Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6159596" data-attributes="member: 17106">Could you come up with a more ridiculous example? The pertinent issue is whether I can recognize that certain animals might kill me and know a few general steps to avoid this outcome, and whether someone in a D&D world can do the same. No one is asking the commoner or PC to explain some complicated theory of how death effects draw energy from a negative energy plane nexus, merely that they should recognize what kinds of creatures tend to have them and know to stay away.It's a pretty light system as is. The entire Knowledge entry is what, half a page?Player skill doesn't matter? So if one player looks at the map, moves his character around to get a flanking bonus, while another just charges in and says "I attack", the first one shouldn't get a flanking bonus? If one player describes a detailed negotiation, and the other says "I diplo him", we should just ignore that and look at the die roll? I'm not big on giving a player a Diplo bonus just because he has a Benedict Cummerbatch voice, but if he makes actual choices that change the parameters under which the check is made, that seems to easily fall under the "favorable circumstances" clause.I don't see what's so bad about a game that rewards the skill of a player. Games tend to do that.I would think that a reasonable interpretation of the "answer one question" rule would not cover an entire language or style of fighting. However, one really good check might give you some idea of what a phrase in an ancient language means. Seems fine to me.What the trained only concept does is subvert the linear progression of skills and DCs. If something is DC 20, that's how hard it is. Your bonus relative to the DC is how likely you are to succeed. I don't see that anything is gained by mucking up that dynamic. Yes, there are things that only trained people can do. The DCs for those should be in the 20's, so that only trained people can do them. If said tasks are hard enough that an untrained person can't realistically succeed, I don't see why one rank worth of training should make much of a difference. If they are not that hard, I don't see why an untrained person can't do them.I certainly don't see any reason why a PC who rolls above a 10 on his Int check can't answer medium or hard knowledge questions. Are we to assume that a character without any knowledge ranks does not know a single fact that is not common knowledge? Does he go around asking people what is own name is, and then instantly forget when someone with the knowledge to identify him does let him know? The implications, which whoever revised this for 3.5 clearly did not consider, are ludicrous.As long as you're able and willing to do that, no it isn't inordinately restrictive. Those things are not a given, as there is not an infinite supply of creatures that you can kill (let alone without being arrested for murder or being attacked by vengeful allies), and killing creatures with a presumably diminished party carries risk. It also leaves the players in an awkward position because they do not generally know the HD of other creatures and must guess that a creature is powerful enough to be accepted in trade. It also makes resurrection harder the higher in level you get, because lives to trade are more scarce and taking them is more likely to cause problems.Other than that, no restriction here.All of that is fine, yes. SoD is swingy, and in general is an incremental increase in swinginess over battles that do not feature it. This is a perfectly reasonable exercise of the available design space. If you want less swinginess, it's easily avoided.Another fair generalization, and again a perfectly valid design choice.</blockquote>

Verification