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SqueeG / awesomeTome

A compilation of Gaming Den DnD 3.X changes. Started by Frank and K.
http://squeeg.github.io/awesomeTome
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Skills Chapter #8

Open Tarkisflux opened 10 years ago

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

Consensus seems to be to keep existing skills and do mergers. Since Lokathor already has them formatted for LaTeX, we can probably start on the merging and errataing... just as soon as we know what those merges and errata bits are. So let's hash those out here.

Here's some things that have been tossed around the boards for a while that are pretty close to simple skill updates:

And on the subject of binary skills, should we turn binary skills into 3-phase (non-proficient/proficient/master) or 4-phase (non-proficient/proficient/master/grand master) skills instead? Sort of a half-USE setup for skills that don't really scale well.

I'll save my own preferences for a bit on this one.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

I would almost like to see some skills just completely separates from the system as it is.. but having a few work off of a near-USE hierarchy ia basically halfway there and could be interesting.

Personally I already merge Hide/M.S as Stealth and Spot/Listen as Percepti-wari-fication.

I was wondering if going as far as making Athletics and Acrobatics might be worth it. FBMF had some.interesting consolidations, too.

Diplomacy is really badly placed as a skill... is there a good plug and play system we've found? I know the Den has 8 million different views on it.

... maybe diplo should be it's own issue thread.

ghost commented 10 years ago

I think a question worth asking here is 'how much should skills do in this system?' Tome of Prowess takes the approach that skills should be a significant part of your character, allowing high-enough ranks to mimic spell effects and the like, essentially making them a significant and important part of your advancement. On the other hand, leaving them as-are and doing some consolidation basically keeps them as a secondary thing, especially in the later parts of the game, and make them obviated by spells. Which way are we swinging on this?

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

Consensus is to try and keep the mainljne project as simple as possible.

Tarkis and I floated the idea of also debating/developing a TNE almost in parallel. So despite me really liking ToP, it would require a lot of other changes through out.

ghost commented 10 years ago

That doesn't really answer my question. If by that you mean 'change as little as possible from 3.5', then I can find something to agree with. My take on this would be as follows:

Now, some structural changes.

Any thoughts on these?

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago
Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

Multi-skills / Skill Tricks I like the general idea of treating multi-skills as skill tricks. It would also allow us to migrate a bunch of smaller non-scaling feats into skill trick land if desired. Which sounds like a larger change than we've been discussing, but it's not one that I'd mind if we were all on board. And if we're not all on board, we should probably just stick to small mergers.

That said, if it did go through we'd need someone to volunteer to write it up. I've written a similar system for inclusion with ToP ExpRunes (link if you care), but it explicitly doesn't use skill points in favor of time and random progression checks. I imagine it's more complicated than is desired here, but scaling it down to skill points wouldn't be hard. Or you can type yours up, it's probably the same amount of work either way. You've already got monsters, want another subsystem to write up :-p?

Knowledge Removal/Merger I think this only works if we do the skill trick thing to pick up edge cases. But if we're going to do the above, sure, let's do this too. It's not too difficult compared to the other thing.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

This weekend I'll take the time to type up the system I had, or at least to begin doing that, so I can actually show what I'm talking about. Some of the talents also added extra functionality to certain skills, which allowed me to reduce the skill list further. Heal, for example, was a talent that allowed you to use the Nature skill (or, without skill mergers, I suppose survival) to do all the heal stuff.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

Before I hit the hay...

I like the idea of skills actually DOING something as they level, but the reason I liked USE was because of it's _simplicity_. It's relatively easy to understand and remember.

I loved reading ToP, but there's a LOT to take in there; and that's just for a sub-system of the game. So if there is going to be a concerted effort to make viable skill-stuffs we either need to make sure it's not overly-complex and/or it can be replaced with the shitty system 3.5 has atm. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but I mean it in the sense that people can simply dial the game back to stupidly-simple if the new option is too complex.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

For the record, ToP is intended to be on the same utility / effect level as the spell system, which led to its complexity. And it's flagged as complex on the intro page, with big warnings that you probably don't need to use it in a number of cases. In other words, I completely agree with the complexity worry, but since it's a subsystem that everyone actually uses to one degree or another, I think that it works out okay despite the complexity. It's not like making people learn truenaming for 1 class and the bolt it on for all of the other things in the game so that 1 guy can use it or anything.

I still don't support using it in this project for the reasons previously mentioned though. This isn't a large departure revision, it's a compilation "we only need this one pdf" revision. And that lends itself to the simpler mechanics that people are already familiar with and using. I think USE is itself too large a break, despite its simplicity, and only want to see something similar to it (or to skill tricks) for skills that shouldn't be skills in the first place because of scaling issues.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

Pretty much exactly what I was trying to say. xD

+1

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

Alright, I typed up the talents I had, you can look at it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cjz5i37fbkhsmnf/Talents.pdf

Since it was for my own d20 variant, some of the language is still specific to that, but it should still make sense.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

I will have an opinion and potential merged skill list drafted by tomorrow night (probably). Too tired to do it now though. We should be able to close this issue by end of week at the latest though. If anyone has opinions on skills / uses as tricks or techniques or whatever, now is the time to put them in.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

I forgot to look this over, will make a note.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

I generally like the traits thing, but replacing a significant portion of the current skills with it requires a lot of changes to skill feats and classes and I don't know that we want to do something on that scale. So instead I think we should largely leave skills alone except for minor mergers and errata, but take all of the epic skill uses (which are also included in the SRD) and turn them into purchasable traits with rank minimums. Note that the DCs on these are really dumb, and will need to be fixed when they get added in.

With that in mind as the ultimate goal, here's the current SRD list along with what I think we should do with them:

New Skill List

  1. Acrobatics
  2. Appraise
  3. Arcana
  4. Athletics
  5. Bluff
  6. Concentration
  7. Decipher Script
  8. Diplomacy
  9. Disable Device
  10. Disguise
  11. Escape Artist
  12. Forgery
  13. Gather Information
  14. Handle Animal
  15. Heal
  16. Intimidate
  17. Jump
  18. Nature
  19. Notice
  20. Ride
  21. Search
  22. Sense Motive
  23. Sleight of Hand
  24. Stealth
  25. Survival
  26. Theurgy

Traits for a whole bunch of removed and/or 'epic' things.

Other things

And I'm spent. Comments? General approval? Readiness to get on this?

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

A few minor quibbles. Is jump worth retaining as an independent skill? It quickly becomes less useful when everyone is expected to fly by level 8 or so, might it be better as part of athletics? Similarly, couldn't handle animal become a trait associated with Nature? Other than that, no arguments.

Your list seems to be missing the arcana, theurgy, and nature skills.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

Jump could be worth retraining, if it gets to scale appropriately. I'd originally written that we'd errata it with IGTN's / ToP jump scaling, which is worth retaining I think, but that doesn't work well with the trait structure. Anyway, by level 8 you're supposed to have access to flight but not necessarily at-will flight, which leaves a lot of space for vertical movement abilities still. And even if you do have at-will flight you may still want to use your 80+' move action jump (assuming significant trait based scaling) once in a while, simply because it's faster or has a smaller action cost or you can pair it with your actual flight for a greater total distance or whatever. Jump also directly competes with climb (which also stops being useful when you get at-will flight and doesn't even have edge movement cases), and putting both of those in the same place seems odd.

