Recently I’ve been involved in several discussions regarding skills in D&D.
There’s an attitude I’ve never been able to understand when it comes to roleplaying games (or anything else for that matter): “I have too many options.”
For example, lots of people complain that there are “too many supplements” for their game. In fact, a lot of people are looking forward to 4th Edition precisely because it will strip away all of those supplements. Ignoring for the moment that 4th Edition will have supplements released for it several months before the game itself is actually available, these complaints and this glee simply leave me scratching my head.
If you don’t want them, don’t buy them.
It’s not like someone is coming round to your house, holding a gun to your head, and forcing you to buy a supplement. If you don’t want them, then don’t buy them. Nothing could be easier. Your “problem” can be solved by doing, literally, nothing at all.
On the other hand, if you need them or want them… well, there they are. And the more of them there are, the better it is (because that drastically increases the odds that whatever supplement you need at this particular moment in time will, in fact, exist).
I bring this up because I see the same complaint leveled at 3rd Edition’s skill system.
The sentiment is perhaps most eloquently put by Vinicus Zoio on WotC’s messageboards: “God, I hope they get rid of skill points!”
“GOD, I HOPE THEY GET RID OF SKILL POINTS!”
I really couldn’t disagree more.
The existing skill point system is the best of both worlds.
(1) If you want to quickly generate a character’s skills, select a number of class skills equal to # + Int modifier and give them skill ranks equal to 3 + your level, where # is based on your class. (Multiclass Characters: For each class, select a number of class skills equal to # + Int modifier and give them skill ranks equal to their class level. Add +3 skill ranks to the class skills selected for whatever class was taken at 3rd level.)
(2) If you want to customize your character’s skills, on the other hand, you have complete flexibility to do that.
The only thing I’d tweak is the rules for handling increases in Intelligence so that they retroactively grant you skill points (the same way that Con increases retroactively boost your hit points). You can argue the “realism” of this (I don’t have a problem with it), but it removes the only mechanical hiccup getting in the way of the fast-and-easy creation method of scenario #1.
The Star Wars Saga Edition method of doing things (which appears to also be the way that 4th Edition is going), on the other hand, is remarkably inferior: It gives you scenario #1… and only scenario #1.
And here’s the trick: It doesn’t make scenario #1 any faster or easier. So by adopting the SWSE method of doing things, you’re sacrificing flexibility and customization, and you’re gaining… absolutely nothing.
SKILLED vs. UNSKILLED
To be fair, there is another argument for adopting the SWSE system for handling skills: It eliminates the disparity between skilled and unskilled characters.
The argument goes something like this: A character who specializes in the Hide skill will eventually become so skilled at hiding that a person who hasn’t invested any skill points into Spot will never be able to spot them. (This happens when there is a 20-point difference between the Hide skill bonus and the Spot skill bonus — the 1d20 roll can no longer span that difference.)
SWSE solves this “problem” by turning every character into a renaissance man: Your trained skills are set to:
1d20 + 5 + character level + attribute modifier + miscellaneous modifiers
Your untrained skills are set to:
1d20 + character level + attribute modifier + miscellaneous modifiers
As you can see, this means that all characters become skilled in all things (with the exception of some trained-only skills). A 10th level characters is as a good at every single skill as a trained 1st level character.
This does eliminate the disparity between the skill bonuses of various characters… but it also means that every single character in SWSE is Doc Savage.
FIXING A FALSE PROBLEM
But the real problem with SWSE’s “fix” is that this disparity isn’t actually a problem.
This type of disparity is a problem when it comes to attack bonuses and saving throws, because those are target numbers which are fundamental to a wide array of common challenges in the game: If you’ve reached a point where the rogue will automatically succeed (barring a natural 1) on any saving throw the fighter has any chance of making, then it becomes increasingly difficult to design challenges for the group.
But skills, in general, don’t suffer from these problems. Any problems created by disparities between skilled and non-skilled characters can be simply addressed by:
(1) Rewriting the skill rules to remove a handful of truly problematic skill uses. (Diplomacy and Tumble, I’m looking at you.) These are areas that need to be addressed any way.
(2) Not worrying about it. If the wizard can cast improved invisibility, why are you fretting about the fact that the uber-specialized Hider finds it trivial to sneak past the unskilled Spotter? If the spellcaster can whip off a dominate person, why is it a problem that the relatively naive guy who has never spent a rank in Sense Motive is consistently getting the wool pulled over his eyes by the legendary Bluff specialist?
LACK OF FLEXIBILITY
But an unnecessary lack of flexibility increasingly seems to be the design methodology for 4th Edition. For example, Andy Collins recently discussed the fact that, in 4th Edition, abilities which were once feats and available to any character will now be class-specific abilities. This is one giant leap backwards for the game.
