Tweaking Skills - Thoughts?

[Nellisir]

I'm tweaking skills in my D&D game, with the goal of increasing the variety of skills characters invest in (not necessarily the number of skills, though I'll come back to this). To this end, I've combined Listen and Spot into Notice, Hide and Move Silently into Sneak, and Decipher Script and Speak Languages into Speak Languages.

I'm not sure this is enough, though. I'm considering setting up martial/magical/mystical styles as "prestige skills" that can be purchased with skill points (and restrictions like 1 martial skill per iterative attack, or 1 magical style per 5 caster levels, or whatever), and I keep tripping over the fact that the fighter, cleric, and wizard have the lowest skill points in the game (discounting the wizard's Int bonus).

I'm not wild about setting up a second "skill point pool" (ie, you get 2+Int bonus skill points, and 2 elite skill points per level), or an across-the-board skill point increase.

I could emphasize it as a carrot to enhance the usefullness of a high Int stat, but I think that'll happen anyways -- and it makes it harder to apply to existing characters (my group is 4th level and just went through one rewrite when I tweaked stats). Still, it's probably my frontrunner idea.

Another possibility is letting characters chose a few skills, at character creation, that advance automatically, without investing skill points. These would probably be the "must-have" skills like Notice, Spellcraft, or Survival. Multiclass rules might have to be worked out. This conserves skill points and lets characters who aren't interested in elite skills ignore them, and if every character can allot, say, two skills, it's an across the board increase without the randomness of just giving out more skill points.

So, I'm just brainstorming around and looking for thoughts and ideas. Anyone?

Thanks
Nell.

 

[irdeggman]

So you are going to a "rank" system for Speak Language then?

The current 3.x rules don't have one (although some 3rd party supplements do - like Celtic Age by Avalanche Press.). In the core you either speak (and read) a language or you don't.

 

[ValhallaGH]

If you want to increase the variety of skills that characters invest in then you need to make them easier to invest in, allow a character to invest into more skills, make the individual skills more appealing or some combination of those three.
Compressing skills makes them easier to invest in, as does removing the cross-class skill restriction. Using expanded uses for skills will make all skills much more appealing, since they'll have an actual use even in a fight. Increasing base skill points is certainly a valid choice, though deffinately not for everyone.

I'll recomend Iron Heroes to you since it chose the route of all three options, and while its skill mechanics are not ideal for all games, they are very inspiring for making your own tweaks. The logic behind the choices can be examined in this article and the final results of that logic, minus the expanded descriptions of the skills and their uses, can be seen in this article. Of course, you should alter any skill groups you choose to use to suit your campaign's style.

I really hope some of that is useful for you. I know it helped me rewrite the d20 Modern skill system to allow the heroes to be generally competant, and my group has had a ton of fun ever since.

Edit: Fixed the second link.

 

[Stalker0]

One idea I've seen a lot is a tweak to the crossclass system.

With this adjustment, all skill ranks cost 1 point. However, the maximum number of ranks you can have is still determined by your class level.

So a fighter could put points in knowledges just fine, but he can never get it as high as a wizard lets say.

 

[Nellisir]

So you are going to a "rank" system for Speak Language then?

Not really. Each language has two ranks: 1 rank gets you speak language, the second gets you literacy in that language. So 10 ranks in the Speak Language skill would mean you know how to speak 10 languages, or speak and read 5 languages, or some combination thereof. The more languages you know (the more educated you are in tongues and dialects), the better your chance to decipher mysterious scripts. At least, that's my logic.

Cheers
Nell.

 

[Nellisir]

Compressing skills makes them easier to invest in, as does removing the cross-class skill restriction.

Great analysis! I've compressed a few skills, and have removed the cross-class skill cost (2 points = 1 rank), though not the cap (lvl+3/2).

Using expanded uses for skills will make all skills much more appealing, since they'll have an actual use even in a fight. Increasing base skill points is certainly a valid choice, though deffinately not for everyone.

I have Iron Heros, and will reread the skill portions of it. The skill groups seemed a little too generous to me, but maybe I'll rethink that. I don't recall the "expanded uses" for skills you mention, but that sounds really interesting. Someday I'd love to go through all the d20 material and draw together all the uses of various skills, but that's not going to happen anytime soon....

Thanks!
Nell.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Glad to be of help.

Yeah, I dislike some of the IH skill groups but I love the basic idea. With some tweaks to how many groups there are and what skills are in which groups, I consider it to be the ideal d20 skill system.
The actual skill entries, which most experienced d20 gamers skip over, have a wealth of cool ideas and uses for the skills. Intimidate is very powerful under that set, Diplomacy can be used in combat, and Use Rope has listed mechanics for all that neat lassoing stuff. Combined with the Stunt mechanics (in the Combat chapter) and a good imagination, Knowledge (Geography) [which I chose at random] could become the single most powerful skill in a given character's repetoir; that's a neat feature of the system.

 

[irdeggman]

Not really. Each language has two ranks: 1 rank gets you speak language, the second gets you literacy in that language. So 10 ranks in the Speak Language skill would mean you know how to speak 10 languages, or speak and read 5 languages, or some combination thereof. The more languages you know (the more educated you are in tongues and dialects), the better your chance to decipher mysterious scripts. At least, that's my logic.

Cheers
Nell.

What I was referring to was you combining decipher script and speak language.

The logic seems to break down, IMO.

You need to break down each rank of speak language into different specialties.

Decipher script by its very nature requires "ranks".

A better idea might be to give a bonus due to synergy based on the total number of languages a character can read/write for deceipher script. "Speaking" really shouldn't have a bearing on deciphering scripts whereas "reading/writing" should.

What this would do is to keep the "basic" skill structure intact and not have to keep trackof individual ranks in language skills.

Perform works similarly - each type of perform is treated as a different skill with its own set of ranks.

Breaking up speak and read/write language is not uncommon. A lot of 3rd party material does it and so does d20 Modern.

It also helps the booking with things like barbarians being illiterate.

Some 3rd party material actually requires "ranks" in each language in order to fluently speak it.

 

[drexes]

Actually I disagree with Irdeggman, I think th eranks version is pretty well thought out. After all many languages that I can't read use similar alphabets, sometimes I can sound out a spanish word and sense I know a bit of french I can figure out what is even if I can't read it. The pronunciation of words is just as important as the characters. I think I'm going to institute this rule, especially since I never see anyone use decipher script. The Dm typically goes, "um...what languages does everybody speak?...uh okay then the mystery note is written in that one..." Kinda sucky, no?

Just my beer-deprivation thoughts

Drexes

 

[irdeggman]

Actually I disagree with Irdeggman, I think th eranks version is pretty well thought out. After all many languages that I can't read use similar alphabets, sometimes I can sound out a spanish word and sense I know a bit of french I can figure out what is even if I can't read it. The pronunciation of words is just as important as the characters. I think I'm going to institute this rule, especially since I never see anyone use decipher script. The Dm typically goes, "um...what languages does everybody speak?...uh okay then the mystery note is written in that one..." Kinda sucky, no?

Just my beer-deprivation thoughts

Drexes

Ahh but you are using skill in read/write and applying it to another written text.

What if you can't read a language at all? Then you can't decipher the scripts of that language (they look like jumbles to you), if you can't understand that writing then you can't reasonably apply that knowledge to another set of written text. At least not IMO.

Decipher script comes up with in my games when trying to read warnings or runes. Age of Worms, Whispering Cairns had examples of this.