I could see putting handle animal in nature as a trait with push animal in there as a default skill use, but I'd want to pull all of the magic bits from it and make druids explicitly divine / theurgy classes with no need for nature for spellcasting purposes. That's just as good from a system standpoint (unless we change someone's casting stats) since we don't need knowledge(nature) for epic stuff or PrCs necessarily, and also from a fluff standpoint since DnD has always called druids and rangers divine casters. So we probably should do that actually, unless we want to change divine casters to Cha casters or whatever. I'm just so used to thinking in 3 way magic split terms from my ToP work that I let some of it spill over.

And it was missing those, boo me. Have added them to the list.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

I, personally, hate the huge fucking lists of class skills. I'd prefer classes just give the +3 to some very iconic skills. With maybe two or three different 'lists' for different play styles. Such as a spy thief vs dungeoneer vs con artist.

I also happen to like 4e's nature phleb(oti)[nu]tonium. With barbarians, droodz, rangers, shaman and the like working off of it.

But I don't have a huge problem with them being considered divine, either.

I do think certain classes should maybe just give ranks in skills as the character levels, though. It's a little ridiculous for druids to have shit nature checks, wizards to have shit arcana and clerics to have shit divine.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

The lists will already be cut down as a result of mergers and eliminations. Additional cuts via edits are probably a good call for some classes, but lists of 10-15 class skills or so should be expected for non- or half-casting classes. Reducing that much more runs the risk of unnecessarily restricting trait access to non-casters (because of the second bullet in my "other things" above), and I don't support that.

Once we have those lists though, we could break them up a bit maybe. Perhaps there are "automatic skills" that always have ranks = level plus bonsues, "core skills" that qualify for bonuses if invested properly, and "optional skills" that you get to pick X from to count as "core skills", but that's a bunch of extra complexity for pretty little gain in terms of differentiation I think. Really, I think you just get to suck up class skill lists @SqueeG, though automatic skills might make it in (with corresponding skill point drops) despite being a net decrease in differentiation and flexibility.

I have a preference for the primal / divine split as well, but I'd want to pair that with a casting stat change. And possibly a name change to the nature skill, to avoid rules / name dissonance. More work though.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

Oh man, I'd love to see casting stat changes that made some sense. ... but that's primarily because I hate CHA being a sorceror's main casting stat.

The skill list thing just annoys me because it just takes up so much unnecessary space, it looks ugly and I've always ignored the shit out of it because I've ignored class-skills v NCS's entirely.

I just feel there's a better and/or more elegant way to handle that. I'm not going to throw a hissy fit over keeping it the way it already is, but it's something I have always hated and _always_ ignored. Making them useful sort of blunts the hatred a bit... but hey, grognard-ism I guess.

That core skills, optional skills, pick from a list thing isn't exactly world ending amounts of work. Maybe a few tables or lists and a few paragraphs explaining what's what. Just seems more worthwhile and/or customizable than dumping a giant list-o-skills in each class description.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

I could see reducing the number of class skills any given class gets if they just provide bonuses and unlock talents. I don't want to see classes getting skill ranks automatically unless it has a core mechanic based on specific skill usage (Soldier). On defensive skill use vs concentration, I'd personally rather see more actions getting a "This action requires concentration" clause to make the concentration skill more broadly useful, but that's not a strong opinion. I could even see completely getting rid of concentration if you wanted.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

@SqueeG, I should have said so before, but I'm also leaning against auto/associated/optional breakdown because it's yet another deviation from SRD on top of the really substantial skills deviation we're already doing, and I feel like we're already skirting on the edge of our scope decision to not deviate too strongly from Tome content + SRD. Skills needed some errata and some non-skills needed serious reworking and we're incorporating the epic stuff in a non-retarded way, but the traits thing is already a big deviation. The ranks change on top of it pushes it even farther out. I think these are solid changes, but I'm wary of making anymore that aren't strongly warranted and I don't think that class skill writeups are. But we will weed some of the skill lists, so hopefully it won't seem so unnecessary and ugly and whatnot when we're done.

On concentration, I agree that labeling more things as "requires concentration if distracted/stabbed" and "can be interrupted" would be a good thing. But there's a more fundamental process change that I want to standardize. For example, we'll look at the movement case (which doesn't interact with concentration, but does everything else). The movement case can not be interrupted (generally), and it's a "make check, if fail provoke AoO" format. If it could be interrupted, damage from that AoO would prompt a concentration check, because that's a straightforward use of concentration to avoid an interruption.

That's a model I prefer much more than the defensive casting "make check, if fail lose spell" model. Aside from not even getting the fluff of why concentrating helps you avoid an AoO, I'd much rather have a check for preventing the AoO in the first place because that means that casting a spell is more likely to get you hit (possible AoO vs. not possible AoO). And then if you do get hit, it's an interruptable action so it prompts a concentration check. Mechanical parity and consistency ftw.

Off the top of my head, disable device and escape artist should both be interruptable. So with those you would make a check to avoid AoOs, with a DC similar to the revised tumble mechanic. If you fail, you get attacked and may need to make a concentration check to avoid losing the action. If you retain the action and if it's the round where you complete your action, then you make another check to see if you succeeded. Concentration there is relegated to only action retention, instead of AoO avoidance.

We could just remove it, but there's a few subsystems we don't directly support (psionics, tome of battle) that make use of it and we wouldn't have a new skill to point those things at. While I don't actually care about them, supporting them seems to be part of our agreed upon "don't rock the boat too much" scope and I don't think it costs us much to retain it.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

@ExplosiveRunes - can you upload the LaTeX version of your traits? Or just a mostly empty LaTeX file that just has 1 trait with formatting in it? I want to make a trait template and start converting things, but I'm not sure how you have them formatted.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

Yeah, no problem, here is the actual tex file I was using: https://www.dropbox.com/s/74hz2vuq1y70cdy/talents.tex

Its fairly simple, just one new command: \newcommand{\talent}[1]{\paragraph{\large\textbf{#1}}}. And the formatting looks like this:

\Talent{Talent Name} ~* \noindent\textbf{Whatever: }Stuff

\noindent\textbf{Whatever: }More Stuff

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

That seems functional, but non-ideal from a formatting perspective. Why wouldn't we want something that contained all of the formatting already instead? Like this (I'm going to use #. things to avoid issue linking, I know they're wrong):

\newcommand{\talent}[4]{ \paragraph{\large\textbf{#.1 (#.2)}} ~ * \noindent\textbf{Benefit:} #.3

\ifx#.4\undefined\else\noindent\textbf{Partial Benefit:} #.4 }

Then if we decide we want to change text, formatting, or even remove partial benefits entirely it's a simple function change rather than a search/replace macro and actual work. It also has the benefit of being easier for contributors to work with, since the template file can hide a bunch of formatting and code and just look like this "fill in the blank" style thing instead:

\talent{ /talent name goes here/ } { /talent cost goes here/ } { /talent benefit goes here/ } { /partial benefit, if any, goes here/ }

Is this a better solution, or am I missing something?

