What would it take to make 6e not garbage?

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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

OgreBattle wrote:Palladium also has different strength charts for robot strength, cyborg strength, and supernatural strength...

If you're removing negative modifiers in a d20 D&D game then what kind of critter has Str +1, and where does the average medieval peasant lie? how about a horse.
IIRC, the last time this was talked about, it looked like d20, with all the modifiers increased by 5, so the unified table started at a mod of 0 for a stat of 1. So a +1 is whatever has a strength of 2-3, like a house cat, a peasant is working at +5, and a horse is at +9.
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Post by Mord »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:IIRC, the last time this was talked about, it looked like d20, with all the modifiers increased by 5, so the unified table started at a mod of 0 for a stat of 1. So a +1 is whatever has a strength of 2-3, like a house cat, a peasant is working at +5, and a horse is at +9.
The only thing shittier than adding negative bonuses during certain interactions between extremely mismatched participants is adding +5 to every single roll solely to avoid adding negative bonuses.

I'm not sure what advantages Frank is referring to in his post, but it seems to me that if you want to avoid a situation where a character has an advantage that would grant a negative ability bonus to a roll, make a positive ability bonus a requirement to use/have the advantage.
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Post by RobbyPants »

Mord wrote: I'm not sure what advantages Frank is referring to in his post, but it seems to me that if you want to avoid a situation where a character has an advantage that would grant a negative ability bonus to a roll, make a positive ability bonus a requirement to use/have the advantage.
I think he means all the abilities where you add your stat bonus to something (where, a penalty would make the ability worse than not having it).

So, picture adding your Wisdom mod or bonus to AC. The first one would give you an AC penalty if you have a 6 Wis. The second one won't do anything until you get a Wis 12+. Presumably, you only want this ability if it's good (thus, an advantage). You don't want to write "Wis mod to AC" on your sheet if it makes your AC worse. It's also a waste of space if it doesn't do anything.

It'd be a bit of a shift in thinking to assume that you always add a bonus of some sort, sometimes bigger than others.
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Post by nockermensch »

RobbyPants wrote:So, picture adding your Wisdom mod or bonus to AC. The first one would give you an AC penalty if you have a 6 Wis. The second one won't do anything until you get a Wis 12+. Presumably, you only want this ability if it's good (thus, an advantage). You don't want to write "Wis mod to AC" on your sheet if it makes your AC worse. It's also a waste of space if it doesn't do anything.
But in a d20 hack where the human baseline is +5, you need to write the monk bonus to AC as "Wisdom Mod - 5", or things get silly (like, the monk will start to look competent).
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Post by Cervantes »

Dogbert wrote:
ArmorClassZero wrote:As cool as it is to cast Time Stop on-the-fly... why the fuck is that allowed?
Because it's a thing that happens in d&d land, and the moment the GM starts saying "Oh no, casting Time Stop on the fly is only for my penis-extension NPCs" that's when we enter into 4E territory where PCs were handled with one set of rules and the rest of the world and the NPCs with a different, incompatible, mutually exclusive set of rules, and next thing we know we have Mick Mearls saying "there's no point in adding rules for lvls 10+ because games never get there anyway" and that's when you know you just went full retard.
I don't think that "you can't do spontaneous Time Spot" implies "NPCs can and they're better than you". I think it's more that Time Stop requires rituals and longer casting time so you can't do it in the thick of combat. And those rules would apply to NPCs as well.

Maybe the risk is "A DM NPC is going to ignore the fact that you have to ritual cast Time Stop and have his penis sheath do it anyways." But a shitty DM is gonna be a shitty DM; if they allow that then they should let players do it too.
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Post by Emerald »

ArmorClassZero wrote:Mages should be OP when they're in their metaphorical element - within their tower or particular domain, a place they've had ample time to setup and prepare. As cool as it is to cast Time Stop on-the-fly... why the fuck is that allowed?
[...]
Not saying you shouldn't be able to throw Fire Balls... but it better take you more than one turns worth of a combat action...
Why shouldn't you be able to stop time on the fly and launch fireballs with a single action?

