It's Time to put up or shut up.

[Murtak]

I propose this: Skill ranks + stat modifier.

As much as I support fixing RNG issues, this may be pushing into pathfinder 'backwards' compatibility territory. You've eliminated racial mods (though possibly unintentionally) and would have to pull lots of things out of monster entries. And then do the same thing for any NPC with a skill item or a skill feat.

Actually, I totally fucking raped your arguments face, you are just too stupid to actually know what the book of gears says, or understand anything I typed. If you are playing with Book of Gears, NPC items are already 100% incompatible.

And this is explicitly something TarkisFlux does not want, which is where most of my post came from. Since you are seemingly unable to follow even a single thread I will put it into a single post for you.

1) The range of skill modifiers for a given level / CR getting too wide is deemed problematic by pretty much everyone on this thread, including you.
2) I propose to cut down the range to skill ranks + stat mod. With skill ranks fixed per HD (if maxed) this should give us a very narrow range (say about 8 points between characters of the same level).
3) You propose using the Book of Gears solution of autoscaling items, + synergy bonuses. The range is pretty much the same as in my proposal, except you also have synergy bonuses, bringing the spread to, say, 14 points, depending on the skill.
4) Tarkis Flux states he would prefer not to alter NPC stat blocks.
5) I state this is problematic at best and leads to worthless or broken skills at worst.
6) You then start yelling that there is no issue, that this never happens anyway, that this is supposed to happen, liberally add insults and ignore the very posts you quote.

Finally you post a single somehwat coherent thought.

It's the same fucking choice you'd have to make with the regular thief and a full plated cleric.

Except it is not. I would prefer that DnD also rewarded being a jack of all trades, but at least in regards to skill the very basic system does not. So unless I want to rework the base system this is unsalvageable. So characters simply opt out on certain skills and max others. What is important is keeping those scores somewhat similar between similar characters. You are basically saying that unless you are a shrunk halfling, don't bother with stealth, since you will automatically fail anyways. Or, alternatively, you are saying that being a shrunk halfling is worthless, you autosucceed long before that point.

And of course if you bothered reading my posts you would see I actually propose to have skill items grant virtual skill ranks, so a cleric could just use a cloak of stealth to keep up (excepting lower attribute modifier and armor penalties).

[Username17]

If other people are up for it, making an actual bottom up new edition is always in the cards. I don't think that tweaking the rules until you can't use the Hill Giants out of the Monster Manual is particularly productive. But if people wanted to actually make a new edition, that would be reasonable. I'd even help.

But bottom up means bottom up. Not just "write something new for every single sub system and hope it works out." So step one would be deciding what stories it was actually going to tell. "All of them" is a non-answer. My assumption is that it's basically based on Greek Mythology. Iron Age Heroes, lots of vertical advancement, and Gods that are basically just very powerful warrior mages that you can (and eventually will) beat the crap out of. The fact that half the classic D&D monsters or more are one way or another Greek Mythos rips certainly makes that easy conceptually.

And step two would be to define a basic mechanic. The d20 mechanic works fine, and might as well be kept. Within that context, something drastic needs to be done to keep things on the Random Number Generator - something 4e tried to do but lacked the discipline to accomplish.

Step 3 would be to define how characters are made. That means that your multiclassing system is not a patch that you apply at the end, it's integral to the system at every level. Until you figure out how you're going to make a Fighter/Magic-User you can't make a Fighter class or a Magic User class. Personally, what I'm leaning towards right now is simply a system that K was throwing around where you advanced by gaining powers and they had tags on them and your class was a package that you selected based on what your powers allowed for you. In 4e terms, that would mean that to "be a Paladin" (and have their bullshit powers like detecting evil and laying on hands) you'd need to have 3 maneuvers off the Paladin list. I would be amenable to dividing characters into arbitrary power sources or not, depending upon whether you wanted to role protect things or not. If Power Sources are implemented, "Martial" and "Ki" should not be on the list. Warriors can get Primal or Psychic power or something.

But yeah. If you just change stuff until you can't use old source material, you haven't really accomplished anything.

-Username17

[TarkisFlux]

+20 items exist. +10 items are abundant. If a single +20 item exists for a skill anyone with that item is not playing the same game anymore, as his worst results will be higher than the best results of those without the item. These items are rare, though, so they could presumably be eliminated without touching NPC stats. +10 items though are abundant. And even if stay at least halfway on the RNG, +10 is supposed to be a factor of 32 as far as increase in character power goes. A +10 on an item is the same as giving a 6th level spell to a first level character. If the spell is useful at all it will outclass anything else the character is capable of doing. Similarly if you hand out +10 to skills you will either end up with characters performing way above their level or you will end up with a skill that is utterly worthless without having such an item.