[Edit] Stupid git markup hiding my text that I didn't bother to preview....

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

There is no real reason, I was just trying to throw something together quickly for an example. That looks like it should work fine, though sometimes latex acts funny about creating new lines within \newcommand.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

The following bits are still pending from my skill update list:

1) Should bluff lose feinting to sleight of hand? 2) Should concentration be the skill that helps you retain an action when you are interrupted (by stabbing or burning or whatever), or should it be the skill that helps you avoid AoOs with an interruptable ability? 3) Which Diplomacy do we want: Iameki's errata for it or my push an agreement ability from ToP.? 4) Forgery - is it a stand-alone thing or a talent? 5) Nature - is it a magic skill for 'primal' casters like druids and rangers (and probably deserving of a rename at that point), or is it an animal / plant ID skill with animal handling? Note that the answer here also determines the scope of Survival. 6) Ride - should we errata the DCs to scale with mount CR in order to make it more valuable/necessary at the high end, or accept it as a low level thing and talent it up appropriately, or something else?

My answers: 1) I think so. Bluff can retain the distract for hiding thing. 2) I think it should be the skill that you roll when you are interrupted, and that other things can take over for checks to see if you avoid AoOs (if that's even an option for the action). This means putting a bunch of -can be interrupted- tags around, but I think it's worthwhile. 3) I like my diplomacy thing, but bias and whatnot. I don't mind Iameki's though. 4) I think it's better as a talent, probably keyed off of appraise. 5) I like the primal fluff and would like to keep it as a magic skill, but I don't mind the animal version (and the animal version is probably closer to stated scope goals). 6) I like errating the DC to scale with mount CR. Dire tigers and wyverns can be more difficult mounts than horses.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago
  1. No argument
  2. Shouldn't AoO avoidance be keyed to dex or something appropriate to the situation?
  3. Haven't read either, yet, my apologies.
  4. Agreed, being a talent makes sense.
  5. I like the primal fluff, but why wouldn't nature be about knowing things about nature? Primal coincides with being attuned to nature, knowing plants and animals, sensing dangers that city folk wouldn't, etc. Survival and Nature go very much hand-in-hand. Healing (the skill) and Nature, not so much. I know there are natural healing things, which could be some kind of bonus/talent for having ranks in both... or something. But I'm not quite sure why a combined Nature/Survival can't be coexistant with Primal power.
  6. Scaling Ride DC for exotic mounts is awesome.

What exactly is the outline for the talent system in your head currently looking like? Because I'm not quite sure I follow exactly.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

@SqueeG

2) It is for movement, via the tumbling/acrobatics skill. It is keyed to concentration for spells, and that's dumb. We could tie AoO avoidance for every provoking action to acrobatics or other Dex skills, but that seems overly limiting to me, and also pushes all combat casters towards wanting acrobatics or some other dex skill.

Let me ask this a different way. When you're doing something like lockpicking or spellcasting in combat, should it provoke an AoO? If yes, should you be able to avoid it somehow? If yes, should it be via skill, feat, class feature, or something else? If skill, which one should you roll? My answers are yes, yes, skill, the same one as you're using to avoid taxes because concentration is already a tax if you get hit, and double taxes suck. But there are other ways to deal with that, like not letting people avoid AoOs and just suck it up with concentration or having to take a feat or something.

5) Skill parity mostly. If there's a magic skill for wizards and a magic skill for clerics and a magic skill for druids they should be roughly equal in value IMO. Which means that Primalmancy (it's a sucky name, but I want to avoid term confusion) needs to do primal spellcraft, primal spellcasting AoO avoidance (if that's a thing there), and have talents for primal item using. It should not get handle animal and the more mundane stuff, which should go into survival or handle animal instead. I think it's a choice between "handle animal + primalmancy + nature/survival" and "nature + survival + theurgy" depending on class fluff. Nature gets to be naturey, it just doesn't get to be naturey + magicy and be better than the other magic skills.

Outline like layout, outline like general mechanical function, or outline like actual planned bits?

For the layout, I figured they'd probably get their own chapter or subsection, since the possibility of multiple skill prereqs means that tehy can't just be listed after the regular skills. Putting them in their own chapter also means that it's easier to cut them from the work if someone wants to fork it and do that.

The mechanical outline looks a lot like @ExplosiveRunes link above. Or a lot like non-scaling ToP abilities that you buy instead of just acquire naturally.

The actual planned bits were mostly me going through the epic skill uses and wanting to turn them into level appropriate talents instead. And a couple of ToP things to round out where the epic stuff is thin, lame, or both. I figure we want 3-7 talents for each skill, plus a bunch of others (craft, perform, profession, etc.) that aren't keyed to any skill at all.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

@Tarkisflux AoO and avoidance : Avoidance is just that, avoiding something. In DnD that' pretty much either Dex, a Dex derivative, a (su) given to a Dex-like class, or magic. So basically Reflex, Feats/Class abilities, AC or spells.

Concentration : Is being able to keep your focus despite outside influence. Keeping focus on your spell after being bashed in the face, finishing your lock picking after being stabbed in the kidney. So...a skill, fortitude, feat/class feature... or spell.

I could see _why_ rolling concentration into other skills would be more simple. Both of those examples could easily just be Arcana and Disable Device checks, with modifiers. But nothing about Arcana or Disable Device implies (to me) that they can simply prevent somebody from gaining the upper hand because you're at a tactical disadvantage. Aside from simply getting the task done quick enough that you can get out of the way or become mobile again. I'm not sure I see a really obvious solution unless a talent is created that is baked-in concentration, that might be buyable (or given) for any skill that would require it.

Natural Primacy-ology : Primal class are expected to be naturalists, able to survive in the wild. So, really, having a Primal AND Nature skill is almost a tax on being a primal class. Rangers and Druids are both expected to be good with animals, be able to find good berries v poison berries, live, hunt and fuck in the wild. Barbarians are suppose to do at least half of that, too. Shaman as well. Nature, to me, is handle animal and survival to a large degree. I could see a Primal power source or Divine( Primal ), or even a 'Primal Spirit'/Spiritual power source. Segregating the power source could be the solution.

_"Thinking out loud..."_ I honestly don't think that it's completely necessary just because it has so much overlap with Natural skills in general. Maybe a separate Talent tree for primal people. Or Talents that have rider effects for Primal classes. Or levels in Primal can also unlock Talents from the Nature skill?

Hm...

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

When I talk about avoiding an AoO here, I mean avoiding provoking it entirely. So let me change language a bit to try to keep that more clear.

Should you be able to deny people an AoO when you would otherwise provoke one? Currently the answer is "yes, sometimes". Lots of actions provoke AoOs by default, but two things allow you to deny those AoOs to people who would otherwise get them. They also use two different mechanical setups, and I find that annoying: 1)You can elect to cast defensively and that simply denies AoOs to anyone threatening you. It is automatically effective at denying AoOs, but requires that you succeed on a concentration check or you lose the spell. 2)You can also elect to move defensively and deny AoOs based on your movement. This is not automatically effective at denying AoOs, and an acrobatics check to avoid move defensively, and if you fail you provoke.

