Rethinking Craft, Knowledge, Perform, and Profession

[TarkisFlux]

Since we're talking about non-combat abilities in a few threads now, I figured I'd start a thread about the really boring non-com abilities in 3.x, specifically (non-magical) craft, (non-divination/monster ID) knowledge, (non-bard) perform, and profession*. These skills are not about non-com utility as much as they are about character fluff and vague downtime bits, and they basically don't get to be even half as level appropriate or useful as the rest of the skills. Even with the Tome profession fix and 3.0 perform, it seems like investing in these means spending level based character resources on background things that don't have any level appropriate consequences. Which is pretty much ass, even in the already ass skill system.

So I was wondering whether it would work to dissociate acquisition and advancement of these background abilities from level. Spend a bunch of time learning to be a weapon smith, make an attribute check or whatever, get to be a weaponsmith. Spend more time practicing and making things, make a couple of harder checks, get to be a grand master blacksmith whether you're CR 1 or CR 20.

Such a move would allow for CR 1 grand master sages or weapon smiths who had no combat ability and needed assistance from (or kidnapping by) adventures from time to time. The various competence grades could be constructed with bonus differences that matter, like +10 each grade, instead of being fiddly little numbers that you don't care about from level to level. I like those changes, but there is certainly an elegance cost associated with it as it's yet another subsystem to bolt on and doesn't look a lot like the level based ones.

Is this idea worth developing**, or just typical poorly thought out folly?

*I'm aware that you can remove the parenthetical restrictions to make them valuable as utility options and level appropriate in some cases, but that already gets done through class features or feats and works well enough aside from the 'skill tax' nature of it. I'm more interested in exploring alternate (if compatible) solutions.

**Full disclosure - I've already started writing up a system that does this, and I'm mostly fishing for discussion on the relative merits of it as an idea. I will dump the broad strokes of it or link to it upon request.

[...You Lost Me]

I always thought that perform was just kind of cute for activating spells on the bard, I'd just put it back the way 3.0 did it.

Craft/Knowledge could use a boost, though, perhaps similar treatment (in that 2 ranks gives you two types of craft at 2, instead of focusing on each one individually). I see absolutely no reason to keep profession as a skill at all.

[TarkisFlux]

And that has what to do with the idea exactly? I think I may have lost you ... You Lost Me.

So, trying that again. None of those are skills in the above setup. Call them occupations, hobbies, background abilities, whatever you want but they are not skills in the current sense. You don't put ranks in them. Your bonus is not limited by your CR. You just put in downtime and maybe make an attribute check to get to make relevant checks with some bonus based on your invested time and successful advancement checks.

[...You Lost Me]

I assumed you were looking for suggestions on making those current abilities ion the skill system relevant or other ways to incorporate skills into the game, not "here is my system tell me I'm pretty".

But I can do that too. Of course you can divorce advancement from those skills, because d&d already has that. If something is boring and irrelevant, you can totally hand it out for free.

[TarkisFlux]

I assumed you were looking for suggestions on making those current abilities ion the skill system relevant or other ways to incorporate skills into the game, not "here is my system tell me I'm pretty"

I'm sorry, I thought

Is this idea worth developing, or just typical poorly thought out folly?

was reasonably clear.

I want to know if this is potentially better /worse than the alternatives like those you proposed or those assumed under Tome because they do different things in stories and have different rules complexity costs associated with them. Your answer suggests that you don't much care either way, which is fine.

[Edit] - I should probably take a minute to talk about why I think they're less good solutions rather than just dismissing them without discussion.

The 3.0 reversion of perform was already suggested in Tome, and it basically serves to reduce the skill tax Bards pay to use their class features down from "however many types of perform you want to be able to use" to 1. But you still don't care about perform unless you're a bard, because it does fuck all for you and points spent there are points not spent being useful in something. Doing the same thing to craft just means that you get to craft more types of mundane useless crap at higher levels. Knowledge is weird because several of them are actually reasonably valuable for monster IDing, and you could make an argument for keeping those separate. Putting the rest into an "everything else" pile where you got additional fields for each new rank is the same sort of things you don't care about problem as perform and craft. In short, each of these solutions reduces the cost of branching out but still makes you choose between background crap and potentially useful utility stuff and I'd rather that not even be a choice.

