Denaes said:
How would you correct this? If you created another role, what would be the division/cut from Expert? How would Expert loose ability and what would it retain. How would this benefit our games (not how does the current system detract from our games).
I'm not trying to bait you or anything - I'd like to hear your ideas, how you would like to go about it and what you plan to get out of it.
Hmm. I've come up with two ideas.
One is to create a Role (let's just call it "Professional" for the sake of simplicity) that has poor Combat, 4 skills and 1 good Save, 4 Bonus Feats taken from General and Professional lists. The Feats it has access too are ones that build on or require Ranks in skills such as Craft, Diplomacy, Knowledge, Computers, Heal, etc. or are extensions of such ideas, such as many of the Modern/Future Advanced and Prestige Class abilities. This becomes the role for those who pursue intellectual and/or social endeavors, such as inventors, technicians, hackers, doctors, politicians, etc. The 4 skills they have access to are likely to be taken up by professional type skills (such as the ones listed above).
The Expert keeps the same Role features, but becomes more of an "generic adventurer" role. The Expert Feat list would largely remain the same, but some would move to the Professional list (and the Expert would gain many more Feats from Modern/Future Advanced and Prestige Class abilities). The Feats would tend to be those that someone who is adventuresome would have, and would encourage skills such as Tumble, Alertness, Stealth, Climb, Jump, etc. It would still be the "Jack of All Trades" Role, with a lot of skills to go around, but it's not going to be the specialist in areas such as research, health and engineering that the Specialist can be.
The other idea, which is a bit of a departure from the standard True20 rules is to use skill points, and have the following two Roles:
Combat-focused: good Combat, 1 good Save, 2 Skill Points
Skill-focused: poor Combat, 2 good Saves, 6 Skill Points
This system would use Skill Points instead of Skills. Expert and Martial Feats would be combined with General Feats, but many would have prerequisites that encouraged one Role over the other. For example, Medical Miracle would require X Ranks in Heal, Build Robot would have prerequisites of Craft (Mechanical) of X, Evasion might require 5 Ranks in Tumble and a Ref Save of +3, Surprise Attack might require 4 Ranks in Stealth. Having both would require a heavy investiture in Ranks in two skills and having a decent Reflex save. A Combat-Focused character could take them all eventually, but a Skill-focused character could conceivably take them and have points to spend on other skills, and get Evasion earlier. Martial Feats would have Combat prereqs which would make them harder for Skill-focused characters to qualify for. A Feat could have Level, Combat, Save or Ability prerequisites (or possibly levels in a Role). The Adept role would function as is, although it would have skill points rather than skills, and access to the Supernatural Feat list would still require levels in Adept (and be based on Adept levels).
MadBlue