From a gameplay perspective, "I continue chanting, for the second of five turns, yay" is boring for the player; no matter how awesome that killer spell will be when it goes off on turn 5, if it takes a half-hour or more of real time to get there that's a half-hour where the player is watching everyone else have fun and not having fun themselves, and it's entirely possible that by the time round 5 rolls around combat is done or the situation has drastically changed to render that spell useless, so they don't even get the payoff after waiting all that time.

Downtime spells, where you can say "Joe the Wizard spends 2 weeks casting legend lore" and move on so having a time cost for the characters doesn't impact the players, are a very different case from combat spells where any in-game delay has a proportionally much larger impact on out-of-game enjoyment. Which isn't to say that you should go out of your way to impose restrictions on non-combat spells--4e did that with rituals, and even people who liked downtime spells never used them--just that it's merely mildly annoying and not incredibly aggravating to increase downtime spell casting times.

From a balance perspective, there's nothing inherently special about spells. A time stop'd wizard can take 5 actions in one turn to kill bad guys? A high-level fighter can attack 5 times in one turn. A wizard can deal lots of damage to a half-dozen foes with a fireball? A ranger can deal lots of damage to a half-dozen foes with a volley of arrows. A wizard can polymorph into something big and strong and beat people up? A barbarian can go from "big and strong" to "bigger and stronger" and beat people up.

The balance issue comes in when a wizard can do things other classes can't (no amount of swording or sneaking compares to teleport or raise dead) and/or can do another class's job better (invisibility + knock > Hide + Open Lock on short timescales and if not traveling through the legendary Dungeon of 1,000 Locked Adamantine Doors) and/or can do several classes' worth of things (a cleric can out-sword the fighter and out arch-the ranger and still be a cleric); 3e classes like the warmage and healer, who have very focused themes and can't really do anything dramatically more powerful than other classes, aren't overpowered at all, and in fact warmages are rather underwhelming despite being able to chuck one fireball per round for dozens of rounds a day. So fix the "I can do everything better than you, and also you and you and you" problem of the handful of caster classes that have that problem, don't change the individual spells which are largely fine where they are (with a few outliers, of course, which can be fixed individually as needed).

And from a thematic perspective, the entire point of Vancian casting is that magic is complex and time-consuming, but that spending ten minutes to get an extra ten seconds right afterwards doesn't make sense and you don't have time to break out the pentagrams and ritual candles when you're being charged by orcs, so wizards figured out how to mostly-cast a spell and save it for later to be triggered when needed. Of all the possible games where one could complain about thematic dissonance between complex magic rituals in the flavor on the one hand and combat-time magic in the mechanics on the other, D&D is probably the least guilty.
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Post by ArmorClassZero »

@Emerald: You make a good point, but I was thinking something along the lines of "Time Stop - Stops time around you long enough to take 5 actions. (Cast Time: 5 Turns.)"

The turns don't have to be your turns (I'm not sure how the PHB would word it...) I think it would be interesting to roll Initiative, know you're going 2nd, cast Time Stop, then hope that you aren't interrupted by those Demon Archers (whose turns are coming up at some point...) Your allies, assuming they go next, also have an incentive to body block or otherwise defend you (as if they didn't already, ha!) And then at the start of the 8th Turn, your Time Stop goes off and you act instead of that ally or enemy.
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Post by Dogbert »

Emerald wrote:and it's entirely possible that by the time round 5 rolls around combat is done or the situation has drastically changed to render that spell useless, so they don't even get the payoff after waiting all that time.
On the only true "1 to 20" campaign I've played, this was the case for my wizard EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. Even at the end-game, combat was actually done in 1-2 turns at most, and I rarely got the chance to do anything meaningful (and no, MC wasn't low balling).
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Post by Chamomile »

A full round of combat can easily take 20+ minutes unless you aggressively require fast-paced play. A five round combat can take up the better part of a full session. If that's the norm, you either have rare but very momentous combats or your campaign moves at a crawl and you probably have a serious padded sumo problem.
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Post by Username17 »

Effects like stopping time and making big spheres of fire are actually pretty easy to integrate into high level play. What you can't have is magic that obviates high level contributions of the other characters, but the ability to take an action and kill some dudes does not do that.

