Tweaking the 3.5 skill system

[Juton]

I don't like how skills work in 3.5. Don't get me wrong the base mechanic of d20+modifier works, but the implementation in 3.5 leaves something to be desired. Since skills use the d20, and the variance on that is so wide they have to spread out the DCs, it takes five levels to go from reliably scaling an uneven surface to a rough one. In 5 levels the skill based character goes from a good climber to slightly better one, while a caster goes from not climbing, to levitating or climbing like a spider, then flying in the space of 5 levels.

This can be fixed in two general ways - increasing the size of the modifier you get on your checks or lowering the DCs. There's upsides and downsides to both. Increasing the number of skill points and the maximum skill rank per level means you don't have to touch the published DCs. It's bad because a large enough wedge of gamers hate basic math, if the number of ranks you could get in at a level changed to ( 3x Level + 5 ), the math would cause way to many conniptions. Lowering the DCs is nice because the math is simpler and you don't have to change PC/NPC stat blocks. The downside of this is that all the checks you don't want an untrained character to make will cluster on the farside of 20. In a character's career they'll start unable to reliably do anything interesting then quickly go to a master of the impossible, you won't get a smooth progression.

My pet solution is to use a smaller RNG for skill checks and redo the check DCs. With this setup +1/rank a level means characters progress is faster. In switching from a d20 to a d10 (or some other die) I may gain a better skill system, but do I lose more in that a 3.5 game wouldn't have a unified mechanic anymore?

[RobbyPants]

Personally, I'd just keep it on a d20 to keep things unified. It's not that hard.

I'd start with adding some sort of level-based bonus to the die roll (like 4E's 1/2 character level or something) so you don't have to worry about skill ranks throwing you off the RNG. If you're proficient, you get some +X bonus (2 - 4 or so), but otherwise, different levels of proficiency give you different non-numerical benefits.

The net effect of this system is the RNG spread can be much lower for people of the same level, which makes it easier to set the DCs by level and have that actually mean something. It's up to you how fast you want the DCs to climb with level, which is controlled by the bonus you give to the d20 roll based on level.

[sabs]

why not just do something like: you add skil ranks x 2 to your roll?

So if I"m a level 6 thief, I have 9 skill ranks in move silently. so my skill roll is an 18+d20.

But really the very first thing to do with the 3.5 skill system is add more skills, and give everyone way more skill points.

6 X int/level to everyone. Then give an extra +4 X Int to all non spell casters, and +2 X Int to all hybrids (Paladin, Ranger, Spellsword, Arcane archer)

A Rogue, Fighter, Barbarian would have 10 X Int / level skill points
A Paladin, Ranger, etc would have 8 X Int / level
A Wizard, Cleric, Sorceror, etc would have 6 x Int / Level

[hogarth]

In 5 levels the skill based character goes from a good climber to slightly better one, while a caster goes from not climbing, to levitating or climbing like a spider, then flying in the space of 5 levels.

This can be fixed in two general ways - increasing the size of the modifier you get on your checks or lowering the DCs.

How would that fix the problem of a level 5 climber vs. a level 5 flyer as you note above?

[fectin]

What if you collapsed the DCs and did nothing else?
No really: it makes skills more powerful, faster. But they're still going to grow slower than magic. It also makes stats slightly more meaningful, which isn't bad.

Try New DC = (Old DC / 2) + 5.

[Juton]

In 5 levels the skill based character goes from a good climber to slightly better one, while a caster goes from not climbing, to levitating or climbing like a spider, then flying in the space of 5 levels.

This can be fixed in two general ways - increasing the size of the modifier you get on your checks or lowering the DCs.

How would that fix the problem of a level 5 climber vs. a level 5 flyer as you note above?

Spider climb isn't as good a power as fly, but it's pretty useful. If a 5th level Fighter could at will climb like he had spider climb that would be useful. A 3.5 fighter can actual do this, but he needs to be able to make regular climb checks in the 50-60 range. If you wanted a player without system mastery to be able to accomplish that pre-epic levels you can increase the modifiers they get, decrease the difficulty DC, both or something else entirely.