I want to standardize on method 2, where you roll a skill to deny an AoO when you would otherwise provoke one. And if you fail the check, you provoke and are hit or avoid it as normal. If you are hit during an interruptable action, then you would make a concentration check or lose the action.

I just said we should have either a primal skill and a nature/survival hybrid skill OR a nature/handle animal hybrid skill and a nature/survival hybrid skill, depending on whether the power source was split out or not. Which seems to be what you end on before thinking out loud and losing me completely. I'm not really sure what you're arguing here...

So I'll just restate my goals I guess. Assuming power source split, I want primal magic skill (that probably covers elementals and fey), I want survival/knowledge (nature) mashup skill that covers survival and tracking (and plants and animals), and I don't really know what I want to do with handle animal in that setup. I explicitly don't want tracking and wilderness surviving to come with a knowledge of primal magic.

If that's not sufficiently clear, I may just work the skills up so that we have something more concrete to discuss.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

No, it's clear. I get what you were saying. I'm also not trying to be argumentative as much as trying to justify everything in my head.

For AoOs, rolling to essentially prevent/avoid an AoO has always made much more sense.

And yes, after talking out loud about knowing nature magic vs knowing about nature, having a separate primal/spiritual/totemic skill alongside a nature skill is how I'd prefer it done too.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

I'm responding here to your to-do list because I want to answer questions from both threads and there is significant overlap. I tend to be reductionist, so if I were to reclassify the skills on my own, without compromise, here's how I'd do it as of now.

  1. Acrobatics: Balance + Tumble
    • Ride: Now a talent
  2. Arcana: Knowledge(Arcana) + Spellcraft (Arcane only) + Disable Device (Arcane 'traps').
  3. Athletics: Climb + Swim + Jump (I know we disagree on jump, not a major point of contention).
  4. Deception: Bluff rename, makes it easier to fit talents thematically under it.
    • Disguise: Is now a talent under deception. Not worth skill ranks.
  5. Concentration: No change, make more things require it.
  6. Intimidate: No change.
    • Brute: Talent, use str instead of cha.
  7. Linguistics: Speak Language + Decipher Script. Each rank gives you a new language.
  8. Mechanics: Knowledge(Engineering) + Open Lock + Disable Device (traditional mechanical 'traps').
  9. Nature: Knowledge(Arcana) + Spellcraft (Wild only) + Disable Device (Wild 'traps').
    • Handle Animal: Now a talent.
  10. Notice: Listen + Spot.
  11. Search: No change.
    • Trapfinding: Now a talent.
  12. Sense Motive: No change. Maybe change name to Insight if we add talents that expand the theme?
  13. Social: Diplomacy + Gather Information (GI not worth a skill) + Knowledge(Nobility, Local).
  14. Stealth: Hide + Move Silently
  15. Survival: No change, maybe expand (also covers Knowledge(Adventuring) whoch wasnt actually a thing before).
    • Heal: Now a talent.
    • Track: Now a talent.
  16. Tactics: Knowlege(History, Warfare) + New subsystem for managing companions, cohortsm and followers.
  17. Theurgy: Knowledge(Religion) + Spellcraft (Divine only) + Disable Device (Divine 'traps').
  18. Thievery: Sleight of Hand rename, makes it easier to fit talents thematically under it.
    • Forgery: Now a talent.

Note that this doesn't include all talents I'd want to see, just things that used to be skills but are now talents. At 18 total skills, I'd standardize skill ranks/level at 3/6/9. So a highly skilled character would be expected to be proficient in half of all skills, a major boon. This is still the case if you retain Jump and axe Tactics.

Primal vs. Natural: I don't really see a problem, the Nature skill is all about identifying natural creatures and magical beasts and fey, and casting 'wild' spells. Survival is about being able to survive in hostile environments, perform first aid, and finding food. Nature is "Oh thats a Warfruga-Bear, they live briar dens and are the natural predators of Wrabbits." while survival is "This looks like a trail, claw marks and size of prints indicate it was probably made by an apex predator. We should be careful when choosing caves to sleep in here."

@Tarkisflux my response to the 6 questions you posed are partly answered above, but I'm answering here for completeness.

  1. Keep it with bluff, rename it deception, fits theme better.
  2. Concentration does not let you avoid AoOs. Tumble and Arcana/Nature/Theurgy are special exceptions that allow you to avoid AoOs.
  3. I think we'd want something simple that takes aspects from both systems. I'd want a system that has three components that determine the final DC: Attitude, Proposition, and Concession. These three things determine a DC that you roll against once. If you don't actually intend to hold up your bargain, or otherwise lie during this, thats a bluff/deception check as appropriate.
    • Attitude: The standard D&D attitudes of how much an NPC likes you, this sets the base DC.
    • Proposition: What you propose. Adds or subtracts from the DC. Things like what you propose is beneficial/dangerous/strange/disgusting to the NPC.
    • Concessions: You can offer incentives in the form of bribes or services to reduce the DC.
  4. Talent, under 'Thievery'
  5. Nature can ID animals and fey, survival helps you survive in any kind of hostile environment, not just natural ones.
  6. Talent. I'd stick it under Acrobatics, because it really is a form of acrobatics, and gives Knights an incentive to take Acrobatics as a skill.

Sorry for the wall of text.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

Well @ExplosiveRunes, I only did the to-do list because you were asking for such a list of things to do and I thought that your "minor quibble" comment meant you were okay with the list I threw down. But this is cool too, I can work with this and hammer out a compromise. Any maybe @SqueeG or someone else wants to get in on it too.

Anyway, I'm going to go through your list and comment it up. If I don't comment on it, I'm okay with it as proposed:

  1. Acrobatics: Balance + Tumble
    • Ride: Now a talent

Not sure how I feel about Ride as a talent here, though giving access to it and virtual ranks through the mounted combat feat would probably open it up sufficiently well for me. Would you also want to make the ride DCs scale with CR as well?

  1. Arcana: Knowledge(Arcana) + Spellcraft (Arcane only) + Disable Device (Arcane 'traps').

I'd want to roll in some monster knowledge (dragons, constructs, something else), but otherwise sure. Additional talents would include other monster knowledge sets, so your necromancer doesn't have to invest in theurgy and the elementalist doesn't have to invest in primalmancy.

  1. Athletics: Climb + Swim + Jump (I know we disagree on jump, not a major point of contention).

As long as this doesn't pick up too many talents (and jump needs a few to scale in a worthwhile manner), I'd roll with the placement to get some reduction since I want to split some other things out.

  1. Deception: Bluff rename, makes it easier to fit talents thematically under it.
    • Disguise: Is now a talent under deception. Not worth skill ranks.

As long as you're not going to talent up Disguise to grant significant benefits, like alter self stuff, I'd be okay with this merger. Otherwise I would expect enough talents to make this worth splitting back out.

  1. Linguistics: Speak Language + Decipher Script. Each rank gives you a new language

I would prefer to put decipher script in as a talent in such a merger. .

