3.xth Edition: Skills

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 2:15 am

Well seeing as though there aren't many house rules turning up aside from Tomes I guess I will move on to skills which aren't given a lot of attention in the Tomes. Some people don't care about skills but I think that they should be given as much thought as feats otherwise some turn out useless (Gather Info, Knowledges, etc) and some overpowered/poorly managed (Diplomacy, Bluff if taken to an extreme in a lie your way out of anything sense). In the Tomes a number of skills seem to be only as important as the feat attached to it. So seeking to have skills matter a bit more I am seeking suggestions.

*First I think the skill system should work out like this:
-Players still get skill points as indicated by class without the x4 at first level (working pretty much like the skill points in PF) So humans only get 1 extra SP per level including first.

-PCs spend 1 point on any skill

-The rank cap for a skill is equal to level/HD

-PCs receive a bonus to Class Skills equal to 1/2 the level of the class. .5s are counted (and rounded down on rolls).

This makes using skills at opening levels a bit harder (you lose the top 3 ranks you could have had) but allows people to get the skills they want without being penalized for it while making the class relevant to being better in certain skills. This means at 10th level someone who maxed a class skill will be easily getting +30 on the check from class and ranks alone.

*Next up would then be the list of Skills:
Acrobatics (Balance, Tumble)
Appraise
Athletics (Climb, Jump, Endurance Checks)
Autohypnosis (for those who use Psionics)
Bluff
Craft
Diplomacy (Gather Info)
Disable Device (Open Lock)
Escape Artist
Fly
Handle Animal
Heal
Intimidate
Knowledge: Arcana (Spellcraft)
Knowledge: Dengeoneering
Knowledge: Geography
Knowledge: History/Nobility
Knowledge: Local (Gather Info)
Knowledge: Nature
Knowledge: Planes
Knowledge: Religion
Linguistics: (Forgery, Speak Language, Decipher Script)
Perform
Perception (Listen, Spot)
Profession
Ride
Sense Motive
Sleight of Hand (Use Rope)
Stealth (Move Silently, Hide)
Survival
Use Magic Device

This is basically the list from PF. I use it because it works pretty well as a list of skills. Skills as they are need a lot of work especially if I want them to matter at all. I am inspired to make a number of changes to them based off of their previous discussion in the recent TNE threads. Having said that I think they should have an application in and out of battle and that each skill should give you something equally (or at least almost) as important as another. I will go over each skill later but if people have additions to or think certain skills should be taken from the list please include the why.

*So now we move on to DCs. DCs usually range from 10 (common) to 40 (impossible) with varying DCs for tasks in between. The problem with a lot of set DCs is that at later levels it becomes incredibly easy for a PC to accrue massive bonuses to their skills making the intended difficulty of a task negligible. In 4e DCs tend to scale with the party. But I think that at certain levels PCs should be able to easily overcome challenges that had previously been difficult or outright impossible. My knee jerk reaction would be to ban any mystical way of enhancing skills. All spells/powers and by that process, magic/psionic items that enhanced such things would therefore be eliminated and keep everyone on track. This would have the added effect of making class/racial abilities that give skill bonuses (fave enemy/terrain, bard's inspire competence, Elf perception bonus, etc) more valuable. Let me know your thoughts on this.

*Certain Skills shouldn't have a set DC for everything (Particularly social interaction skills) but I will address that when going over the individual skills.

*I also like the ideas that a number of skill tricks present. I think that a number of them should be incorporated into the skills.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 3:09 am

MGuy, you need to read the write up on "Hits Needed" to do things in the AWoD game.

At high levels, the characters will lift and throw motorcycles; drive crowds into a blood frenzy; boil a man's blood alive; spit gouts of flame from their hands, smash open steel doors, move like lighting incarnate, turn into hulking giant monster etc. etc.

The Campaign Organizer doesn't need to suddenly increase the difficulty just because the characters are able to deal with problems that truly -are- trifling, as if they really were trifling. Simply making things 'harder' is not really a good solution for characters who are designed to accomplish specific types of things.

Lowering DCs to base 10 or 12 eliminates the problem of "not having +3 to all skills at level 1". I hope that helps.

I'm, not a fan of combining skills. Some classes get some skills, while not getting everything on the 'group' that is part of a now combined skill.