[TarkisFlux]

Compressing the DCs has the problem that Juton noted before, that people can attempt and succeed at awesome new things well before you would actually want them to. It gets worse if they pick up a skill boosting item. If you want levels to mean anything about the powers you might be able to reliably call down, this is pretty much a non-starter for most skills.

Doubling the value of skill points (or tripling, which I think is actually better for these purposes) allows you to set your stuff far enough apart that people aren't attempting and succeeding at awesome stuff before their level and investment should allow it, but it also makes it really really hard for people who aren't investing in counter skills to oppose you. And for those skills where people are opposing you, you probably want people who aren't within a very narrow level range to be able to oppose you some of the time (barring large scale aid another nonsense).

Doubling / tripling for some skills and not for others might work well enough though. 3x ranks per skill point in climb lets you set DCs far enough apart that level 1 guys don't pray for a 20 to climb a wall of force but puts them in reach of level 7 guys (depending on your DCs). 1x rank per skill point works better for a sneak if non-spot class skilled people are supposed to have a shot at seeing him (which also means spot ranks scale at 1x skill points). Rather like Frank's rant a while back about some skills being very class dependent (big scaling) and others less so (small scaling). Skill items might need an overhaul here as well, depending on how you wanted things to ultimately work.

Or you can assign abilities to various skill levels instead. But that's a not-inconsequential amount of additional bookkeeping and ability learning on top of all the other stuff in the game (though largely offloaded on the easy to play classes) and has it's own associated issues.

[Novembermike]

Skills are fundamentally broken. You have two major problems.

1) The RNG is shit. People tend to go all or nothing because dabblers can't do anything and masters can't fail.

2) The skills are shit. You have Jump and Use Magic Device. Think about that for a second.

The solution? Kill it with fire and use something that actually makes sense.

[Psychic Robot]

honestly 4e's system is a pretty good idea with poor execution (like many things with 4e). I'm pretty much in love with skill tags now

[CCarter]

This is a pretty wacky suggestion, but you could give extra checks to characters based on skill rank e.g. 6 ranks = 2 checks, 11 ranks = 3 checks, 16 ranks = 4 checks...like how multiple attacks work. A character could either use all their rolls to try to make a higher DC, or just do a skill faster - opening a lock or jumping or tumbling as an 'attack' equivalent action, rather than as a standard action.

That's basically how the Starcluster RPG handles skill checks, though note its a non-d20 system.

[Username17]

This is a pretty wacky suggestion, but you could give extra checks to characters based on skill rank e.g. 6 ranks = 2 checks, 11 ranks = 3 checks, 16 ranks = 4 checks...like how multiple attacks work.

That sounds like an incredible pain in the ass. What with the fact that multiple attacks don't really work.

I mean: I like dicepools well enough, but I don't think running dicepools and floating TNs at the sam time is anything close to a good idea.

-Username17

[hogarth]

honestly 4e's system is a pretty good idea with poor execution (like many things with 4e). I'm pretty much in love with skill tags now

4E's system only works (for certain values of "works") because spellcasters either don't get skill devaluing spells at all, or they only get them as overly expensive rituals. I don't think that nerfing spellcasters is an option for Juton, but I could be mistaken.

[Juton]

honestly 4e's system is a pretty good idea with poor execution (like many things with 4e). I'm pretty much in love with skill tags now

4E's system only works (for certain values of "works") because spellcasters either don't get skill devaluing spells at all, or they only get them as overly expensive rituals. I don't think that nerfing spellcasters is an option for Juton, but I could be mistaken.

Even subtracting ways spellcasters can futz with skill checks I am just non-plussed at how skills work in 3.5 You can see the problem when you look at the spells that affect skills, adding +5 or +10 to an opposed roll is nice, it doesn't guarantee success and in a PvE environment getting a magical +10 once to something like climbing or swimming doesn't make you super human, it just makes you above average.

The Tome of Prowess has the idea that skill ranks is what unlocks abilities, not your total modifier. As Tarkis' mentioned that adds a bunch of of book keeping to note how a character can use his skills and what the check DCs are for those new uses.

[hogarth]

Even subtracting ways spellcasters can futz with skill checks I am just non-plussed at how skills work in 3.5.

Okay, let me look at your other complaint from the original post:

Since skills use the d20, and the variance on that is so wide they have to spread out the DCs, it takes five levels to go from reliably scaling an uneven surface to a rough one.