Let's say for the sake of argument that there's a level in which the Fighter becomes a Lord of some kind and gets themselves a bunch of tiny dudes of their own. At that point, the contribution towards big battles of the Name Level Fighter is primarily to bring and boost his tiny men, and the ability to take an action that turns a number of tiny men into casualties with a fire explosion is actually easy to balance against an inspiring speech ability that increases the number of casualties inflicted by the tiny men using their own arrows and spears.

Problematic spells are things that in some way obviate entire armies of tiny men. High flying. Incorporeality. Weapon Immunity. Wall of Force. Shit like that. Anything that sets the projected input of any number of tiny men to zero is potentially problematic because it means that it threatens to make Conan irrelevant even when he Prestige Classes up to Conan the King.

But spells that just do effective things in skirmish combat aren't problematic at all. Such things are rather easy to balance.

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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

Does Weapon Immunity need to be a thing at all? I've never actually seen any scenario where wizards having weapon immunity is anything more interesting than compensating for the mage's low HP and AC in an incredibly stupid way. I am personally fine with force walls and defensive spells lessening the threat of weapons but having high level warriors being hardcore enough to chop right through this shit.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Does Weapon Immunity need to be a thing at all?
You want something to avoid the 5e 'all problems solvable by peasant militia' problem. D&D has classically handled this with weapon immunity or damage reduction, and if an ability is available to team monster, it's available in some form to team player, through summons or charms or whatever.

Now, you don't have to keep out the riff-raff with a magic sword checkpoint. In a situation like Frank's 'Lords contribute with tiny dudes' setup, I think you'd be better off giving all sufficiently big bads a level-based fear effect that makes sufficiently low-grade opposition run when they try to attack, and then the Lord's inspiring speech lets his tiny men ignore the fear effect and keep contributing.
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Post by Chamomile »

I don't think it's a problem if Team Monster gets to obviate swarms of tiny men, and players have access to that to the extent that they can recruit a small handful of Team Monster units. An RPS where armies crit-seek heroes to death, heroes penetrate monster DR, and monster DR makes them immune to army crit-seeking is perfectly fine so long as every major power in the game world is expected to have all three of those things.
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Post by Emerald »

ArmorClassZero wrote:@Emerald: You make a good point, but I was thinking something along the lines of "Time Stop - Stops time around you long enough to take 5 actions. (Cast Time: 5 Turns.)"

The turns don't have to be your turns (I'm not sure how the PHB would word it...) I think it would be interesting to roll Initiative, know you're going 2nd, cast Time Stop, then hope that you aren't interrupted by those Demon Archers (whose turns are coming up at some point...) Your allies, assuming they go next, also have an incentive to body block or otherwise defend you (as if they didn't already, ha!) And then at the start of the 8th Turn, your Time Stop goes off and you act instead of that ally or enemy.
Ah, that's much less of a player-boring and -screwing idea. It sounds like you want something like AD&D's initiative with weapon speed and casting speed, then. Everyone rolls initiative and declares actions at the start of the round, all declared actions all have a certain initiative modifier that affects your place in the initiative order, and spellcasters start casting at the start of the round and finish on their action. For example, in 3e terms, if Joe Wizard rolls a 14 on initiative and wants to cast a fireball (which has a -3 initiative modifier for being a 3rd-level spell), he goes on initiative count 11, and any enemies who act between count [highest rolled initiative] and count 11 can potentially interrupt him, not just actions take on Joe's turn.