Move Silently and Hide make a case very strong against combining skills.

I've played Painball and fired my marker at chip-board bunkers while not being actually seen by the people inside it while they could hear the distinctive 'thwap' of paintballs flying into the large window of the building they were inside of.

I've snuck up on people with their backs turned to me, if they turned around, they would have seen me plainly, but they couldn't hear me for shit.

I've done games of manhunt (think tag, except that once your tag someone, they're merely changed into an other person searching for who ever is remaing, and not caught) in forests (I tend to have funny and easy hiding places; like lying down in a stand of high grass and taking a nap).

I've hidden in the edges of a forest and made in-game 'calls' that other players would know 'something' was in the woods, but not what was making the call, let alone where the call came from.

and, that's just me. I'm not rated for covert anything, I'm just some guy who practices walking heel-edge-toe of the foot, and a few basic sight avoidance techniques. An actual high-level rogue will have methods that are probably insane, and require all kinds of physical effort. So there could very well be even more divergences in the methods used.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 4:10 am

Let me just say that the fly skill is total ass. It was a really bad idea to come up with it, and it basically makes it so you have to roll a bunch of skill checks each round to have an aerial battle.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 4:16 am

Holy shit, a Fly skill?

Yeah, fuck that... actually, no, don't fuck that. Burn it. Burn it with hatred and prometheum.

The fucking Scry skill was removed for a fucking reason. Paizo went and reversed something that the 3.0 to 3.5 revision improved; and then decided to 'herp derp' make the same mistake that was once corrected.

That's... worse than re-inventing the wheel.

That's like burning the wheel; and telling people to use dragged sleds again. Very retarded.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 4:35 am

Fly is kind of fun if you assume that anyone can take it and natural flyers get a hefty racial bonus and the ability to take 10 in most situations. Then people can seriously fly by just waving their arms really fast.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 4:41 am

I haven't played with PF rules ( as I am currently on DnD hiatus IRL and have been for a few months) but I think it might actually come to be useful. Adding flight to the game makes things a bit more difficult so I'm going to make flight more tenuous in this little project. I'm leaning away from using the fly skill for just making 90 degree turns so before this discussion gets derailed by it I will make a thread in IMHO over the subject.

IGTN · Post by **IGTN** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 4:47 am

I could see the use of a Fly skill when flying is restricted (i.e., forests and the like) or in difficult conditions (winds).

Using it as a general-purpose nerf to flying by making you roll dice every turn to do anything is lousy, though.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 5:12 am

Well, first of all, some of us have done a lot of work on skills. It's semi-tome compatible, and not quite what you're doing here, but I'm going to pimp it whenever appropriate.

But yeah, JEs right about scaling DCs. If a task has a DC, you should expect people to get better at it as they level up and you shouldn't get in the way of it. You should embrace and rejoice in it really, because it's fucking progress for the character instead of a treadmill where the numbers change but the chance of success never does. Opposed tasks scale just fine on their own (assuming equally skilled opposition) and you shouldn't tweak those at all unless you want to even things out so that the chances never change among levels.

Adding new skills to make things more difficult for a small subset of the game is retarded, and Fly is ass. You can make it workable by letting people take 10 on it under pressure (like in combat), but it's still pretty bad and amounts to a skill point tax to be able to use rather iconic and expected powers.

As for combining skills, there are enough skills in the game that people won't really miss a few of them and you can get away with combining skills that people generally roll simultaneously / were underpowered on their own without making many waves. Eliminating things like concentration is retarded though, because it was never rolled in conjunction with anything else, was substantially useful, and it actually had a subsystem tied to it that can't be remapped easily. So unless you're also fine with not ever using that portion of ToB, don't drop it.

JE's specific example counter example is pretty shitty in the context of 3.x systems. Move Silently and Hide may be separate things in real life, but in the game they do the exact same thing and just force people to roll twice. If the game incorporated facing at all, there might be a case for keeping them separate, but it doesn't and there isn't.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 5:57 am

Indeed I had been so busy going over PF's stuff I actually forgot all about concentration.