So the Climb skill in 3.5 D&D is calibrated so that you have to be level 10 or so before you can reliably do something fairly outlandish, like crawling around on a ceiling. I don't particularly have a problem with that, outside of the fact that it's long since been made obsolete by magic like Spider Climb at that point. So at what level do you want characters to be crawling around on the ceiling, say?

[Juton]

Even subtracting ways spellcasters can futz with skill checks I am just non-plussed at how skills work in 3.5.

Okay, let me look at your other complaint from the original post:

Since skills use the d20, and the variance on that is so wide they have to spread out the DCs, it takes five levels to go from reliably scaling an uneven surface to a rough one.

So the Climb skill in 3.5 D&D is calibrated so that you have to be level 10 or so before you can reliably do something fairly outlandish, like crawling around on a ceiling. I don't particularly have a problem with that, outside of the fact that it's long since been made obsolete by magic like Spider Climb at that point. So at what level do you want characters to be crawling around on the ceiling, say?

Well, without the epic rule book a mundane can't climb on the ceiling, so that's a problem. At the latest, a mundane climber (maybe using daggers as pitons) should be able to reliably climb a hundred foot tower in the rain at level 5. If a player was so determined, their character should be pulling of spider man hijinks like crawling on the ceiling at a significant portion of his move speed and still be able to make attacks by around level 7 or 8. This may rely on the climber using some mundane gear to preserve some verisimilitude, but it shouldn't be too expensive or provide too great a bonus.

A swimmer should be able to catch up to a Shark around level 5, kill it, take any treasure in it's belly. I'd really like to see level 8 characters have jump and balance skills so high that they can jump from tree top to tree top like in a Hong-Kong action movie. Funny thing is 3.5 lets you do some of these things with skills already, it's just those checks are consigned to the epic level hand book.

[RadiantPhoenix]

What if you did something like removing the +3 ranks at first level and then doubling or quadrupling the effect of skill ranks?

[hogarth]

Well, without the epic rule book a mundane can't climb on the ceiling, so that's a problem.

Huh? According to the 3.5 SRD, climbing on the ceiling is a DC 25 Climb check.

[Juton]

What if you did something like removing the +3 ranks at first level and then doubling or quadrupling the effect of skill ranks?

I'd do something like that if I wanted to keep as much of the 3.5 DCs as possible. That and add in very large bonuses at certain stages of a character's development so they can hit those epic thresholds. The problem with this is that a lot of D&D players do not like math, at all. So saying your bonus to climb as a fifth level character is something like 20+3xRanks+2x Strength would never gain wide scale acceptance. Beyond asking for calculators they'd have me do all the math for them. There are players with whom I game who still can't figure out an attribute modifier without the chart.

Also for some reason a good swath of players who don't hate math have significantly more trouble adding 56+18 that 16+18, even though they require the exact same number of steps. I can only guess it's some latent math phobia, they feel it's a difficult problem when the numbers get larger. Also if you are dealing with very high modifiers, like 134+d20 people who do not practice math everyday won't be able to do it reliably because the information needed to perform that calculation takes up more spaces than short term working memory has available.

[fectin]

DC 25 at 7th-8th level then. There's a -5 penalty to climb fast, so that's equivalent to DC 30.
The conversion I proposed makes that DC 20.
7th level gets you 10 ranks. Take 10, and you're climbing around the ceiling at a high speed at level 7-8.

[hogarth]

If all you want is for characters to be able to do skill-like stuff a few level sooner, that's trivial to do (by subtracting 5 from all DCs, or multiplying all DCs by 2/3, or whatever). I'm not a big fan of "super-skills", but different strokes for different folks.

[RadiantPhoenix]

You could also change the DCs and use a d10 or a d6 for skill checks to get the same effect as multiplying bonuses.

[fectin]

Seriously off the wall gameplay starts coming online at level 8 and is basically default at level 12. Why would you not want skills to match that?

[CCarter]

That sounds like an incredible pain in the ass. What with the fact that multiple attacks don't really work.

I mean: I like dicepools well enough, but I don't think running dicepools and floating TNs at the sam time is anything close to a good idea.