It also keeps the combat + background ability connection, and I don't think that does a damn thing for the game. I see zero reason why a master smith necessarily needs a higher level than an apprentice smith, nor an expert flutist or an expert anything else. It kills plenty of stories that I actually want to tell while offering me no new ones in return.

As for just throwing away profession, well I already did that. Actually, I threw all of these away and got a bunch of complaints for my troubles. Turns out that people really want to be able to write "master flutist" or "sailor" on their sheet and have it mean something mechanically. They have an expectation at this point that they can make a check to beat someone at that thing or to complete something hard with a substantial chance of failure. And they also want to know how they can advance these things. It's not an unreasonable desire, given that the alternatives are 13th age style "argue with the DM" mechanics that don't help anyone.

[Drolyt]

Is this idea worth developing

I think so. Having a minigame for blacksmithing (for example) isn't much different from having a minigame for running a thieves guild or a business. I think there is a gut reaction against roleplaying actually putting permanent bonuses on your sheet that you don't have to pay for, but I don't think it is a big deal for something like craft or profession.

[Sigil]

I did something similar as house rules, and while I'm not going to type it all up I'll summarize it.

Profession, Craft, Perform, Use Rope, Proficiencies, and some other stuff got turned into "Talents". The bonus skill ranks you get for having a high Intelligence can only be spent on talents. Each talent has a limited number of ranks you can spend on them, usually 1 or 2. If you ever gain a talent from a class of feat or whatever, you get reimbursed any ranks you spent on it, and you can spend it on another talent.

The craft talents were seriously 1 rank you can make mundane equipment, 2 ranks you can make masterwork equipment. Crafting times and costs were explicitly listed for weapons and armor, and left up to MTP for the rest.

The profession and perform talents both functioned the same way. There was a chart that listed professions, the weekly pay for that profession, and a DC for finding a job in that profession. Trying to find a job takes a week, can only be attempted once per month, and is a straight Charisma check. Bonuses/penalties are applied to this check based on both the current economy (good/average/bad) and population density.

For each rank invested in Light/Medium/Heavy Armor or Simple/Martial/Exotic Weapons, you became proficient with one whatever. If you got to max ranks, you became proficient with all of them.

---

I turned knowledge, spellcraft, and disable devices into what I called 'subskills'. A set of rules that worked like skills, but you rolled different skill checks based on what you were actually using it on. You needed a 1 rank talent to get above DC 10 for most uses.

Example, Arcana was the actual skill used when using Spellcraft to identify an arcane spell, when usin Disable Device to disarm an arcane trap, or when using Knowledge to learn about an arcane monster.

[MGuy]

As long as these skills don't do anything of importance then I believe you went the right route. I think Sigil's mod actually is a bit better as it reduces book keeping.

[TarkisFlux]

Profession, Craft, Perform, Use Rope, Proficiencies, and some other stuff got turned into "Talents". The bonus skill ranks you get for having a high Intelligence can only be spent on talents.

That is certainly less book keeping, but in exchange you don't get to pick up new things unless you level up or have a high Int mod. So your ability with a background talent isn't necessarily level / attribute limited, but your total number of them is. And higher level dudes simply have more of them than you do. It's an interesting simplicity tradeoff.

The expansion into proficiencies is a fine way to round out the RoW Exploits though*, and you can toss in speak language and the less used knowledges as well. Placing use rope in there has some mechanical concerns if you ever tie dudes up though because it buts up against escape artist and actual skill point investment. How'd that work out Sigil?

*It was already in my writeup even.

[tussock]

So I was wondering whether it would work to dissociate acquisition and advancement of these background abilities from level. Spend a bunch of time learning to be a weapon smith, make an attribute check or whatever, get to be a weaponsmith. Spend more time practicing and making things, make a couple of harder checks, get to be a grand master blacksmith whether you're CR 1 or CR 20.

FUCK NO.

