Untrained/trained Skills....Noooo!

[Baby Samurai]

To be (perhaps, if they stick to the SWSE model) replaced with a new multiple attack mechanic under which you just miss a lot when making multiple attacks unless fighting absolute mooks. :\

I don't know, as I haven't got my hands on 4th Ed yet…

 

[Greg K]

As a GM, I would not mind the skill system as an option for NPC generation. However, as a player, I have despised the Star Wars Saga skill system since its use was revealed and refuse to play the game in large part to the skill system. The same went for the skill system in Blue Rose and I was glad to see GR drop it for True20.

 

[BryonD]

For me, the rogue gets his chance to shine by being first across. The wizard uses his fly spell to ferry others across, or he (or the cleric, depending) creates a bridge from the wall of ice or wall of stone spell ( i think wall of stone can still do that, but I know wall of ice can) for the others, or he whips out his jump potion, or the cleric air walks them across. In other words, the Rogue doesn't have his thunder stolen by the others using action points to succeed at the same thing he just did without one.

However, I can also see the appeal of having multi-competent characters instead of one specialist in each party.

Exactly. Sometimes you actually have to (shudder) rely on other party member's strengths.
The fighter just may need help. And later, when that frost giant comes charging at them, the rogue will know that he and the fighter are even.

 

[BryonD]

So in the specific examples mentioned (being tossed overboard, sneaking past guards or needing to jump and balance your way across a chasm) how should the wizard, fighter and cleric solved them, for the ideal experience in terms of tone and atmosphere?

Also, it is not required that one capture "the ideal experience" for them to be opposed to the idea that skills should grate completely against the grain in terms of tone and atmosphere.

The specific answers can vary wildly. But I would expect them to run in a manner consistent with how it has very satisfactorily occured in my 3X games for the past 8 years.

 

[Celebrim]

Remathilis: You could make a better example that doesn't debunk itself as quickly, but the basic problem would still be there. If you present a challenge that is beyond that of what ordinary people can do, its always going to be an individual challenge, not a group challenge unless every member of the group plays a similar character.

Often times, unless the PCs had no choice, if a task involved a skill they were untrained in (and a real penalty for failure) they'd skip it and send someone (if any) who had ranks in it because they KNEW they'd fail but the guy who had ranks would most likely succeed.

If there is a real penalty for failure, then smart players are going to avoid the obstacle unless the probability of success is nearly 100% and the loss incurred by failure is less than the reward of success.

In the example you site, I'm not sure that even my rogue is going to try the three disks unless I have a feat that lets me take 10 on my jump and balance checks regardless of the situation. I probably wouldn't attempt it with one disk, much less three. The odds of failure for are hypothetical rogue are 19% (roll 4 d20's no 1s) with the results of failure being falling into the lava and dying. I don't think so. I'm going to be looking for alternative solutions, because there are only so many chances of death you can risk before you die.

No one else in the party dares that jump. The fighter's odds of death are still nearly 100% even with the SAGA rules. So nothing changed. You still avoid anything that isn't what you do if there is a significant risk involved. The challenge is still about the one character that can do it.

Before you go trying to tweak the example, there is something even more important that you are missing that is going to haunt any example you come up with.

All you've really done is created power inflation. You can set those DC's to whatever you want. My generally strategy for a group challenge is to set them to whatever would be slightly challenging for an ordinary person or athelete. In other words, I'd select DC's more around DC 5 than DC 15. In some cases, I tend to throw out DC 0 challenges where the idea is, 'This should be fairly easy, but if you have some sort of penalty (dump stat, armor check, flaw) you actually have to pay for it in risk.' So, with a slight variant on the encounter you suggested - DC 5 for the jump and the balance check and a 30' spiked pit rather than lava - I can challenge the whole party _as the system exists now_. For the example you suggest, all that you've really done with the SAGA system is increased the size of the numbers.

In both cases, pursuit is going to come from those characters where atheletics is thier thing, and the other characters aren't going to shine (or shine as much) or they are going to use one of thier strengths to face the challenge in thier fashion (cleric summons a flying create to use as transport, wizard casts fly, fighter resorts to long range missile fire to take down imp, etc.) Or, rogue gets to jump across the rings two at a time (awsome!) and the rest scramble along behind as best as they can while reminding themself what the 'Use Rope' skill is for.

IN SAGA:...Even if the bonus isn't all that high, the fact it allows them to attempt them rather than setting the DC so low the rogue isn't challenged or so high that the fighter, cleric and wizard can't succeed.