In theory, this is a great system that lets you do things like adjust your actions to anticipate other peoples' actions, allow interrupting the wizard without requiring readied actions or the like, lets you differentiate between fast but weak weapons and slow but strong weapons using different weapon speed modifiers, and so forth. In practice, though, the whole system is a royal pain. Aside from rolling initiative every round, you have to deal with calculating out initiative penalties for every action, changing weapon speeds when you draw a new weapon, choosing actions to ensure you go before your target, and such; new players who already don't know what they want to do on their turn tend to be completely lost in such a setup. Most people ignored them, and even Gygax thought they were a bad idea:
Gary Gygax wrote:Forget weapon speed factors. I must have been under the influence of a hex when I included them in the bloody rules.
So I'd say anything involving different casting times by turns or initiative count is probably a non-starter, for complexity reasons if nothing else. Much simpler to change the Concentration rules or equivalent to make interruption easier and the movement and/or combat maneuver rules to make intercepting attackers easier.
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Post by Mord »

RobbyPants wrote:I think he means all the abilities where you add your stat bonus to something (where, a penalty would make the ability worse than not having it).

So, picture adding your Wisdom mod or bonus to AC. The first one would give you an AC penalty if you have a 6 Wis. The second one won't do anything until you get a Wis 12+. Presumably, you only want this ability if it's good (thus, an advantage). You don't want to write "Wis mod to AC" on your sheet if it makes your AC worse. It's also a waste of space if it doesn't do anything.

It'd be a bit of a shift in thinking to assume that you always add a bonus of some sort, sometimes bigger than others.
That makes sense, thanks.

It's still unworkable for the simple reason that no matter how weak and puny you set your "+0 bonus" baseline, you will always have someone wanting to model something weaker and punier. At that point you say "things that are so exceedingly weak and puny have negative bonuses" and we have the exact same situation as we started with, except that our zero point has been shifted five points closer to hamsters than peasants.

Since there's an intrinsically higher math load on the MC than on any given player just by the nature of the beast, I feel pretty secure in saying that it's better for the MC to sometimes have to add -5 to DCs or rolls related to some small and puny critters than for a player to have to constantly add +5 to all his rolls all the time. Offloading math from players onto the MC whenever possible is a good thing.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

So was it a mistake for 3.x to have intuitive modifiers that scale to +5 for 1st level characters? In 2nd edition, an 18/00 Strength gave a +3 to Attack and +6 to damage (and generally, a bonus to attack is BETTER than a bonus to damage) and having an 18/00 was a clear sign you were a cheating munchkin. An 18 was only a +1/+2 (and the highest score a non-martial could get).

Constitution was similar, a 20 in the ability score was only +2 HP per level unless you were a warrior, in which case you got +5.

So do the way attribute bonuses work in 3.x drive people off the scale too quickly. In this day and age, is having a +2 for a 22 ability score acceptable? Or does the fact that 'big numbers are cool' make sliding the bonuses to be larger than the entire RNG a feature?
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

FrankTrollman wrote:... What you can't have is magic that obviates high level contributions of the other characters, but the ability to take an action and kill some dudes does not do that.

...

Problematic spells are things that in some way obviate entire armies of tiny men. High flying. Incorporeality. Weapon Immunity. Wall of Force. Shit like that. Anything that sets the projected input of any number of tiny men to zero is potentially problematic because it means that it threatens to make Conan irrelevant even when he Prestige Classes up to Conan the King.


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What seems to be the salient point that I'm gathering from this is that the best way to fix 6e is to drink from the same well as [Tome] D&D did, and borrow as much as possible from Dominions when D&D "breaks" as a wargame. Which is probably fine. Borrowing a lot from Dominions for [Tome] helped fix the fact that D&D is mostly a bunch of disparate parts that don't actually interleave together to make a structurally self-contained object.