[*]There are elves, they live for ever so much longer than you, so if anyone cares about blacksmithing, the best ones are all elves and always will be forever more and ever and even dwarves just have to be a bit shit at it (which fits JRRT, but fuck that for D&D).

[*]You want me to what now? Because either smithing matters and it's OK if I drop a skill point or three in it, or it doesn't and you're not only forgetting to say not to bother but also letting me tell long-ass background stories that cannot help in game. Don't do that.

[*]If the NPC is important to the fucking plot (like he's the best elven blacksmith and the only one who can craft your red key card to get through the flimsy screen door of doom or whatever) it's actually a good thing that he doesn't have just two hit points. 20th level experts are an abomination, it's true, but 1st level experts who matter when the party is 20th level are worse.

[ishy]

The problem is that you can't make the crafting process interesting (by this I mean the assembly part: Say if you had a sword, the actual forging is just not interesting). At least if you are trying to test the characters skill instead of the players.

With crafting systems you have to focus on gathering resources and choosing what outcomes are possible and resources.
And sometimes you want the 'master crafter' to be an npc they have to find.
Or the crafting recipe or the "crafting hammer of Thor"
etc.

[Sigil]

It worked out pretty well, since it's rather simple. Having the various knowledge skills be part of other skills rusults in characters that want to be knowledgable having useful skills (and spending less ranks in general), and having the disable device be a function of engineering/arcana/theology results in the rogue also being the guy that identifies spells and stuff. It also results in the sorceror and cleric being able to disable traps that fall directly in their realm of expertise.

Escape Artist, Heal, Swim, and Use Rope also became talents. Escape Artist straight up just gives you a bonus to any check made to escape a grapple or binding. Heal lets you use the new Nature skill (which combines knowledge nature and handle animal) to perform all the functions of heal. Swim lets use Athletics (which combines climb, jump, and swim) to swim without any penalty. Finally, Use Rope just give you a +5 bonus whenever the check involves a rope.

This consolidation of skills usually means that the classes that get less skill points, the ones that usually are buying climb/jump/swim or balance/tumble (now Acrobatics) have some extra skill points that they can either stick into other skills or put into talents without losing out on skills that are necessary for the role they have.

Disable Device and Spellcraft being subskills means those classes that want to get the full features of them need to invest into 3 seperate skills Arcana/Engineering/Theology. For the rogue this means that he needs to spend one extra rank a level on this, but gets the benefit of being proficient at 3 knowledges too, and since he's probably not spending as many ranks on balance/tumble or climb/jump/swim, he can probably afford it.

All in all, its pretty much a complete overhaul of the skill system. I really did it for my d20 heartbreaker, but decided to make it modular enough that it would work with regular d20. Unfortunately, it's completely hand written ATM (yeah I know, I'm a caveman, whatever). If anyone seriously want's to look at it I could probably type it up sometime this week.

[Stubbazubba]

I'd be interested, Sigil.

I agree that people want to be able to say "I'm a master flutist" and such things and have that be backed up on a character sheet in some way, and having that kind of fluff pull from the same pool as useful abilities is unacceptable. And I think your workaround actually helps tie it into the fluff of what happens during downtime, as well. A normal part of downtime might be narrating what it is you've been up to and rolling to earn advancement. Of course, it would be better if these things actually did something or could be put to use some other way. It would be worth it to spin this acquisition idea into a simple system where you could leverage these things in Profession/Reputation-related ways.

[TarkisFlux]

[*]There are elves, they live for ever so much longer than you, so if anyone cares about blacksmithing, the best ones are all elves and always will be forever more and ever and even dwarves just have to be a bit shit at it (which fits JRRT, but fuck that for D&D).

This is trivial to solve. If the advancement check to grand master blacksmith is a DC 22 con check, elves basically don't make those checks while dwarves do with some measurable regularity. If you want it even more dwarf sided, you replace their now useless craft bonus with an advancement check bonus.

All that being long lived necessarily does is increase your chances of being a master at something eventually, because you can just keep going through your options until one sticks. That's fine in a low birth rate, low population people (like the long lived races are generally fluffed as) because you're swapping lots of advancement chances from lots of people for lots of advancement chances from life span. So while the chances of any individual being a master X are much higher with a long life span, they don't have more masters than the more populous shorter lived peoples because probability.