As for scaling DCs I don't mean to say that I want to scale every DC as PCs go along. I mean that DCs go from a simple 10 (breaking open a simple door) to a near impossible 40 (dancing on a leaf) The nerf I'm suggesting to give to players is to take out their ability to get items and buffs that give them +10s and +20s on their attempts and to rely on other methods.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 1:54 pm

I wish DnD supported a Fly skill. It makes sense.

However, the idea of constantly rolling at higher levels is just ass, and the skill tax hits non-casters the hardest, AND if you base the DCs off of the closest applicable skill (Ride) then you're looking at a DC 10 check which is basically trivial anyway since at the level you're flying, picking up a +5 competence bonus to compliment your +3 DEX is a negligible cost.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 2:22 pm

TarkisFlux

The RoW Fighter has Move Silently, but not Hide. That was an intentional choice that Frank and K made. There are cases were the two should be split up.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 5:23 pm

I missed that JE, but I don't really care. Yes, there are cases where they need to be split up, some of which you illustrated in an example that doesn't really apply because they're not supported by the game. The in game times when you would want them separate are mostly status conditions (blindness and deafness) or times that reduce to those conditions. That's it. It's the lack of facing that really does it, and the closest the game gets to facing that might otherwise split the uses up is the distracted penalty, which applies equally to both and fails to differentiate them at all. And if I'm just losing that tiny bit of granularity, that's ok with me.

It's not like the hide skill makes a lot of sense on it's own anyway. Originally it was a skill to see how well you hid behind a box or a wall or in shadows that people couldn't see clearly in. That shouldn't be a skill, that should be a function of reality. The rewritten hide skill they did in Dungeonomicon (I think, hard to remember where things come from with the pdf) is one big "don't notice me" skill that has next to nothing to do with actually 'hiding' in any sense that people normally think about it. And while that could totally be a skill, it has as much to do with not making noise as being in the right place and I don't see a reason to make people pay twice to do it.

I should add that while my preference is to merge them and I don't see a compelling reason to do otherwise in DnD land, I don't actually care if you keep them separate as long as you don't merge spot and listen. It just serves to center the average stealth / detection check and be a more expensive ability.

NativeJovian · Post by **NativeJovian** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 4:43 pm

On the subject of skill consolidation, I can see two reasons to combine skills: because they're never used separately (eg hide/move silently) or because if you're good at one, you should probably be good at the other too (eg spot/listen, balance/tumble).

The way I see it, skills should be described by their effects, not by how you achieve those effects. Why are Hide and Move Silently different skills if you need both to be good at sneaking around? Roll them both into "Stealth". Why are Diplomacy and Intimidate different skills, when they both boil down to "convince someone to do what you want"? Roll them both into a more generic "Persuasion" skill.

The question in my mind is how far to take it. Having Bluff, Diplomacy, Gather Information, Intimidate, and Sense Motive as separate skills is silly, but is lumping them all into a generic "Social Interaction" skill too far in the other direction? How about rolling Diplomacy and Intimidate into "Persuasion" and Bluff and Sense Motive into "Deception" (Gather Info we can honestly probably chuck as a skill entirely)?

What about skills that are dependent on each other, but only in one direction? It takes a Bluff check to stay "in character" while you're Disguised, but while Bluff is useful on its own, Disguise without Bluff pretty useless. Do we roll Disguise into Deception with Bluff and Sense Motive? Now suddenly everyone who's good at lying is good at using makeup and shit too, is that okay? What about Forgery, which no one ever takes ever because it's bloody useless as its own skill, but meshes fairly well Disguise at least flavorfully (because they're both "make something look like something else" skills)? Do we roll Forgery into Deception too? Now anyone who's good at lying is also good at makeup AND counterfeiting. Or do we leave Deception as Bluff/Sense Motive and combine Disguise and Forgery into a separate Subterfuge skill? That way anyone who's good at makeup is also good at counterfeiting (which I can handle, under the "making something look like something else" heading), but can't actually successfully disguise themselves as someone else unless they also take Deception. Do we want "pretending to be someone else" as a single skill, or is it okay for our brilliant liar (someone with ranks in Deception) to get made up by a partner (someone else with ranks in Subterfuge) in order to successfully pretend to be someone else?