  1. Nature: Knowledge(Arcana) + Spellcraft (Wild only) + Disable Device (Wild 'traps').
    • Handle Animal: Now a talent.

Strongly opposed to handle animal as a talent here, unless you plan on appending similar subsystems to the other magic skills. The magic skill balance is just screwy with it. Also opposed to the idea that everyone who is good at training animals at higher levels also has wild magic knowledge, which is enforced by this pairing. If you think that the nature skill needs handle animal and animal knowledge, then I think it needs to not be called nature at all in favor of something more esoteric and less mundanely evocative (hence my stupid primalmancy). Would also want to add in monster knowledge, likely fey and elemental. Additional talents would include other monster knowledge sets, as above.

  1. Sense Motive: No change. Maybe change name to Insight if we add talents that expand the theme?

Insight was used by 4e. I'm not opposed to it off hand, I just wanted to make sure that the associations of the name change are known before hand.

  1. Social: Diplomacy + Gather Information (GI not worth a skill) + Knowledge(Nobility, Local).

Don't like the name change, prefer "persuade" or "convince" or something less broad (though those may be too specific). As to the merger, I generally don't like GI as a skill as it cuts out the whole "using your abilities to do legwork" part of the game, but enough people don't want to do that part of the game (see previous den discussions on the matter) that I left it alone. Happy to tell them to screw off or make it an explicit use of whatever this name is changed to though (in that you convince people to tell you what's up); just wanted to point out the implication there.

  1. Survival: No change, maybe expand (also covers Knowledge(Adventuring) whoch wasnt actually a thing before).
    • Heal: Now a talent.
    • Track: Now a talent.

Not down with heal as a talent here. I get the apothecary angle, but it doesn't seem mandatory to apply bandages and treat wounds with antiseptic or whatever. It also means that every great healer is also great at getting along in the woods, and I don't want to merge those two. And it also piles on any healing talents we wanted to do onto the survival skill (which we can rename back to wilderness survival or outdoorsmanship if you wanted). I do want to add on monster knowledge (animals, plants, vermin, and maybe oozes) though, because knowledge of those things doesn't seem sufficiently magical to need to go in one of the magic skills.

  1. Tactics: Knowlege(History, Warfare) + New subsystem for managing companions, cohortsm and followers.

Don't want another new subsystem at this time, don't see a need for this one.

  1. Theurgy: Knowledge(Religion) + Spellcraft (Divine only) + Disable Device (Divine 'traps').

Want to bolt on monster knowledge for undeads and outsiders as well. Additional talents would include other monster knowledge sets, as above.

  1. Thievery: Sleight of Hand rename, makes it easier to fit talents thematically under it.
    • Forgery: Now a talent.

Thievery implies more than the palming and hiding and swiping without others seeing that the original skill actually does. And I don't see forgery coming out of the base skill at all. I guess it works if you are working as outgrowths of the name of a skill and not of the function of a skill though, it just seems a bit of a stretch to me (more even than deception swallowing disguise, which at least grows out of the acting part of bluff).

So I'm mostly ok with your base list. I'd want to axe tactics because I don't see the need for it, and restore heal and handle animal for thematic ability set reasons (heal can get monster knowledge traits to be a bit more useful without just being survival). Some of the mergers just combine things I don't want combined for all characters, and those two splits would keep that from happening. Jump I could take or leave, but I do like having a round number of skills at 20 (because aesthetics; it's not a very defensible reason). I'd standardize on 4/7/10 skill points if we went with 20.

There are several problems.

Survival already helps you find food by identifying edible plants and bugs, it allows you to avoid natural hazards (which should include carnivorous plants in addition to quicksand), and one of the epic abilities is to ID creature type by tracks. These seem like a much better default fit for the lower CR animals, plants, and vermin than the primal magic skill.

Arcana and theugy give you creature knowledge that cover every level of the game, nature tops off near 10 with some rare exceptions. Primal magic skill needs something more than animals, plants, and vermin (though I am perfectly happy with it talenting into that if they want to go that way instead of survival ranks).

Dumping additional (if somewhat irrelevant) animal training bits into the primal skill makes it do more than the other magic skills. While that might be okay if primal skill has crappy monster ID associated with it, that seems like a worse fit all around. It also means that all animal trainers are primal knowledge guys as well, and I see zero reason to enforce that.

Again though, if it needs a name change to be less evocative of those things I don't want associated with it, then we should do that. Hell, we can rename survival to nature, and then nature gets tracking and eating off the land and all of the other outdoorsey things, and primal magic skill can go its own way and be a magic skill.

3) Both systems already do those things actually (either implicitly or explicitly), and after re-reading Iameki's I think we should just use that one with some wording changes, some modifier changes (because we want hostile people to agree to things once in a while without massive bribes I think), and maybe some more explicit modifier examples.

5) I don't think this works, as I attempted to explain in the previous section.

6) As asked above, does the talent come with a scaling DC based on mount CR, or would you prefer it just be an ability and not worry about the checks (which is about the same as a flat DC given sufficient levels)?

Woo walls of texts!

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

Ha, well, when I said "Minor Quibbles" I guess what I meant to say was something more along the lines of "I can accept this". Everyone here likely has their own opinion on how to perfect the Tomes, and I would be perfectly willing to help produce a document that used those previous 26 skills, they already look better than 3.x. Once I had some time to sit down and think about skills, and write some of my thoughts out, that list is what I came up with what I'd want if I had to make absolutely zero compromises. I don't expect all of them to be accepted, and could live with none of them being accepted.

That said, lets look at it more!

On Iameki's diplomacy, am I looking in the wrong place? The only one I've found is here: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=29292 and that diplomacy seems to vague too use as is. I'd still want something with three tables that show you DC modifers and examples plainly, and probably another table that would show what NPCs of a given level would typically consider to be appropriate gifts/bribes/incentives to accept a deal.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

Ride: Fair enough. Still not sure I'd want it as an acrobatics talent, since that means that everyone who needs to get ride needs to have acrobatics as an associated skill, but I could see it as an unassociated non-scaling talent worst case.

Disguise: You can't disguise yourself as a sahuagin effectively unless you can breath water and have darkvision (and maybe even blindsense). You can't disguise yourself as a demon unless you can do even crazier things. Disguise needs to get alter self or polymorph like bits if it is ever going to evolve past simple disguises (unless you want people's disguises to be gear / spell limited, which I'm not so fond of), which is why I brought them up. I could live with it limited to simple disguises though. It's not like most players think about going scooby doo villain for infiltration purposes.

Magic Skills: I don't like alchemy as an arcane talent and sort of prefer it as a generic craft talent (because druids can distill acid and glue too, see apothecary), though I wouldn't cry if it were used here. Oracles as theurgy thing might work, but I've been toying with that for a while now in ToP and been unable to work it out to satisfactorily. So, maybe? And I still think handle animal is a terrible fit for a magic skill, so I'd want something else there.

But that's 1 "meh", 1 "want working model before considering", and 1 "think of something else". I'd be perfectly happy to do none of them really, and have the magic skills otherwise be boring mirrors of each other. For talents, "combat casting" to get AoO denial, monster knowledge expansions, and UMD stuff should fill them out nicely without needing additional stuff.