[*]You want me to what now? Because either smithing matters and it's OK if I drop a skill point or three in it, or it doesn't and you're not only forgetting to say not to bother but also letting me tell long-ass background stories that cannot help in game. Don't do that.

Here, let me fix that for you:

Either smithing is useful on the order of your other utility bits that you could be investing points in instead, or it isn't and you shouldn't get to invest points in it normally because it's an intentional hobbling of your character. If the latter and smithing still matters to PCs, then you need an alternate system for PCs to pick it up.

Since I think that's the case (and nothing you wrote suggests otherwise), I'm looking into the alternate system. The fact that smithing is an entirely low level and mundane thing that doesn't matter in lots of games doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the game, it means that it shouldn't cost you level based resources.

[*]If the NPC is important to the fucking plot (like he's the best elven blacksmith and the only one who can craft your red key card to get through the flimsy screen door of doom or whatever) it's actually a good thing that he doesn't have just two hit points.

Having played games where the sage is always better than you, I don't think it's a bad thing that he can have just 2 hit points and go down when you punch him well. He could also have 200 and be better than you of course, he just doesn't have to be. That's the whole point of decoupling these things, you can have both.

[Red_Rob]

I posted our group's solution a while back. We pegged them to character level to prevent abuse, but the basic idea was similar to yours.

[tussock]

Either smithing is useful on the order of your other utility bits that you could be investing points in instead, or it isn't and you shouldn't get to invest points in it normally because it's an intentional hobbling of your character. If the latter and smithing still matters to PCs, then you need to tell players not to bother with it.

IFYP.

Your system, instead of being honest and telling players that smithing is useless, tells them do some complicated dice and background story thing to put stuff on the character sheet that doesn't matter.

Don't do that. Don't tell people they can write background stories and then have that background be substantially less useful than picking skills. If you want random NPCs to be awesome blacksmiths at some happy medium rate, just do that. If PCs also want to be a blacksmith in a way that's not worth a couple skill points, just write Blacksmith somewhere. No system. No requirements. No hoops to jump.

It's not important, which I can tell because it's not worth any skill points. Don't invent an even more complicated system for it, just ignore it. The same system for making someone king of somewhere: somebody just arbitrarily is in a way PCs can't buy.

That's the whole point of decoupling these things, you can have both.

So I can have a spam sandwich and a shit sandwich. Why not let 1st level commoners cast Meteor Swarm 3/day while you're at it. There's something else you can't do with D&D. Totally tell interesting stories with that.

[Omegonthesane]

tussock - Do you have an actual reason why people who know everything and have 2 HP are so bad for the game that they must not be includable or supported?

[hogarth]

The problem is that you can't make the crafting process interesting (by this I mean the assembly part: Say if you had a sword, the actual forging is just not interesting). At least if you are trying to test the characters skill instead of the players.

This is my main problem with crafting skills, although I would probably rephrase it as "it's hard to make failing a crafting check interesting" (succeeding at a craft check is interesting in the obvious way). If it's never interesting to fail a particular skill check, that probably shouldn't be something you need to roll in the first place.

Even if you said that a failed Craft check puts a hidden flaw in whatever you're crafting, that would probably just add an extra testing phase to the crafting process.

[tussock]

Omegon, the sane - actual reason is as stated previous. If your high level character needs someone to make them a red key card (or equivalent reason to give a shit about their existence), it's useful if they have the generalised immunity to plot devices and being casually exterminated or assimilated that comes with being high level.

Like, maybe you need to drag them to Avernus to forge it, this being high level play. But if the rules for high level play come out at all while you're there, they just melt. Low level NPCs are not capable of interacting with high level problems at all, unless you give them complete immunity to everything like a CRPG ( ).

[TarkisFlux]

Don't tell people they can write background stories and then have that background be substantially less useful than picking skills. If you want random NPCs to be awesome blacksmiths at some happy medium rate, just do that. If PCs also want to be a blacksmith in a way that's not worth a couple skill points, just write Blacksmith somewhere. No system. No requirements. No hoops to jump.

