[3.5] Ability Obsolescence

[virgil]

What abilities, skills, traits, what-have-you can you give a character that would be good at low levels but are forgettable once you hit mid-level or higher? Low-level spells are obvious, though it's not a universal rule because some are still used at higher levels.

[deaddmwalking]

What abilities, skills, traits, what-have-you can you give a character that would be good at low levels but are forgettable once you hit mid-level or higher? Low-level spells are obvious, though it's not a universal rule because some are still used at higher levels.

Every skill except Diplomacy (which never stops mattering because the DCs are static).

[...You Lost Me]

Swift action, 1r flight and standard action, 1d6/lvl damage to one target come to mind.

[Koumei]

Yeah, crap like Swift Flight all falls under a category of "Like the stuff you get at higher level, but more limited" which means it obviously goes obsolete when you get the better version.

A lot of skills go obsolete whether you keep putting ranks in them or not (and others go obsolete if you put your 4 ranks in at level 1 then stop because they fall into the "opposed roll" category). A lot of basic equipment (for that matter, any kind of nonmagic weapon).

[ACOS]

@skills:
I'd say that UMD can stay useful pretty much forever.

For martial types, a weapon's actual damage die tends to obsolesce pretty quickly.

[tussock]

There's your race, every stat that's not your prime and maybe Con. A lot of the feats you can use early are useless later (Great Cleave can be fun for a couple levels, frex). Turn Undead as anything other than free metamagic charges. Heaps of spells have caps and only work against things that aren't giving you XP any more, so the DM won't let you fight them anyway, even though they should and it's fun. Almost anything you pay level adjustment for is useless as soon as you have a couple real levels.

Anything in combat that uses full round actions without giving you movement, really. Anything that slows you in any way, like non-light armour. Not having Free Action.

Most skills are fine if you just use all the +20 items or +30 spells to trump any resistance. Tumble used to have fixed DCs, and everything that still does is fine because you can beat it by mid levels. Hide actually gets much better than Invisibility if you push it.

I think there's enough in the splats to make saves and AC work at higher levels. Didn't use to be though, had to give up on those for a long time, immunity or die.

[Eikre]

Curious, but is there an objective for this list? Are you putting together a design criteria that includes lots of extraneous sheet-cluttering features at higher levels?

[virgil]

Curious, but is there an objective for this list? Are you putting together a design criteria that includes lots of extraneous sheet-cluttering features at higher levels?

Opposite, actually. I'm looking into design criteria for abilities to give at low levels, and once they hit level X, they have all of those old abilities wiped clean and start over as something new.

[Eikre]

Is there going to be continuity?

I think it is fine and even perhaps healthy to just say, "yes, skills will be a level 1-6 thing and then after that you're never going to roll another skillcheck again," but you could keep the gimmick going for fucking ever by re-naming and re-equalizing every six levels, after the RNGs stop working and the spells and abilities of yesterlevel have invalidated the chance of failure. After level 6, everyone can have wings if they want and Acrobatics stops mattering, but Aerial Maneuvering starts to be a thing if you don't want to get your shit wrecked when you get him by a thrown boulder and stall out. When people have perfect hovering ability, then flight stops being a measured skill and people maybe put points into Flashstepping until forcecages and casual teleportation become a thing, at which point you use Non-Euclidian Locomotion to take advantage of fifth-dimensional trajectories that they haven't anticipated and maybe that takes you to the realistic conceptual limits of whoever is still playing at that point.

Is this a model of character advancement that people will find intellectually satisfying? I actually really can't answer that question, but I think it would at least be better than the 4E notion where you conceptually keep climbing progressively slippier walls all the way up to godhood. You'd have to come up with a lot of stupid made-up compound words to fill out the upper level iterations, but that's really nothing new, is it?

[tussock]

So, like, a race and class with feats and skills gets you a paragon path with superpowers and quantum uncertainty and armies and so on, which gets you an epic destiny with world-building points to shape new realities and whatnot. Then you're 16th level and stop before it gets silly.

And your paragon attacks just kill anything from hero level, and you're immune to all their skills and spells, because charm person and sleep stopped being funny quite some time ago. And there's some sort of special rule for masses of hero-level people trying to kill paragons by weight of numbers. Or something. Tiers, like someone would care about them.