Diplo: A better name for hitting it off at parties would be "charm", but that's taken. That also suggests an attitude altering mechanic or reaction roll mechanic, which could well be a talent. I could see sociability maybe?

Knowing about nobility I'd rather see as a skill less talent, or rolled into linguistics (again, maybe as a talent) so that you know the basic sociopolitical setup of any area for which you know the language.

Forgery: I stuck it under appraise because that sort of attention to detail can be turned to nefarious purposes, but it seemed similarly ham handed. Not sure how I feel about a scaling talent though. Might work better as a series of 2 or 3 talents that just grant higher DCs as you get better at it. Or as 1 talent with partial benefits of reduced DCs or whatever.

Handle Animal: I could see this as a talent and a time scale with no checks. That seems pretty solid actually.

That's the one (it's also in the community section of the Tome pdfs). It doesn't have explicit modifiers for how bad the thing you want them to do is or how how good a thing you want to give them to offset that, but the weighing of those things comes out in the example (lose last cow, big penalty; offered 'magic' beans, moderate bonus). You want more explicit examples though, which just better spells out the process and makes it more explicit. The basic framework is already there and it just needs tables though, which is what I meant.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

Ha, I completely forgot about appraise. I made a mental note to make it a talent on my list, but completely forgot. Sort of shows how I feel about appraise I guess. I don't think it's worth a full skill. It could be an independant talent, or maybe related to making "knowledge checks" however we handle that, or sven just something you can do. I coyld see it fitting under search or notice. Perhaps Notice gets Appraise and Search gets a talent that gives a bonus to detecting forgeries? Forgery, as you said could just be a two tier talent like craft.

Disguise: I had in mind for it just to be some simple scooby doo disguises. As a one rank talent its implied that it should have about the same value as being able to say "I can play string instruments" or "I can read footprints". Potentially useful, but only situationally.

Arcana/Nature/Theurgy: I'd like each to have at least one talent you can grab at first level for it, but it's not strictly speaking necessary.

More powerful talents: so far we've only been discussing low-level talents. Do we want then to be something characters continue to invest in at higher levels like skill tricks wanted you to? If so some of these issues could be solved. Sure disguise is low level, but it qualifies you for the Metamorph talent at 5 ranks in Deception, and so on.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

Appraise: And I missed that you had removed it. I think it's worth including if it gets ID magic weapons, armors, and wondrous items traits. I'm aiming more towards making things useful than just straight removing them.

Magic Skills: UMD and combat casting and knowledge expansions would all be first level things, though there would probably be too many of them to get them all at 1st level. There's no reason to restrict those things though.

Higher powered talents: Yes, they need to be things that higher level characters can invest in, because higher level characters will otherwise have unused bonus points just laying around to be spent on bullshit like more professions or new crafts that they don't care about. Since I wanted to bring in the epic skill uses as talents, there's already a bunch of them laying around for adaption. My concern with merging things and then making a bunch of higher level talents is putting too many talents in one skill and not enough on others, weighting the value of that skill disproportionately. If deception gets you access to "falsify alignment", "falsify thoughts", "trick divination sensors", "glibness/magic lie detection denial" talents, then piling on a bunch of disguise advancement talents gives you a lot of reason to take that skill over others. And I don't like that layout so much.

And if we don't want to mess with higher powered talents (and I think there are plenty of valid reasons not to, like project scope and additional complexity and making skills a source of power that competes with class features), we should probably settle on that now.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

If you're going to fuck with skills, my opinion is that they need to remain useful as you level, or we explain they pretty much just stop at level 10. Ooooor they just scale like USE. I have zero interest in allocating between 60 and 200 points over a character for what would end up being useless fluff in higher level play. Which, I know, a lot of people don't really do but I enjoy playing in the 'teens'. Between the epic stuff, skill feats and talents there's plenty of ideas to merge.

That being said, I'd like to avoid skill points getting into the hundreds, that shit is annoying.

That's personal shit, though. I'm just of the opinion if _time and effort_ are going to go into rethinking parts of the skill system, aside from quick mergers. Then make sure it's time well spent.

I'm also okay with some skills being more interesting, as long as they have a lot of options. So not everyone focuses on the same skill tree or path... how ever you would want to envision it. Some skills really just leave themselves open to more options.

Primal and Nature seem a pretty obvious split the more I look at it.

Survival: Nature could be survival for wilderness, Primal could be survival for magical wilderness, Arcane could be survival for Magical planes, Theology could be survival for Deific and Demonic planes.

For things like Ride or Handle animal you could offer a few different ways to buy the Talent, maybe enough ranks in Arcana for handling/riding certain animals, same with Nature, Primal and Theology.

Appraisal could also be built into fields of study (Arcana, Primal, Theology), as a talent for a few ranks so a rogue could take points in all of them to be able to make some quick appraisals but a Wizard/Cleric would know exactly what a particular item is. Maybe Appraisal could be a talent that lends itself to having 2 or 3 ranks in each 'Field of Study'.

Disclaimer: I'm not going to cry if you think those ideas are stupid, they're just some quick ideas.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

Appraise: I can see appraise being an acceptable skill if it becomes the skill that identifies the function of magic items, how to activate them, their value, etc as long as it gets some talent support.

High Power Talents: Agreed. We need to determine how many bonus skill points we can expect an intelligence focused character to get at each level, and have at least double that many ranks worth of talents for them to have access to. This is easy at low levels where a wizard probably only has 5 bonus skill points, max. But more difficult at 10th where he might have 60 or more. Also should have a note about how you can switch around a number of skill points equal to your level each time you gain a level, or let characters put ranks into talents they don't qualify for yet in preparation so that they always have something to do with their bonus ranks.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

@SqueeG Haha, hooray for simulposts, totally missed your post.

I don't see the skill points being as big of a problem. By limiting your 'real' skill points to a flat rate per level, and reducing the available skills, at 10th level as a skilled class you're looking at allocating 90 points in 18-20 skills. Seems like a fair amount, but really you're probably choosing 9 skills to place 10 ranks in, and then assigning 50 skill points into talents. I'd expect the high level talents to cost about 5 or so ranks. That's still a fair amount to do when making a high level character, but making a high level in D&D has always taken me an hour or so, more if I'm choosing spells.

I sstill think Nature should just be the magic skill, and survival should be the surviving anywhere skill. Having both a Nature and a Primal skill seems weird to me. In dungeons and dragons nature is magical. Fey and electrical plants are 'natural' creatures.

Appraise being folded into other skills? I could see that too. No strong opinion either way. I can easily see it as a talent, its own skill, or folded into other skills.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

It occurs to me that we're punting on multiclassing and spending a lot of time worrying bout a skill revision that's ballooning a bit in scope. So much so that I'm starting to have second thoughts about doing it for the initial work.

