A Topic that everyone has repeated before me, I'm sure....

[For Valor]

So, skills again.

I don't understand why people think they should be open to everyone. I thought Spellcraft, Autohypnosis, UMD, and shit are supposed to be unique-ish...

Please enlighten me. Or shut me down. Whatever.

Also, Tome of Prowess.
http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Tome_of_ ... rcebook%29

Is this not a viable option for skills?

[CatharzGodfoot]

The skills you mentioned shouldn't be skills.
Hopefully you are now enlightened.

[Blicero]

I'd say the main argument for making skills open to everyone is 3.5's (theoretically) open multiclassing system.

Jim the Fighter could be a fighter for his entire life, but, should he randomly decide to pursue the wizardly arts, there's nothing stopping him from just taking a level of Wizard next time he levels up. D&D isn't like Harry Potter or whatever, where you have to be born with Teh Speshul Powerz to use them; anybody with decent enough ability scores and drive can theoretically accomplish anything.

And, honestly, none of the skills that are supposedly "unique" need to be all that exclusive. UMD always seemed like a force of personality thing more than any formal arcane training.

Compared even to a 0 level spell (detect magic), Spellcraft doesn't do that much. If you can learn to cast spells, you can learn to do Spellcraft.

And I seem to recall example tasks from Autohypnosis being things like memorizing shit and ignoring pain. Anybody in the real world (tm) can do those things if they want to.

[TarkisFlux]

It's all about role / shtick protection. They are restricted because someone thought that the magic guys should have the magic skills, and the mental guys should have the mental skills, and the roguish guys should have the use item skills because they've had it for editions now. Because that made them special and unique. But any sort of role protection has story costs. Skills in 3.x don't do enough (compared to other options) to be worth the cost of protecting them. Most of them barely matter after level 5 anyway, and the ones that do don't matter for the right reasons or don't protect any shtick I care about. The benefit of restricting them isn't actually present because of their design and general lack of interaction with other systems.

As to whether ToP is a viable method of doing skills, well, it's not right now, because it's not complete. It is intended to keep some of the role protection in place, however, and not to open everything up to everyone. It is also intended to be powerful enough that you might actually care about what skills your character has access to in the same way that you care about spell access. Which is a level where the benefits of having something or another are probably worth the cost of limiting characters in your stories in arbitrary ways.

Anyway, if you're impatient you can find a much more complete one right here (though that version is older and has some serious issues). It'll be complete sometime, and I think it'll even be viable at that point as the idea was met with a fair bit of support and no screaming vehemence when I first posted it here, but it might also have turned into a bloated carcass of ass during the second pass. It's hard to tell when you're close to a big project.

[Crissa]

Role protection is just a way for boning groups that don't have a Cleric or a Rogue.

-Crissa

[TarkisFlux]

Role protection is just a way for boning groups that don't have a Cleric or a Rogue.

It can be. It can also be a method for preserving character uniqueness without ability uniqueness. Which is what I'm actually going for, and what the KSFRP setup is going for, and so on. There are shticks that are worth the protection cost, but "healer", "sneak", and "traps guy" aren't among them and are much less protected in my stuff, if at all.

[For Valor]

So ToP (according to CG) shouldn't give the skills the abilities they have, or (according to TF) is simply incomplete -*mixed signals = confusion*-

And I see I see the point w/skills being available to all now.

So ToP needs to be completed to be useful?

[TarkisFlux]

CGs comments refer to a relatively small subset of the abilities that it gives out. Spellcraft and Autohyp fall into a category of skills that you shouldn't be putting points into because they're not worth much, don't scale well, and don't have a good return. They've been turned into something that you get as bonuses on top of things you actually care about investing skill points into, which resolves those issues actually. So they're fine here, and even if you disagree with that you could just not give those abilities out. UMD was a sort of must-have skill because you needed spells or items with spells in them to compete at higher levels. And anything that is a must have had better be universal and shouldn't require character resources, since that's just giving you the choice of sucking or being level appropriate (read: pointless skill tax). Since the skills do real scaling utility things in the ToP setup, you don't need the same level of access to spells to keep playing the game. They're still helpful of course, and that's where splitting UMD out came in since it makes it less of an automatic investment while also making it available to more people. So his comments are basically accurate in the standard system, but the reasons behind that position have been largely addressed.

Anyway, it's useful, in the ways that ideas can be, but it's not viable because it's missing big substantial pieces of things that you need to play the game. You could get by without intimidate or disguise or healing or dowsing if you wanted, but it's much harder to play without perception rules. And those aren't in there yet. You're welcome to use what's there and fill the holes yourself of course, I understand that's what MisterSinister is doing, and you could probably do so without substantial work. So I'd still call it useful, but anything you have to finish yourself in some way isn't viable as-is.