You didn't fix shit with your requote, you just said "fuck off" to people who want to write these things on their sheets and not play argue with the MC to get things done with them.

Thing is, I already did the rest of this. And it works well enough so long as you have a permissive or cooperative MC who doesn't mind handing little things out without a lot of fuss. But even then you run into problems with differing expectations and game portability. You'd rather have those problems then the added complexity though, and that's fine, but you don't have a lockdown on the preferences of others.

So I'll continue with the "fucking handwave it" solution for them in games that want it light and with trying to find reasonable level independent rules for people who have the not unreasonable expectation of game portability and actual rules guidelines for the things they write on their sheets.

Why not let 1st level commoners cast Meteor Swarm 3/day while you're at it. There's something else you can't do with D&D. Totally tell interesting stories with that.

Meteor Swarm is a level of fantastic and combat ability that level and CR actually sort of has guidelines for, while "can make slightly better swords" or "has read slightly more books about history" or "can sail a boat good" aren't. The things that level measures can be tied to that, the rest can not be.

If your high level character needs someone to make them a red key card (or equivalent reason to give a shit about their existence), it's useful if they have the generalised immunity to plot devices and being casually exterminated or assimilated that comes with being high level.

Like, maybe you need to drag them to Avernus to forge it, this being high level play. But if the rules for high level play come out at all while you're there, they just melt. Low level NPCs are not capable of interacting with high level problems at all, unless you give them complete immunity to everything like a CRPG ( ).

Right. Because planar adaption, abjurations, temp hp, and a bunch of other effects aren't things that PCs could do to bring someone along with them. And there aren't any NPCs with actual levels and the background ability you care about. Or any Avernus natives with the ability so you don't have to fuck with those other things at all. Yup, totally an insolvable and system breaking problem.

[Judging__Eagle]

Ugh, these aren't solutions to the gordian knot that says "these skills that are actively important" when it comes to psychological, physical, stealth/recon and knowledge skills to the tactical combat minigames that occur in the Zcience Phantasy worlds that Dungeons and Dragons is purported to take part in.

While at the same time not solving the dilemma of "these skills are also important; but not actively so" being in any way balanced with the above range of Active skills.

Seriously, the better way to handle this would be like the Perform hack that Frank wrote up for his "Bards Suck!" bard.

Craft and Perform, should work in the same manner. Whenever you Craft or Perform, you use your total ranks in the skill; but each rank has given you a new specialty that you can use.

Profession apes Speak Language; along with the Dungeonomicon: Economicon hack that explains that Professions are a 1 rank skill; but if you spend 2 you're considered a "master" at it.

I'd actually like to expand that to include how Speak Languages works. With people who have a 2 ranks in a Language, gain a +1 synergy bonus to charisma based checks when speaking to people in the correct language.

Mostly because being intimidated by some asshole who says "me, hurt your fire!" is not the same as hearing "Water Elementals will drown your soul!" in Ignan to a Fire Elemental.

This isn't necessarily a "good" idea for the engine, as d20 is replete with millions of bullshit modifiers that are only meant to make the boring results of "fail/success" shift one way or an other (the biggest reason for me not caring about d20 has been this, the results are super boring, even if they are success or failure, there's no variety between them).

I'd recommend using the Tome of Fiends monster summoning rules to see a bit more cleaned up method for identifying creatures.

For the most part, my own group has preferred a method that works along the lines of "The Difficulty Class of a Knowledge Check is : 10 + CR of creature; success grants knowledge of the creature's type(s); every point over grants knowledge about one of the creature's special abilities; exceeding the check by 10 (or 20?) points allows the players to see the creature's entry that the game referee is using."

Knowledge, in a tactical minigame where knowing your enemies powers and weaknesses should not be relegated to a smaller role than it already is; unless much wide sweeping changes are going to be made to the d20 Skills system, where both Open Lock, and Disable Device, get folded into each other; likewise with Spot/Listen, Move Silently/Hide, Disguise/Forgery, Bluff/Sleight of Hand, Diplomacy/Handle Animal, Appraise/Heal, Perform/Intimidate, Climb/Balance/Ride, Gather Information/Sense Motive, Concentration/Survival, Decipher Script/Spellcraft, Escape Artist/Use Rope, Craft/Use Magic Item, Swim/Jump, and Perform/Intimidate.