So just in case anyone else feels the same way I thought I'd point out that doing @SqueeG's "make it explicit that they stop around 10" (but really 6 or 8) warning with mergers and errata only is a perfectly adequate (if potentially unsatisfying) solution for the TRD. It requires less mucking with skill feats, less mucking with class features, and less writing of new skill mechanics. I'm not sure I'd rather do it yet, but I'm back to considering it.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

Even if the TRD ends up having a system much more similar to 3.5 than the one we're hashing out here, I think it's of value to know where we get to in the TRD 2e so that our initial minor revisions align with later, more major revisions. We'll probably end up with a similar discussion for every system in the game.

I'd want any skill system we have to go all the way to level cap, and Id want the highest tier of talents to go up to at least 3/4 the way to that level cap. If cap is 20, we can probably stop making talents after level 15, as long as we have enough things for them to spend ranks on. If 10 is the level cap, they should go up to 7 or 8.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

Nature vs Primal - The whole point of splitting them out is to break up ability sets along defensible lines. Yeah, it's all "natural" in the trivial non-artificial sense, but that's not helpful thing to divide up ability sets along because it is overly broad. So in a split of those two nature is "prime material natural" stuff that includes electric plants and oozes and dragons and maybe magical beasts and/or vermin (depending on world building type fluff), and primal is something deeper like "elemental planes (elementals) and anthropomorphized elemental / natural forces (fey)". It also sets druids and rangers up as distinctly tied to the inner planes, and very distinct thematically and power wise from the outer planar focused cleric. Whether those are divisions you like is a different question of course.

But that seems a bit moot because....

Let's not go crazy here - I'm changing my position on talents and skills in general, at least for TRD 1. I think we're better off skipping large system tweaks (including skill point limits) and sticking with just mergers and errata for the most part. If we do talents at all, they should probably only be things that can be taken at level 1... but I think we might be better off just reformulating them as tome profession style skills (and removing serious checks from all of them). So for each point you put into craft you get one style of craft, and there's no checks with it, just a time associated with how long it takes you to make stuff. And handle animal (individual animals) and profession (individual professions) and perform (individual instruments) can all be the same thing.

Int bonus could still be restricted to those things + knowledges + speak language (if it's not merged with script) though, if we wanted to limit bonus skill point value a bit. And a weapon proficiency / armor proficiency set of skills that functioned sort of like the proposed talents would probably be fine too.

And there is no nature vs primal problem here, because we're not changing class fluff either. It's closer to our scope decisions anyway.

But if we were going to go crazy... then it's worth taking a step back from where we are with talents. So far we're talking about having a lot of talents to expand skills, but a lot of them seem like normal things that you'd need the skill to do after level X in order to remain relevant. I'm not sure why we're charging characters for that (and by extension, penalizing people who have small int bonuses with comparatively reduced skill effectiveness), rather than building it into the skill ToP style. So if I were going to get everything I wanted out of a skill system, real skill talents would just be built in, and background skill talents wouldn't cost you permanent skill points so much as time (because skill point value issues).

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

@Tarkisflux : Let's go a little bit crazy Skills are really something that should either be left out, or swapped out for something better.

Because otherwise the only skills worth having are perception, stealth, search and disable device. I rarely, to never, use skills other than those past low level games. Oh, there's also Perform. Because I have players who run some pretty awesome Bards.

So in my view let's do two things:

  1. Make sure what ever we do, it's easily translatable from 3.5 to Tome. (important) It's a lot easier for people to adopt something when it doesn't shit in their cheerios. Gradual change is a lot easier to get people to swallow. A la Pathfinder. Except we can make actual changes that have some math behind them.
  2. KISS principle : RoW scaling skill feats are a simple-to-grasp concept. Talents are a simple-to-grasp concept. Merging / Combining / etc the two should not result in something that's not really worth the word count.

Really all we're talking about here is a sub-system that is largely ignored, and if TRD v1 compiles with a PF-style skill merge with COMING SOON tags thrown in, I'd be okay with that. But I really think there are some solid changes that could occur even then. Such as Phlebotinum skills( Arcane/Divine/Primal) being created and/or useful. Creating Perception as an always-on feature. There are features worth keeping already, in my opinion.

Advanced shit can be hashed out and placed in ATRD (har har) if necessary. But taking shit no one cares about and making it viable and/or cool is sort of what the Tomes started out as, and there is a LOT of material out there to sift through. That's where the TRD sort of stands. A _sane_ compilation of community Tome material with errata _and tweaks_.

Bonus rant:

  • Consider making high level skills (su) : I see absolutely no issue with it. It's something I want personally. It's also something that makes sense imo. Your perception becomes so awesome that you can see ghosts. You can stealth so sneaky that you really do merge into the shadows.

Clearly this is a complex issue. That could be an "in the future" kind of thing, but I figured I'd throw it out there.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

Simplicity vs Complexity: There are advantages and disadvantages to all of the systems we've talked about, but I feel that the issue of complexity should be one of our top concerns when revising any subsystem for the TRD, second only to mechanical balance and practicality of implementation. The Tome of Prowess seems to be (never having played it) mechanically sound. Unfortunately someone wanting to know all the features of Athletics (the skill that lets you climb and swim) can be expected to look at nine tables charts. That's bonkers. Our objective should be to have a skill system that remains both manageable and relevant at all levels, wether we go with innate features or talents.

Talents vs Features: We have, broadly speaking, three options on how to handle the skill system.

  1. Skills remain similar to how they are, being useful in some circumstances but becoming more and more irrelevant as a character progresses.
  2. All skill hand out awesome abilities, for free, as you gain ranks in them.
  3. You pick and choose abilities (talents) to gain in skills of your choice as you level up.

Both options two and three can work, but I'd prefer three. Under option two all characters who know a given skill are given the same set of abilities. With option three we can have some variety even between characters with the same skill. If we go with talents, we should design said talents using the following principles.

Going Crazy or Staying Sane: I think theres a middle ground here. I think we can expect players to be moderately familiar with the concepts we discussed. Pathfinder already consolidated skills to a degree, and even introduced a new skill. Skill tricks already exist. Yes, we want to take things a little further and do more, but I don't think anything proposed warps the skill system beyond recognition for players familiar with d20.

Time as a Cost: I'm against time being used as a cost for anything but the most minor things here. In my personal experience something that takes more than a day or two of down time to have is usually something you either enter the game with, don't get at all, or end up just killing an npc for. I've never even been in a game where a player crafted a moderate magic item after the game started. I do not want to see in-game time as a cost to acquire anything skill related, would not want to see any implementation of a talent/skill requiring more than a week to use (excepting craft, if you decided to make a house or something), and would not want to see a talent/skill that take a day to a week to use have a chance for failure. In the instance of Handle Animal, for example, I'd want to see it take one week, no check, to train an animal for a purpose (not to do a single trick, what good is that?)

@SqueeG Crazy-Ass Bonus Idea... MEGASKILLS: I'm just talking out of my ass here, but here we go: After tenth level you no longer get skillpoints, you get MEGAPOINTS that can be used to by MEGARANKS in MEGASKILLS. These MEGASKILLS start all over at rank 1, with all new DCs, and do MEGASTUFF. *Note: This isn't something I'm advocating, or even think is a good idea. It's just something that floated off my brain.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

@SqueeG

You can make the same argument about multiclassing, and we're punting there. Why are skills worth dealing with in a larger way and multiclassing not?