The ultimate issue is that one task should be governed by one skill. In order to sneak around, you need both Hide and Move Silently, and that's dumb, so we combine them into Stealth. In order to notice stuff (including sneaky people) you need both Spot and Listen, which is also dumb, so that becomes Perception. However, we start stretching verisimilitude when we run into things like Bluff and Disguise. If our task is "pretend to be someone else", then we want one Impersonation skill to handle it. However, "acting like someone else" and "make someone look like someone else" are two very different skill sets (which is why not all actors are makeup artists and vice versa), both of which are necessary for Impersonation. How do we resolve that?

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 5:21 pm

Oh fuck. I just realized that I closed the browset before posting the 6x3 skill list that I had written up.

Int was seriously "Knowlege: Mundane; Knowlege: Arcane; Tinkering (Disable Device, Open Lock)"

Speak Language and Proffession were removed from the list. Proffession is treated as per Dungenomicon.
Craft and Perform were removed from the list; both are treated as the Perform skill was re-written in the Frank Bard.

I have to get ready and gear up for the weekend, but I'll try and post what I did again when I get back.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 5:50 pm

Tarkis's skill set works out pretty well. A few skills aren't on the list (Concentration, craft, perform, profession, etc) but what is there looks really good.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 7:20 pm

I'd be interested to see what you put where JE. Spreading skills out among the stats was interesting...

MGuy, Concentration isn't in the thread but it still works as written originally. When I do get around to it, it's going to be a fairly substantial overhaul that steals from auto-hypnosis and forks things into an endurance skill and integrates both with the save system as a sort of backup option for skilled characters who failed saves in the way that escape artist sorta does already for failed reflex saves with continuing effects. It'll be a while is what I'm saying, and you should just use the old one because it's mostly only for casters anyway.

Craft, perform, and profession aren't in the list because none of them do things that are level appropriate and you shouldn't charge people skill points for them. If you want them in the game still, I'd seriously just let people take 5 of whichever ones they wanted for free and if a check ever came up then you can use the original mechanics for them (bards can jut get level +3 ranks in any performs they know for the purposes of class features). If they ever get added to the list, it'll be specifically to tell people not to use them like the rest of the skills and to just give them out for free. Like I already do in the rant about not charging for knowing things as part of knowledge skills.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 7:50 pm

I can definitely understand where you're coming from. The thread with your skills in them had talk about a redone concentration skill. I'm not in any hurry right now (I don't expect to be done for at the very least a month) so I will wait to see your work on concentration. As for perform I really just consider it a bard skill that is really only useful for bardic performances.

I'd really have no use for profession save for very specific instances (to specific to make them useful as a real skill. Knowledges have the advantage of telling you about an enemy. I'm not a fan of using knowledges to advance the plot though. In either case I think that there may yet be some use for knowledges though I have no faith in professions skills (though I'll keep my eye out for any good house rules for both.

As for craft, it may have a use for me as I am leaning on getting rid of item creation feats like craft arms armor and the like and may just turn them into a scaling craft skill. Potions done under craft alchemy, scrolls under decipher script, magic arms, rings, amulets, and armor under craft, while wands staves, wonderous items are tied to maybe knowledge arcana, nature, and religion depending on what spells it has. Craft Construct under knowledge engineering. None of this is set in stone and I'm still looking here and there at various house rules.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 9:09 pm

NativeJovian wrote:The way I see it, skills should be described by their effects, not by how you achieve those effects. Why are Hide and Move Silently different skills if you need both to be good at sneaking around? Roll them both into "Stealth". Why are Diplomacy and Intimidate different skills, when they both boil down to "convince someone to do what you want"? Roll them both into a more generic "Persuasion" skill.

....

However, we start stretching verisimilitude when we run into things like Bluff and Disguise. If our task is "pretend to be someone else", then we want one Impersonation skill to handle it. However, "acting like someone else" and "make someone look like someone else" are two very different skill sets (which is why not all actors are makeup artists and vice versa), both of which are necessary for Impersonation. How do we resolve that?

I'm not with you on your desire to merge skills that achieve the same effect. Diplomacy and intimidate are different skills, and while they do both serve to get information out of people one leaves them pretty pissed at you afterwards. Is that not a meaningful distinction? Climb and jump both serve to get higher up something, but they do it in pretty different ways. They achieve the same effect, and you'll almost never roll both even though they can both apply to the same obstacle. Should they be merged?

