FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1168978442[/unixtime]]
Currently investing skill points isn't like spending gold for a magic sword. It's a lot more like keeping up with spellcaster levels - you have to invest something every level of your whole life or you fall behind the curve.
But it is just like spending gold for magic sword. If you're 20th level but didn't "invest" in you magic armor and swords keeping a track of it at each level to ensure that your plethora of magic items is at the required level, you will fall behind the curve and your character will eventually die. A character that has only a +1 sword and everything in gems due to his incessant greed isn't going to be a successful character build. (Unless he bribes everyone along the way)
Except, it's more than that. There's a DC. The DC scales up faster than your level by a substantial margin. And if you don't meet the DC, you don't do anything. It isn't like having crap spellcasting where getting a few spells from the old levels can be diverted into buffs while you do whatever it is that you really do. If you can't Sense Motive against level appropriate foes, you accomplish nothing - it's just like you never had any motive sensing at all.
Not if you're dedicating your skills into listen, spot, or have dogs/cohorts/other player characters/magic items/spells that can do the skill for you. It is just like how the fighter can't attempt to counterspell or dispel a magic spell.
A Rogue chooses their skills at first level, and then those skills continue to go up every level, but they don't really get any new abilities. They just get offered the chance to not raise their first level skills each level. Fvck that.
But they do get other skills. If they grow confortable (or just want to bridge out), they can take other skills and start building them up. And, as I said before, each time I have played a rogue, I've never been able to max out *every* skill, or even taken every skill, that looked cool for my character - there's just more skills than there is skill points.
Giving a Rogue skill points to assign each level is like giving a Wizard an assignable caster level - sure they could start over from level 1 Sorcerer, but then they'd suck ass.
But this is somewhat of a red herring - yeah, the spellcaster is getting bonuses at each level, but so are the bonuses to defensive features. (ie saving throws) Like I said earlier, you could make skills like this, but all you're doing is trading in (+20 skill/+0 defensive skill) for (+40 skill/+20 defensive skill) which really doesn't buy anything.
That's the problem. The problem is that for a Skilled character to be simply level appropriate, they really can't abandon the choices they made at first level - and that's crap. When a Rogue gets an empty level it's actually empty. All they get is that they count as one level higher.
But that is most of the game. Fighters can't go out and abandon keeping up their armor and weapons, wizards can't go out and abandon gaining their spells, and the such. If your DM is pitting level appropriate obstacles to your party, everybody is trying to keep up with the curve in their own way to what they think their character needs to have.
That's the beauty of D&D - otherwise, people would just have pre-printed character sheets ebcause everyone would have every base covered. It I make a hit-point inflicting machine and not keep up propping my saving throws to the maximum level that is possible for my character, that can come back and bite me in the butt in the long run. The reverse is exactly possible as well. All I can hope is that each character covers the weakness that other characters have, and thus working together as a team the party can survive. Through all of its incarnations, the game isn't really designed to be a one-person/character game.