I don't even think there's a strong onus on us to fix it at this time. The skill system wasn't just largely ignored by the players, it was largely ignored by Frank and K when they were making tweaks. The Tome solution to skills it to boost their relevance via class feature (and eventually, skill feat) rather than deal with the underlying value of them at all. If you think we absolutely must deal with the skills, then a USEM setup is the way to go at this time (with additional rules to limit skill feat interactions to appropriate classes with appropriate skill rank and appropriate levels). It is probably not the direction that we would go with for a 2e, but it is the sort of irrelevance that the tomes were aiming skills towards: actual skill checks are meh, and all the cool stuff is in feats or class features.

@ExplosiveRunes

On ToP I don't think the 9 tables point is a fair one, nor are they bonkers. It's an information display choice to help people find what they care about and ignore the rest.

2 of the tables are modifiers (I wanted to present things in a "the way things are" DC adjustments and "things you can do to affect your chances" modifier adjustments, but it could be dropped to 1 table) and you're going to have some of those no matter what.

3 of those are explicit declarations of the "you can take a -5 to try to do better" or "if you fail by less than 5 you suffer minor drawbacks" bullshit that is otherwise hidden in the text. It's just a different presentation of those things that are already in the skill to make it easier to work with and remove the bullshit function hiding.

The remaining 4 tables are things you only look at when you level up, as they are explicit growth of ability based on rank tables. It's basically what you'd get if you took a bunch of talents and put them in table form instead of individual form. If you want a more direct comparison to a talent setup, you'd want to look at a different skill (like intimidation") that I haven't reformatted (and possibly gone overboard on ability scaling smoothing).

On Talent Goals I don't disagree with these goals, but some of them are pretty much unattainable as written.

Crazy/Sane Talents as skill tricks is fine (maybe not in a USEM system... haven't really pondered that though), though the higher powered ones we're discussing aren't ones I'd want to put in yet. Actually reducing some skills to skill tricks is more than I think we should do here. Pathfinder skill rank changes are also weird, because they drastically change the value proposition of class skills and that has implications on which skill feats you care about. It works to reduce skills to further irrelevance though, which is what the Tomes were headed for, so maybe that's fine.

Time as Cost Yeah, time as cost is only for things like proficiencies, languages, fields of study, animal training, and so on. Hence background stuff. I admit that it's unlikely to come up in games (I have seen significant crafting and downtime stuff used it in games before, but it's not exactly common), it's mostly there for world building consistency and handwaving reduction and decoupling things from level that I don't thing benefit from being coupled to or limited by level and available level resources. It was a "no compromises" position (as I said) since we were throwing those out there, and not one I care at all about getting in here.

SqueeG commented 10 years ago

Working, so just a quick response.

I don't think multiclassing and skills are really on the same level. The kind of skill revisions we've been talking about don't necessarily require the same level of core-system changes that multiclassing will need.

With skills I feel we're adding an addition onto the house. With multiclassing we're easily gutting and remodelling the inside of the house.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

Alright, I've had some time to mull over some stuff. I think you're right about the scale of the talents, at least for the first version of TRD. If we want people to get badass stuff related to skills, those should probably just be skill feats, or just part of the skill. I do still like the idea of talents for low level background stuff. Craft, animal training, languages, etc. When we want a talent and a skill to intersect in a thematic way, we could have a skill feat that requires a talent as a prerequisite (A feat that gives you leadership for beasts could, for example, require both handle animal and scale with nature). We also probably don't want to award new points to buy talents with every level or anything, because they aren't high level things. So, here's the idea for a much scaled back talent system, or at least the underpinnings of it.

The talents we would use would be the sort of talents we were looking at handing out for one rank before (and, in a way still are one rank talents). Perform, profession, craft, handle animal, speak language, weapon proficiencies (with different time requirements, depending on the proficiency you already have), even disguise make sensible talents under this system. Granted the much reduced scope of the talent system, we'd want... let's say around 15 talents to choose from, maybe less (not counting variants of the same talent).

If we want to go into skill tricks type talents, that can be an expansion to the TRD in the form of a 'splat', or something withheld until TRD2.

Skills: Talents aside, I'd still like to see a significant reduction in the number of skills, and no more bonus ranks for high int. Argument about the TOP aside, I'd rather have 18-20 moderately complicated skills than 25+ simple skills any day.

Also, @Tarkisflux , you're still totally the project leader, if you decide that multiclassing is what we need to focus on, I'll do it. Hell, even if I disagree with the method of multiclassing (or whatever subsystem) you choose, I'll still help format it. The most important part of this project is that we work together to actually finish it. If I want to change something for my own D&D group? Well, I know latex and I can do that on my own later.

Tarkisflux commented 10 years ago

That's more than I think we need to do, but sufficiently non crazy to fit within scope. I assume this would pair with your reduced skill list, which I'm mostly ok with. Do you still want some talents to unlock additional skill uses, like disguise unlocking bluff uses or decipher script unlocking linguistics uses (which is no longer a skill even)? I don't think it works as well if we don't have at least 1 of these use unlock talents floating around for each skill, so we'd either want to do a bunch of them, roll them into different skills by default, or retain the skills as their own thing. I don't have an opinion on that just yet, but I wanted to put it out there.

Past that, here's my take on a few mechanical things:

If you want an alternate take on the idea with fleshed out mechanics, I've got a similar system for ToP here. I imagine the multiple grade mechanics and long learning time frames (which are reduced through unfinished skill interactions) aren't going to be to your liking, but maybe you'll find something to loot in there. And handle animal isn't in there, but I think you're right that it should be.

And while I am project manager / leader / dictator, I'm sticking to "what contributors want goes unless it doesn't make sense" guns. I think punting on multiclassing is the right call because of who the audience for this work is. I think punting on skills to a large degree is the right call as well, but you both really want to do more than that with them. I'd prefer to talk you down rather than put my foot down, hence productive (I think anyway) conversations. I'm going to try to save putting my foot down for something bigger (or hopefully never have to use it).

ToP aside, removing handle animal would make me want to also remove an int and cha skill for attribute balance aesthetic reasons, so one of appraisal or ciphers and then also cultures. Which would bring the list down to 22.

ExplosiveRunes commented 10 years ago

Well, I was just taking it back to its most minimal implementation, to see if it was agreeable. Since this version combines the good parts of exploits and talents, it lets us reduce the number of subsystems.

I'm a little confused as to what base skill set we're going with now. Are we going with our own set of skills hand chosen by us, or are we going with an altered version of the ToP? Your final question mentions ciphers and cultures, which would imply the latter. If the former, could you list the new skill list you're considering? It appears to be different than the one given further up the thread, or the one in the skill to-do issue.

Background Abilities: I genuinely like that system, but I think its more complicated than we want to have here. Maybe format it and present it in an index of optional systems?

Skill Unlock Talents: We can if we want, and I'd like to. One talent to go with each skill seems like a good goal. We could even have some synergy and decide to have two skill feats for each skill, one that requires the related talent and one that doesn't.