I can't see how this is beneficial to the game. You are basically telling the swashbuckler that his 12 ranks in Diplomacy are essentially worthless because he did not get the prerequisite +10 item. Never mind the maxed out skill, the skill focus and the points he put into charisma, without the item he is fucked. That is bullshit. It's like 3.0 Haste where everyone got a spell or an item of it eventually, except you collect one for every skill you care about.

Suppose I should respond to this directly. I already said that if the items were going to continue to exist we should set the DCs by them, and that would mean that you were not level appropriate without them. Given the 8 item limit, this actually looks pretty harsh because an int rogue with skills out the ass literally can't be level appropriate in all of their skills because they can't attune themselves to all of the items around that they need at one time. So yeah, what you wrote above is absolutely true.

But it only matters if you assume that getting that huge bonus is actually going to do something for you. That's only the case if we go and actually make the skills worthwhile. We could also go the other direction, and make the good skills worse beyond low levels so that they better match up with the diminishing returns of climb and jump and swim. I don't care if someone gets a +20 item to any of those skills, and it would not be difficult to dump the effectiveness of the rest of them until I didn't care about +20s to them either. The other half of this change would have to be putting good skill abilities in skill feats so that ranks were not utterly useless, and you can do that in a way that the bonus still doesn't matter.

In the interest of offering a concrete (if not really thought out and so likely terrible) example, here's a way of shitting on hide that makes bonus matter much less, and some other supporting changes.

[*]Add this to Hide: Your maximum hide check is your CR +30.
[*]Add this to See Invisibility: Your eyes are also more attuned to the shadows and the creatures that move in them. You gain a +10 enhancement bonus on your spot checks to detect hiding creatures.
[*]Add this to True Seeing: Your eyes are also more attuned to the shadows and the creatures that move in them. You gain a +10 enhancement bonus on your spot checks to detect hiding creatures.
[*]New skill feat: Camouflaged (hide ranks); 0 = +3 competence bonus to hide checks; 4 = you suffer half penalties for moving more quickly while hiding; 9 = while hiding, you can not be seen with the naked eye. though you must begin hiding while you are not noticed or seen, you are thereafter treated as invisible. creatures who can See Invisibility may attempt to spot you, but they must still succeed on a spot check to see you; 14 = while hiding, you are treated as invisible. you can not be detected with See Invisibility, and creatures with true seeing must succeed on a spot check to notice you; 19 = something else
[*]You could go with will saves to notice a hiding creature instead of spot checks while you had an appropriately powerful spell up if you wanted.

The above limits how well you can hide by your CR, so I don't care what your bonus is. It already deals with spell interactions in a way that allows for stealth skill counters for non-skilled characters without making it so that I care what bonuses they provide. It allows a path to counter those counters without spells, items, or super bonuses. And it does all of that without touching a single NPC writeup or forcing any conversion (though some may still be desired to take advantage of the new options for a select number of creatures). I haven't thought enough about this to know if it's actually not a shitty broken idea, but it's something we could do largely ignore the bonuses that people run around with. Yes the backend is fairly different, but so was the combat backend after Races of War and it also reduces to the current setup at low levels where people don't have stupid bonuses all the time.

---

For the record, even if this is good and workable I don't think this is the best solution. I'd much rather have a skill system that did something (which is why I'm writing one), but for that we have to restrict the bonuses that go into it and evaluate them ahead of time (and yes, in that system BoG items don't work but items as modified rank replacements do). Moving towards a system where we have to watch what numbers can even be added means we do not support BC in the finished tomes, and we ask a lot more of people who would pick them up and use existing material with them.

[angelfromanotherpin]

If other people are up for it, making an actual bottom up new edition is always in the cards. I don't think that tweaking the rules until you can't use the Hill Giants out of the Monster Manual is particularly productive. But if people wanted to actually make a new edition, that would be reasonable. I'd even help.

I am 100% up for this. I've tried to rewrite the PHB a few times, but I just don't have the chops. The problem is going to be getting any consensus out of the whirling melee that is TGD discussion, as we saw with the TNE stuff.