I get your point, but you really need to pick a skill granularity that fits your goals and stick with it. It doesn't really matter so much where you pick, just that it fits your design goals and you're consistent. I don't care if skills have similar outcomes, as long as they're not 'the same' outcome. It helps if you can add different abilities to the skills though.

I don't have your bluff / disguise dilemna, because each skill grants sufficient options to be used on its own. If you want to look like a guy and also act like him you do need both, but that's not the only way to use them. The system actually supports a distinction between lying to people about who you are and just looking like someone else, so you use that. You can act like a guy and fool people who don't know what he looks like, and you can look like the guy and fake sickness or whatever while your 'good at lying' friend bluffs you past people who recognize him. I also don't care if people who have the disguise skill apply disguises to others, so you could just find someone who had it and benefit from their assistance. They're not mostly useless on their own, so they don't have to get boosted or merged.

You're really going to be waiting a while on that MGuy. I probably won't get to it until after the second pass on everything else, and those aren't proceeding very quickly at the moment (because doing them would mean not spending as much time with my son or playing Batman: Arkham Asylum).

Knowledge as IDing an enemy is fine, just make sure it applies to any enemy they run across, even the ones that the wizard just pulled out of the vat and no one has ever seen before ever. It's less the ability to be an encyclopedia, and more the ability to make educated guesses that make it worthwhile. I'd also combine monster types into fewer skills so they were worth a bit more, because otherwise you suffer from limited utility.

Making magical items with craft skills isn't bad at all, it's just a downtime skill instead of an adventuring skill. People who take them will be trading in-adventure-power and options for out-of-adventure-preparation and gear based options. That will certainly lead to some interesting trade offs, but I don't see any compelling objections to it yet.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 11:53 pm

Diplomacy and Intimidate are different methods of the same skill. It sucks when you're forced to be nice from 1st to 20th because you didn't invest in Intimidate or vice versa, so we should group them. Chavs on the street don't use Diplomacy when asking for cigarettes because Diplomacy is harder and they didn't invest enough, having only 1 skill point per level due to the int penalty. Intimidate is easier but has unfortunate consequences (target is unfriendly). So you pick the method and roll Persuasion.

Bluff and Sense Motive don't have as much in common as the first pair: those who are good at bluffing are also good at discerning lies except in comedies, but the reverse is not true. Gather Info has aspects of both Bluff and Sense Motive. I folded them into one skill based on different abilities (Cha for bluff, Wis for Sense Motive and Int for GI).

You can also have Athletics: Climb and Jump (both are Str applications: Climb is more reliable, Jump gets you there faster), Tumble (Dex, also works for aerial maneuvers) and Swim (Con). And the PCs are totally allowed to say "I'm a dwarf, I can't swim" or "I'm a wussy woman who's afraid of heights".

NativeJovian · Post by **NativeJovian** » Sat Sep 05, 2009 9:52 pm

TarkisFlux wrote:I'm not with you on your desire to merge skills that achieve the same effect. Diplomacy and intimidate are different skills, and while they do both serve to get information out of people one leaves them pretty pissed at you afterwards. Is that not a meaningful distinction?

Sure it's a meaningful distinction, but not one worth taking a whole new skill over. When you use the skill, you don't just say "I'm rolling Persuasion", you have to decide whether you're trying to sweet-talk or bully your target, and the target reacts appropriately. The point is that forcing someone who wants to play good cop/bad cop to take two different skills is pretty retarded -- so why do it? I'd rather have someone be able to take Persuasion and be a general smooth-talker than force them to take Diplomacy and Intimidate separately to generate the same effect (or pick one of the two and become a one-trick pony when it comes to dealing with other people).

TarkisFlux wrote:Climb and jump both serve to get higher up something, but they do it in pretty different ways. They achieve the same effect, and you'll almost never roll both even though they can both apply to the same obstacle. Should they be merged?

Yes, actually. Roll them both into "Athletics". Neither Jump nor Climb is really worth the skill points you put into them, but Athletics might be.

TarkisFlux wrote:I don't have your bluff / disguise dilemna, because each skill grants sufficient options to be used on its own.