[edit]

I just realized that the best analogy for running most ttrpgs is that they're inverse of "disassembly puzzles". Instead of trying to take the components that don't want to separate apart, you've got components that just as much resist being connected together.

The idea of The Next Editions workaround of "everyone has magic" might be an other way of dealing with that issue without borrowing from Dominions wargame mechanics & ability interactions.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:
CapnTthePirateG wrote:Does Weapon Immunity need to be a thing at all?
You want something to avoid the 5e 'all problems solvable by peasant militia' problem. D&D has classically handled this with weapon immunity or damage reduction, and if an ability is available to team monster, it's available in some form to team player, through summons or charms or whatever.

Now, you don't have to keep out the riff-raff with a magic sword checkpoint. In a situation like Frank's 'Lords contribute with tiny dudes' setup, I think you'd be better off giving all sufficiently big bads a level-based fear effect that makes sufficiently low-grade opposition run when they try to attack, and then the Lord's inspiring speech lets his tiny men ignore the fear effect and keep contributing.
Honestly you're best off just using AC and not auto-hits. If Steve the Viking is a high-level dude his numbers can just be big enough for tiny men to fuck off, and lords can hand out buffs for tiny men to be relevant again. Admittedly this is pretty much what you're suggesting, but I'm fine with keeping it all in one mechanic (AC) because seriously RPGs have too many fucking rules to track as is.
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Post by Username17 »

Mord wrote: It's still unworkable for the simple reason that no matter how weak and puny you set your "+0 bonus" baseline, you will always have someone wanting to model something weaker and punier. At that point you say "things that are so exceedingly weak and puny have negative bonuses" and we have the exact same situation as we started with, except that our zero point has been shifted five points closer to hamsters than peasants.

Since there's an intrinsically higher math load on the MC than on any given player just by the nature of the beast, I feel pretty secure in saying that it's better for the MC to sometimes have to add -5 to DCs or rolls related to some small and puny critters than for a player to have to constantly add +5 to all his rolls all the time. Offloading math from players onto the MC whenever possible is a good thing.
Strength is a somewhat special case in that there are creatures that are going to be smaller than the point where the game stops bothering to model them at all, but you can have honest disagreement as to what that point is. Like, we all agree that the game shouldn't bother trying to model individual brine shrimp, and probably we agree that the game shouldn't bother modeling individual flies. But what about mice? Rats? And so on. Clearly there is a minimum strength below which it does not make sense to worry about, but where you set that point is ultimately arbitrary.

But what about Dexterity? How is it not incredibly stupid for there to be negative Dexterity modifiers when getting caught flat footed negates your Dexterity? Like, how is it even possible for there to be 5 levels of slower movement than people who are attacked while not moving? Why is that even a fucking thing?

Everyone should have a Dexterity bonus while they are able to move so that losing your dexterity bonus by being attacked while immobile has a consistent meaning. Because fucking obviously.

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Post by deaddmwalking »

So 3.x trying to make what stats MEAN consistent was a step in the wrong direction?

Having a 10 Dexterity at +3 (for instance) and a 10 Strength at +0 (for instance) might be better? Then you could scale Dex slowly (say +1 for every 4 points) and Strength could scale quickly (say +1 for every 2 points)? Is the fact that you'd have to refer to a table lookup (a la 2nd edition) sensible?
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Post by Username17 »

deaddmwalking wrote:So 3.x trying to make what stats MEAN consistent was a step in the wrong direction?

Having a 10 Dexterity at +3 (for instance) and a 10 Strength at +0 (for instance) might be better? Then you could scale Dex slowly (say +1 for every 4 points) and Strength could scale quickly (say +1 for every 2 points)? Is the fact that you'd have to refer to a table lookup (a la 2nd edition) sensible?
Having a unified bonus table was an improvement over the bullshit that came before. But you've still got the issue where it's simply factually true that different bonus schemes are appropriate in different contexts. It would be ungamebalanced for strength bonus to damage to scale 1 for 1, but it's fucking stupid for strength bonus to kicking open doors to scale 1 for 2.

