sense if you're actually rolling dice instead of using a point buy system.Anyway, I'm cautiously optimistic about what we've heard of Saga Edition, but I ain't quite sold on everything.This strikes me as kind of a weird decision.  Not necessarily a bad one, but just surprising, in light of the huge focus on crafting in today's very popular CRPGs.  Anyway, here's hoping they rename Repair to Electronics or something so it'd make more sense to be building droids with the damn thing.Collapsing Spot, Search, and Listen into one skill sounds like a great idea, but adding Sense Motive in as well doesn't really sit right.  The other skills are all dependant only upon raw sensory acuity and general alertness, while Sense Motive is largely a question of social and psychological awareness.  They cover very different conceptual ground, as well.Still, skill consolidation is, in general, a good thing.I don't know how everybody else builds their characters, but I don't really do the max-the-important-skills-and-ignore-the-rest thing.  I tend to give my characters very varied levels of ability in different skills, according to what seems appropriate.Moving from skill points to a binary "you've got it or you don't" system makes skills a hell of a lot less fine-grained, and it sounds like it might eliminate the "color skill" practice (that is, when you toss two points into Perform (whistling) just for kicks) by making skills a more carefully-rationed resource.All in all, though, I think I have to admit that this rather severe simplification of the skill systemn is probably a good idea.  It ain't a good fit for me, personally, but I know that a lot of folks get completely turned off by that part of character generation.This is interesting.  I'm not sure I can really get behind the whole idea of a character getting better at repairing droids over the course of his career even though he never does any mechanical work, and mechanical aptitude isn't part of his concept in any way.  (Comparing this to Wizards gaining BAB over time doesn't strike me as completely valid: BAB is a much more fundamental resource than the vast majority of skills, and Wizards most definitely have use for it.)  But that's a minor gripe, and I do like the smoother ability curve that it leads to, as <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=3444047&postcount=206" target="_blank">demonstrated by Kunimatyu</a>.  So I could live with it.This is cool, as long as they still make different levels of skill mean something, even when everyone ends up being "good enough".  I really hope they work variable levels of success in, somewhere.About time.  I never understood why the PHB needed 15 goddamn feats that were essentially the same thing, and all of them basically redundant in light of Skill Focus, anyway.  And, worst of all, they're newb traps: They don't do anything interesting or useful, but they're named simply and clearly, and tie in easily to folks' 1st-level character concepts, so they're easy choices for folks who don't know the game well.Oh, man, finally.  Those were always pretty lame.That's cool.  I always liked reroll mechanics.  I dig how they improve your chances of success while still rewarding a character for being good at something, and how they make unlikely catastrophic failures at something a character ought to be good at less likely.Interesting.  I dig that.  Certainly, if anything ought to go up with character level, this qualifies.  I kind of preferred the idea of Initiative checks being replaced with Reflex saves, but I can certainly deal with this, especially now that saves are being converted to static defensive target numbers.So, yeah, all-in-all, I'm digging this whole direction.  Simplification isn't generally my bag, but I understand its necessity, and most of the complexity they're cutting out is stuff I'm not too attached to, anyway.</blockquote>

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