Really? You think so? When was the last time you saw anyone take or use Disguise or Forgery in a campaign? Bluff is useful enough, but Disguise/Forgery certainly isn't. That said, I'm leaning toward combining Disguise and Forgery into Subterfuge and making Deception checks necessary to stay in character. If someone wants to be the makeup artist who can't act, or wants to use their makeup skills to disguise the party's really good liar, that's their choice. What it comes down to is that Disguise can be used on yourself or others, while you can't make someone else's Bluff check for them. That's a sharp enough divide to justify separate skills, methinks, even if it does mean that you need to spend two skills for "Impersonate" now.

I've been thinking a bit about how the skill consolidations I have in mind would interact with the expanded skill uses you have in your thread. I'm not quite sure how to accomplish it, because I like your stuff for doing crazy-awesome things, but I like my version for ease of characterization (eg, you can choose Persuasion to avoid having to choose between being a smooth-talking Diplomant or being angry and Intimidating), and simply consolidating your skills makes them fairly overpowered. I'll have to put more thought into it...

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Sun Sep 06, 2009 12:03 am

Sure it's a meaningful distinction, but not one worth taking a whole new skill over. When you use the skill, you don't just say "I'm rolling Persuasion", you have to decide whether you're trying to sweet-talk or bully your target, and the target reacts appropriately. The point is that forcing someone who wants to play good cop/bad cop to take two different skills is pretty retarded -- so why do it? I'd rather have someone be able to take Persuasion and be a general smooth-talker than force them to take Diplomacy and Intimidate separately to generate the same effect (or pick one of the two and become a one-trick pony when it comes to dealing with other people).

The distinctions between Dip and Inti is decided when looking at their effects. Intimidate produces fear based responses and effects while Diplomacy utilizes charm. A person who is good at being bad cop could very conceivably be bad at diplomacy. An interrogator who wants to do both would have both or would have a feat that allows him to sub diplomacy in for intimidate (shouldn't work the other way around IMO). An orc chief might be good at using fear and intimidation to keep his people in line but he shouldn't be able to jump into the nobles' court and be able to be bell of the ball.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Sun Sep 06, 2009 1:35 am

The reason an orc noble isn't going to make it in a human court is cultural, not because he lacks diplomatic ability. In a lot of settings, it makes sense to have a single rhetoric ability which can be used to influence with positive or negative emotions, or clear logic, all of which you have different effects and be more or less effective in differing circumstances. In other settings, invoking positive emotions might be tied to musical performance, or might come completely on its own. The two most important things for determining what a skill can do are genre and balance.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Sun Sep 06, 2009 2:23 am

Last game I ran had people actually pull off a disguise infiltration with a couple of guys in the squad doing the heavy acting, and I hadn't written the skills thing yet so it was all still core. The fact that most games don't allow for that I think more reflects the smaller focus that infiltration (opposed to straight stealth) has in most games, which is really sad.

I get your point though, and I won't dispute that core skills are largely ass. They don't even really do anything anyone cares about after something like level 8, and they are regularly ignored in favor of spells. With their limited utility you could totally decide that their granularity just isn't worth it, combine tons of stuff and be fine. You achieve a similar goal to boosting, by making each skill worth more than it previously was, I just don't think you keep them relevant into later levels. It's just a matter of what you like, and if the game stops around level 8 I'd be pretty happy with consolidation. My general preference is for greater granularity and more skills in cases where the game supports it and I can sufficiently boost the skill. YMMV.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Sun Sep 06, 2009 7:33 pm

CatharzGodfoot wrote:The reason an orc noble isn't going to make it in a human court is cultural, not because he lacks diplomatic ability.

An orc NPC noble might have difficulties, but an orc PC adventurer should not, otherwise it would unnecessarily penalize people for playing the characters they want to play.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Sun Sep 06, 2009 7:51 pm

Starmaker wrote:
CatharzGodfoot wrote:The reason an orc noble isn't going to make it in a human court is cultural, not because he lacks diplomatic ability.
An orc NPC noble might have difficulties, but an orc PC adventurer should not, otherwise it would unnecessarily penalize people for playing the characters they want to play.

By making a noble human court in a standard D&D setting treat an orc PC no differently from any other character, you're robbing the player of being able to play up the 'don't judge a book' trope. At that point, why even have orcs?