The easiest way to thread that needle is to have some tests that you add bonus to and some tests that you add the whole stat. There's no reason to have different bonus charts for different stats. But similarly there's no reason to slavishly add numbers of the same size to all kinds of tests.

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Post by deaddmwalking »

I think that makes sense, but I want to ask a clarifying question...

So, in 3.x kicking open a locked wooden door is a DC 25. That's something a STR 20 person can do on a 20, and anyone else is not going to succeed. That'd be a task where you might consider a higher DC, but characters could add their entire attribute. Thus a STR 20 character could conceivably succeed on a DC 21-40; a STR 10 character could succeed only on an 11-30. Even if you bumped the DC to 30 you'd have reasonable amounts of success, and a STR 40 Dragon is never going to fail (while in 3.x that +15 modifier results in a failure 50% of the time).

That seems to make sense for Strength, and seems like a pretty easy way to make it work. Can you think of an example using Constitution or Intelligence?
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Post by Trill »

deaddmwalking" wrote:So, in 3.x kicking open a locked wooden door is a DC 25. That's something a STR 20 person can do on a 20, and anyone else is not going to succeed.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't kicking doors open be easier than DC25?
Because I know that normal people can kick open doors by kicking near the lock, which depends more on putting the strength into one spot, rather than raw strength. And I know that people that do this aren't the strongest people around.
Is there something I'm overlooking here?
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Post by deaddmwalking »

That was a 'strong' wooden door. A SIMPLE wooden door is 15.

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Post by Username17 »

deaddmwalking wrote:I think that makes sense, but I want to ask a clarifying question...

So, in 3.x kicking open a locked wooden door is a DC 25. That's something a STR 20 person can do on a 20, and anyone else is not going to succeed. That'd be a task where you might consider a higher DC, but characters could add their entire attribute. Thus a STR 20 character could conceivably succeed on a DC 21-40; a STR 10 character could succeed only on an 11-30. Even if you bumped the DC to 30 you'd have reasonable amounts of success, and a STR 40 Dragon is never going to fail (while in 3.x that +15 modifier results in a failure 50% of the time).

That seems to make sense for Strength, and seems like a pretty easy way to make it work. Can you think of an example using Constitution or Intelligence?
I don't think Constitution should be a stat, but my first example of it would be drinking alcohol. The amount of booze you can drink should be reasonably deterministic, with sturdy dwarves being able to pound back steins full of grog while delicate elves sip wine from cups. The Constitution 20 guy knows for absolute certainty that he can pound back 21 or less points of booze without any possibility of falling down, while the Constitution 10 dude looks at the same pile of cups and knows that if he downs them all it's a coinflip that he ends up on the floor.

Intelligence is a somewhat different problem, in that there isn't general agreement on what exactly it's supposed to do. Most of the Intelligence related tasks are things people think of as skill-dependent in the sense that your ranks in Knowledge: Whatever should actually be a much bigger deal than they are. So a lot of Intelligence tasks have kind of the opposite problem, where what you really want is for skill ranks to be providing much larger bonuses than +1 to the d20.

But there are certainly other ways you could handle that. The underlying issue is that you want there to be Sages, people that the player characters seek out for exposition. But you also don't want all of them to have to be 12th level Wizards and shit. Really you just want someone who knows enough about stuff that he can tell you that the thing you found was a Khaasta scale and it implies that the attackers came from the Bane Mires. A key portion of that is probably having Knowledge Ranks add large amounts to the die roll such that the fact that the Sage has taken the relevant skill up to Master rank is really important on the die, but equally having the Sage's Intelligence of 20 put him most of the way off the RNG with rando farmers even at Basic Knowledges is a pretty defensible design decision.

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