Except, as I've shown, that's exactly what you've still got. You've run into a famous engineering law: "if the probability of something isn't 0, then its damn close to 1." In this case, if the character's probability of succeeding in each step isn't 95%, then the chance of failure is nearly 100%. In both scenarios, the rogue has a near 100% chance of success, and everyone else has a nearly 100% chance of failure. So you've added only power inflation, while rendering the more trivial ordinary challenges outside of these specially designed scenarios pointless. No net improvement, no easier to design for (as your failure with this example demonstrates), and loss of flexibility, flavor (most instances of a class have the same skills) and versimlitude ("What do you mean my desert nomad can't swim? Haven't you heard of oasis? Maybe he learned to swim cooling off in the cistern! By the rules I qualify for being just as good of a swimmer as that fighter over there who spent his youth as a polynesian fisherman!").

 

[Stone Dog]

I'm not a fan of the SWSE system. ... I think the Saga system goes too far and, like is often the case with new editions, replaces old problems with a whole new set.

Probably a good thing SWSE is a specific variant of early 4e then, tuned to Star Wars rather than D&D. We can get a rough idea what 4e might look like from checking out SWSE, but it has been altered to fit a specific cinematic style. While I hope that skill ranks are gone forever, there are lots of ways that SWSE skills can be tweaked to have more granularity to match certain concepts.

 

[BryonD]

Oh, its worse than that.

See, the characters with Swim as a class skill haven't put points into it because they know you won't put a swimming encounter in the game because the Paladin and Cleric with platemail armor and no ranks in Swim will instantly drown, and you're not a jerk like that. They put their points in something they expect to use instead.

Now no one has any ranks in Swim. So even a DC 10 swimming problem at level 10 is too much, because the best swimmer in the party is the ranger using Swimming untrained, with his +2 strength and -1 armor check penalty. He's got a +1, the wizard has a +0, and the rest of the party is negative from armor.

Are you suggesting that the party should not have any weaknesses? Or is swimming just an expection, and if so why is it an exception?

I can't imagine how one could be so self constrained that any use of swim checks regarding an unskilled party would consitute being a jerk. I think that is a patently absurd declaration. If the fighter in full plate knows he can not swim then there are vast options for using that to add tension to a game. Letting the fighter just know it isn't a threat because, well just because we don't want it to be, would suck.

 

[Henry]

I can't imagine how one could be so self constrained that any use of swim checks regarding an unskilled party would consitute being a jerk. I think that is a patently absurd declaration. If the fighter in full plate knows he can not swim then there are vast options for using that to add tension to a game. Letting the fighter just know it isn't a threat because, well just because we don't want it to be, would suck.

It's also where using the jetsam from the sinking ship to avoid drowning comes in. And if the characters decide to go swimming without a life preserver, and with full armor, then their new characters will have swim, I guarantee it. But then, that's how our gaming group rolls, a little bit of the old style of, "if you're unprepared then you'll have a much harder time of it," rather than depending on the GM to take it too easy on us.

 

[Howndawg]

Jumping in with my two cents worth. One advantage of the trained/untrained system vs the skill point system is it makes the job a heck of a lot easier on the DM. Let's face it, there are some players out there who just cannot deal with the skill point system. Each time they advance a level, they either spend too many, too few, or get confused about the whole class/cross-class skill thing. In the last campaign I ran, I was cursed to have a couple of them in my group. I encouraged them to make things easy on themselves by just maxing out on a few skills, but one of them refused to do so. I was constantly going over his skill list and correcting it. It was a royal pain in the rumpelstiltskin. With the trained/untrained system, DM's will not have to play character editor as much as in 3e. I embrace that change.

Howndawg

 

[FireLance]

Also, it is not required that one capture "the ideal experience" for them to be opposed to the idea that skills should grate completely against the grain in terms of tone and atmosphere.

The specific answers can vary wildly. But I would expect them to run in a manner consistent with how it has very satisfactorily occured in my 3X games for the past 8 years.

I thought that multiclassing worked very satisfactorily in 1e and 2e, but I also think that the 3e multiclasing system is a vast improvement.

As for going against the grain of tone and atmosphere, the key issue is whether you take the view that characters have to train or otherwise make a specific effort to achieve greater competence in their skills, or whether the general experience of adventuring is enough to acquire greater competence in certain areas, in much the same way that general adventuring allows the character to acquire greater competence in fighting (BAB) and greater resistance to various effects (saving throws). For some people, it seems strange that a character might have made 100 Spot checks by the time he reached 20th level, and still be no better at Spotting danger than the day that he started adventuring.

If you can accept that general adventuring can make a character better at Spot, then the question becomes one of where you draw the line with respect to improving skills. If Spot, then what about Listen, or Concentration, or Climb, or Jump, or Balance, or Tumble, or Swim, or Survival, or Sense Motive, or Search, or Spellcraft, etc.