Take the rules-as-written (no changes to any skills), give the Rogue a skill bonus in every single skill equal to his level +3, and he still under-performs.
Depends on playstyle, but assuming lots of combat, yep. I wasn't saying that designing the Bard and rogue as skill characters worked out, i was just saying that is how they were designed. I'd argue that it didn't work out. Great, they're awesome skill monkeys, but skill monkeying doesn't affect gameplay as much as it should.
He can tumble, he can bluff, he can spot search and listen, find traps, charm the pants off the king, intimidate the ogre champion, climb jump and swim like an Olympic athlete, and use any magic item the party comes across.
Yep.
None of this is gonna impress a pack of ghouls.
Well, the tumble ranks give you an AC bonus eventually. lol. Some of the skills might be good at helping you run away from said ghouls. But I agree, skills are not as good as they should be.
Skills just don't move the needle much when it comes to Challenge Rating, and an overwhelming portion of the game revolves around combat.
Quite true. I'd argue that they should. they should be considerably more useful in combat scenarios. They should let you do crazy stunts, and let you act like a ninja. Or a swashbuckler. You should be able to use your skills to make combat work out more in your favor.
Conversely, if the game throws the balance farther towards skill challenges, then it's kind of irrelevant what your BAB and HD are.
Depends how much more towards skills it is. And not every skill check will be "check or die", som will be "check or damage".
As the sliding scale of "Combat" approaches 1.00, the value of skills approaches 0; as the sliding scale of "Combat" approaches 0, the value of BAB and HD approaches 0, and perhaps the value of skills shoots up instead.
I agree with this one wholeheartedly. Ok, most-heartedly. Skills can make a difference in combat, but you're right, its not a very big difference. If your games are about a 50/50 blend of combat/noncombat(mine are around there), the skills ae useful, but still dont seem to be quite useful enough (though definitely more useful than your posts seem to indicate in your playstyle).
So, I'd say yeah. Make the Rogue and Bard have other abilities instead, but I'd still drop the skills around the level of other characters, because a full caster with 6+int skills is better than a full caster without. Albeit, not by a large margin, but still better. (Unless they lose most of the interesting class abilities, and thats no fun.)
Another fix, would be to work on the skill system.
If skills were more generally useful, a skillbased character could be good in combat if he chose, or he could spend his skills elsewhere. Personally I think that would be a better fix, but the other one will still work.