-Username17

Well, I said it was wacky
Most of the problem with multiple attacks in D&D is that they're at different bonuses everytime, and because the target's armour class is unknown the dice have to be rolled one at a time. Neither of these necessarily have to be the case here.

The dicepools would be fairly small. In a given situation they would either
-give someone an extra action in a round over the usual system, at the normal DC.
-give the equivalent of around a +5 to the dice rool (using two checks, taking highest) with chances of really low rolls in particular dropping.

[hogarth]

Seriously off the wall gameplay starts coming online at level 8 and is basically default at level 12. Why would you not want skills to match that?

Who, me? Personally, I have no problem with skills becoming semi-obsolete by level 12 (say). The idea that 17 ranks in Use Rope should be as powerful as a 9th level spell is just stupid (yes, I'm exaggerating, but you get the drift).

[erik]

Seriously off the wall gameplay starts coming online at level 8 and is basically default at level 12. Why would you not want skills to match that?

Who, me? Personally, I have no problem with skills becoming semi-obsolete by level 12 (say). The idea that 17 ranks in Use Rope should be as powerful as a 9th level spell is just stupid (yes, I'm exaggerating, but you get the drift).

That sounds like a pretty derned good idea. What if skills capped out at a certain point?

There ought to be a point where you say "That fucker has mastered lock picking!" and move on.

And to build upon that idea... you could even have some higher level skills that become accessible at higher levels, and you learn how to do magical shit for free by passing skill checks to use Spell-like abilities.

Here's what I might like as an alternate 3e skill method:

• Let people have up to 2 ranks per level in a skill, and cap em at 20. BAM.
• Scrap the notion of class skills. Anyone can pick anything, at normal cost.
• Do a rehash of the skill list (out with the stupid, combine some, and maybe a few newbies):
• Jump and Swim become pure movement modes.
• Concentration is a caster level check.
• some skills will use different attributes depending upon how they are used
• Get rid of use magic device. Just let anyone use scrolls/wands with knowledge arcane/divine at their character level as caster level. Do we really need to trick magic items into thinking you are higher level/differently classed?
• armor check penalties go to Athletics, Deception-Physical Dodge, Stealth

Mundane skills:

• Animal Handling (riding) (cha/dex)
  Appraise (int)
  Athletics (balance, climb, non-combat tumbling) (dex)
  Bargaining-Hard Sell (intimidate) (cha)
  Bargaining-Soft Sell (diplomacy) (cha)
  Craft (forgery, int/str/dex depending upon craft)
  Deception-Physical (escape artist, sleight of hand) (dex)
  Deception-Social (bluff/sense motive) (cha/wis)
  Disable Device (open Locks) (int)
  Disguise (cha)
  Dodge (combat use of tumbling) (dex)
  Gather Info (cha)
  Knowledge -Arcane (limited spellcraft, UMD), Divine (limited spellcraft, UMD), Geography, Legends (history/nobility/locals of note), Nature (survival), Planes, Underdark (int)
  Linguist (speak languages, decipher script)
  Perception (spot/listen) (wis)
  Profession (healer, performer, etc.) (wis/int/cha depending upon profession)
  Research (gather info from surroundings/libraries) (int)
  Stealth (hide/move silent) int)

The magical skills don't need analogs for everything, but you could have em grant spell-like or supernatural abilities for many of em.

Magical skills:

• Animal Handling (charm animal, charm vermin [even though they are normally immune], charm magical beast)
  Appraise (identify, analyze dweomer, legend Lore on item)
  Athletics (expeditious retreat, spiderclimb)
  Bargaining-Hard Sell (scare, fear)
  Bargaining-Soft Sell (charm person)
  Craft (minor creation, major creation, fabricate, limited to craft)
  Deception-physical (freedom of movement)
  Deception-social (suggestion)
  Disable Device (knock, dispel magic on item/trap)
  Disguise (change self, alter self)
  Dodge (blur, displacement)
  Linguist (speak languages, comprehend language)
  Perception (see invisible, true seeing)
  Profession (cure, enthrall, etc. limited to profession)
  Research (legend lore, contact other plane)
  Stealth (invisibility, improved invisibility)

I dunno, that's a rough list without a lot of thought and consideration. Just nifty stuff that higher level characters should be able to do on demand. Higher level spell-skills would demand more ranks as the buy-in.