I've said in the past that I have deep problems with people giving a superficial "folding" in of skills such as the Stealth and Observation skills; I think in part it was based on the feeling that "most" skills in D&D are bullshit, overlap too heavily with each other; and one could conceivably half the amount of skills, and lose nothing in terms of flavor.

Knowledge skills could be simplified into: Political [History, Local], Geographic [Geography, Nature], Supernatural [Arcana, Religion, The planes], Technical [Architecture and engineering, Dungeoneering, ].



This makes Supernatural a bit bigger... but people tend to get those three maxed first anyway, which will incentivize players to pick up the usually worthless Local, and Architechture/Engineering aspects of knowledge.

The resulting list could look like:

Assessment
Hold On
Expression
Dedication
Crafting and Use [decided to just copypasta the d20srd list, and work from there]

Appraise/Search: Assessment
Balance/Tumble: Acrobatics
Bluff/Sleight Of Hand: Deception
Climb/Ride: Mounting
Concentration/Survival: Willfulness
Craft/Use Magic Device: Craft & Use
Decipher Script/Spellcraft: Litereacy
Diplomacy/Heal: Caretaking
Intimidate/Handle Animal: Empathy
Disable Device/Open Lock: Disable Device
Disguise/Forgery: Make Up and Artistry
Escape Artist/Use Rope: Escapes and Restraints*
Gather Information/Sense Motive: Investigation
Hide/Spot: Overwatch
Jump/Swim: Perseverance
Knowledge: [Political, Geographic, Supernatural, Technical]
Listen/Move Silently: Sentry
Perform/Profession: Career
Speak Language:

*: Honestly, I wish that these skills could be used by non trapfinders to survive traps, and would have fit in with the more "lol traps are arbitrary" nature of Old School D&D, and by trapfinders to avoid the worst of a catastrophically failed disarm attempt.

I know that I put Spot/Hide together, and Listen/Move Silently together; mostly so that skills are used to make comparative checks against each other; and that the storytime that a bunch of people silently set up an ambush on some immobile enemies who can't see them anyway (such as the "let's surround, and set up an awesome ambush on an SS Panzer platoon" scene from Kelly's Heroes; lots of silent moving, but they're not really hiding). is similar, but not quite the same as the storytime where a single dude sneaked into an enemy fortress and blew stuff up (Rambo sneaking into a Russian Base in Rambo 2, placing, then setting off demolition charges among some materiel; it's noisy anyway, but there are bright spotlights). I'm sort of sad that I didn't resolve this sooner.

19 types of skills; and 22 total. While it may not be a "best" solution; it's a bit more comprehensive of a solution for skills than I've seen in the past. A lot of skills seem reasonable, but are treated as boguse in actual gameplay, and worst of redundant skills are obviously apparent, so this is more an attempt at compressing the most egregious duplicate skills that exist in d20.

[Foxwarrior]

I somehow suspect that you haven't heard of TarkisFlux's Tome of Prowess ( http://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tome_of_Prowes ... rcebook%29 ), Judging_Eagle.

[Judging__Eagle]

I've seen it in the past; it doesn't solve the issue of "there's too many skills to show to a new player; and even years long players don't use/appreciate all of the skills that they could be using" that I have with bloated and redundant skill lists.

I'll have to look at it again, there's probably some good things I've forgotten; I never implemented every tome-related change that has been made on these boards; mostly b/c even keeping track of the Tome Repository to make sure I've got Kaelik's latest Errata, or Koumei or Maxus's latest items, feats or PrCs isn't something that I've been doing in the last couple of years.

I've been steadily dumping d20 binary wargaming as my narrative structure; and I'm going more towards Horror After Sundown scaling results via degree'd successes.

D20 doesn't really give granularity, either you do something, or don't; and that's bad if not everyone in the collective narrative is not going to be equally skilled at climbing a cliff face in a semi-supernatural setting like the one most people would like to make-believe fantasy storytelling takes place in.