The skill system does suck though.
Granted. Mostly because people can't make up their minds as to whether they are playing super heroics or a medieval sim.
If I hear one more person say that Rogues shouldn't be able to bring down magical effects because "they can't see how they would go about doing that" (despite the fact that they definitionally don't know how the magic stays up in the first place), I'm not even going to argue - I'm just going to cut their jeffreys off.
You're either awesome or you suck.
Well - there's a lot of gradation at the awesome or suck levels, though. A Rogue often runs around with a +23 or so to Hide, which is completely out of the range of anyone with a suck level to spot - but the people who are really good at seeing stuff are all up ons.
In fact, there's quite the arms race going on with the guy who is plus twenty two envying the person who is plus twenty four, and so on and so forth.
There should be more than two levels of ability possible in a decently build character.
Why?
Seriously, you are including the guys with a +18, a +19, a +20, a +21, and +22 as all having the same level of ability. And while compared to the guy with a +3 that he gets from having a high stat they do - compared to each other they don't.
Fundamentally, the guy with a +20 Spot doesn't care whether you have a +1 Hide or a +4 Hidw - he pretty much just sees you whatever you do. But he
really cares a whole lot whether your Hide is +18 or +22.
In order to introduce "more than two levels of ability" (taking as granted that what we have are in fact two levels of ability), we would have to introduce people who are either awesome compared to the people who are awesome now, or suck compared to the people who suck now. And why would that be a good thing?
Why would having people on the Super Awesome scale necessarily be good for the game? They would function exactly the same as the awesome people against the current suckers, and the normally awesome people would function like the suckers against them. Aside from occassionally kicking player chaarcters right in the bean bag - how is that a good thing?
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Players don't get enough skills, and there's no reason for Knowledge, Profession, and Craft skills to function on the same DC scale as regular skills. I mean, dude, those skills aren't opposed and there's nothing really epic you are supposed to be able to do with them.
I suggest that we do what class systems do best - they provide separate systems of point expenditures. We take all the non-active skills totally out of the skill list and give people a separate tally of points to spend on them based on their desired non-combat role.
There's no reason to make a DC 35 Profession check ever. The DCs don't need to go that high and the skill doesn't need to be graded on the same scale as Sneak or Sense Motive. It will partially solve the inadequate skills problem without actually making every character into a cookie cutter.
-Username17