So step one would be deciding what stories it was actually going to tell. "All of them" is a non-answer. My assumption is that it's basically based on Greek Mythology. Iron Age Heroes, lots of vertical advancement, and Gods that are basically just very powerful warrior mages that you can (and eventually will) beat the crap out of. The fact that half the classic D&D monsters or more are one way or another Greek Mythos rips certainly makes that easy conceptually.

I'd like to see some of the Iron Age Celtic stuff in there as well. The battle feats of Cu Chullain should be the basis for high-level martial abilities, not the relatively tame stuff we see in most of the Greek myths. Those cultures are very compatible in many respects, though.

And step two would be to define a basic mechanic. The d20 mechanic works fine, and might as well be kept. Within that context, something drastic needs to be done to keep things on the Random Number Generator - something 4e tried to do but lacked the discipline to accomplish.

I vote to keep the d20+mods vs TN mechanic if at all possible.

Step 3 would be to define how characters are made. ... Personally, what I'm leaning towards right now is simply a system that K was throwing around where you advanced by gaining powers and they had tags on them and your class was a package that you selected based on what your powers allowed for you.

Sold.

In 4e terms, that would mean that to "be a Paladin" (and have their bullshit powers like detecting evil and laying on hands) you'd need to have 3 maneuvers off the Paladin list. I would be amenable to dividing characters into arbitrary power sources or not, depending upon whether you wanted to role protect things or not.

I'm still not sure how this works. So, you have a number of lists of maneuvers, and one of them is the 'Paladin' list. Then you take for example 3 maneuvers from the paladin list, and you are eligible to call yourself a Paladin. So far, so good.

Do you then get the Paladin bullshit powers for free? Or is there a second Paladin-exclusive list you are now allowed to choose from? Or what?

[MGuy]

If other people are up for it, making an actual bottom up new edition is always in the cards.

I'm totally up for a brand new edition. That's what I've been working toward myself as of late. I'd personally like to stick with the d20 system myself. Though I'm working on my own thing I'd love to bat ideas around if another d20 system is going to be fleshed out here.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Screw it, let's get started. I'll pop a new thread for discussion.

[Username17]

I'd like to see some of the Iron Age Celtic stuff in there as well. The battle feats of Cu Chullain should be the basis for high-level martial abilities, not the relatively tame stuff we see in most of the Greek myths. Those cultures are very compatible in many respects, though.

Really, most Iron Age chariot (and therefore hero) based cultures are pretty compatible. All of the Aryan Invasion splinter cultures can be thought of as a single super-culture. Spring and Autumn China folds in OK. There's a bunch of Indian stuff that works.

I'm still not sure how this works. So, you have a number of lists of maneuvers, and one of them is the 'Paladin' list. Then you take for example 3 maneuvers from the paladin list, and you are eligible to call yourself a Paladin. So far, so good.

Do you then get the Paladin bullshit powers for free?

Yes. You get the Paladin bullshit powers for free. You have some number of classes. Let's say for the moment that you have a Power Source system where your character has to be marked as Divine to take powers off the Divine Powers list. The powers you take have a series of tags on them, and then you select a template that you qualify for with those tags. And that template gives you all the bullshit powers.

In this way, being a Paladin can smoothly transition into being an Oracle as you take more and more Oracular powers and then eventually say "fuck it" and swap templates. But in the meantime, the fact that you're a Paladin who happens to have some Oracle powers isn't weird and the game doesn't fuck with you over it.

Prestige Classes are merely class templates that have prereqs that you can't qualify for at first level. And when you trade into those you get bullshit powers that matter to higher level characters.

-Username17

[MGuy]

Sounds kind of like FFTactics' job system. I like the job system so its something I could get behind.

[Koumei]

I like that idea, Frank.

[Aktariel]

Honestly, if you're worried about "being on the team" don't be.

I was only doing this because there was nothing else going on and I wanted something nice and usable for playing a game. Enlightened self-interest, remember? It's not my project (oh god no please don't make me carry that monkey) except in the sense that I seem to be the only one who's stuck with it.

Plus, I just got appointed as a mod on another fairly large forum, so I have a lot on my hands right now (cuz fulltime job doesn't leave much room for multiple big projects, unfortunately.)

If people want to write content for finishing "The Gaming Den Tomes" that's fine. I'll aggregate shit and pass it around for review and editing when I have enough that it's worth people's time.

And if people want to actually fucking write "D20 Iron Age" I'll format that up with help too. But... I have been here too long and seen too many "Next Editions" come and go to have much faith in it.

We shall see.