Similarly, it now appears that monsters and PCs will be built on mutually incompatible frameworks.
All of these things are major strikes against 4th Edition, in my opinion. Combined with decisions like removing saving throws from the game (fundamentally altering something that has been a core component of D&D gameplay for more than three decades), focusing the game exclusively on miniature-based tactical play (both in terms of removing real-world measurements from the rules and in terms of designing monsters so that they have no function outside of combat), and changes to the meta-setting of the game (something roughly akin to changing the property names in Monopoly) the prospects for 4th Edition looker bleaker and bleaker for me.
It seems increasingly likely that the game is heading in the wrong direction. I’m still holding out some hope, but my suspicions are growing that I will not be making the transition from 3rd Edition to 4th Edition.
ARCHIVED HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Justin Alexander
Jeff– Seriously, I don’t know how I can say “they are getting rid of the utility I prefer” in a way that will make you comprehend it. You are either not reading what I’m writing or you’re incapable of understanding what I’m writing.
Saturday, March 22, 2008, 1:42:33 AM
Aranamarunda
Lol, that wasn’t an insult, it was a statement that may or may not be true for you, but it is the truth in general. So, opf course we can design a game that has eaiser rules all around, but 4th edition alsmot has nothing to do with D&D, as far as I can tell. Of course, some stereotypes remain, but that’s about it. If you like those new rules, why not play heroquest instead?
As for the undead example, yes, we might as well jump through hoops, because the consistency doesn’t only allow us to battle these monsters, but to play them as well. And that is something that can’t be done in 4th edition if it all becomes ad hoc.
Sorry if I sounded insulting, I was merely critisizing.
PS: Why am I not getting any notification mail?
Tuesday, March 11, 2008, 7:30:39 AM
Jeff H
So the thread with person after person singing the praises of the new system’s flexibility gave you the impression it was less flexible?
We must mean different things by “flexible”, then. I’m talking about being able to create the monster I want without jumping through ridiculous hoops and in a reasonable amount of time. You appear to be talking about some advantage, whose nature eludes me, that inheres in being able to use the same rules for different purposes. What that is, or why I should care about it, remains unclear to me.
For example, create an undead that’s a reasonable combat challenge for, say, a 9th level party but can be Turned or otherwise fall to nondamaging magic relatively easily. You can do it, but only by giving it ad hoc drawbacks to overcome the features forced on you by the huge number of hit dice you need to give it because of the way the Undead type works. Why should you have to jump through the latter hoops in the first place? And why care that I can use similar tools to create characters (assuming, though it’s actually now looking rather doubtful, that this will not be the case in 4E)?
Monday, March 10, 2008, 10:31:51 PM
Justin Alexander
I dunno what to tell you, Jeff. I don’t have the problems you describe with the system. The only place where we seem to have a common experience is in observing that CR can’t always be reliably determined by simply looking at the number of levels a character has.
But everything I’ve seen indicates that 4th Edition is simply swapping one type of utility (plug ‘n play mechanics where PCs and NPCs are compatible with each other) for a different type of utility (CRs that are more easily calculated without any need to use your personal judgment).
It’s not that I don’t understand the utility of the latter, it’s simply that:
(1) I find the former more useful.
(2) I find it relatively easy to compensate for the lack of the latter. (I can simply eyeball how challenging a particular encounter will be to my current crop of PCs. OTOH, reintegrating consistent mechanics across PCs and NPCs would require huge amounts of re-design work.)
(3) I’m not particularly convinced that you couldn’t have achieved the latter without getting rid of the former.
Re: The ENWorld thread. It seems to blatantly confirm that the rules for monsters are less flexible. I’m not clear on what you were expecting me to see there that was going to convince me that 4th Edition’s more complicated and less flexible approach was worthwhile.
(To make that perfectly clear: It’s more complicated because you have different rules for PCs and NPCs. It’s less flexible because you can no longer mix-and-match your tools. It’s a classic case of the sum being less than the total of the two parts.)
Monday, March 10, 2008, 6:04:45 AM
Jeff H
I’m not even going to respond to most of the previous post, considering it starts with a gratuitous insult and goes on to grossly misrepresent practically everything about the discussion. I will say that professional designers like Clark Peterson have made exactly the same complaints as me, and for that matter there have been several hundred stat block errors in each of WotC’s own books (albeit mostly in things I often don’t bother with in detail like allocating skill points, but quite a few miscalculated ACs and DCs as well). Might I respectfully suggest that it might be a case of you *overestimating* your ability in this area?
Anyway, ignoring that particular interlocutor and getting back to Justin, I’d like to call attention to this thread: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=220984 . Do you still think it’s reasonable to complain that monster design is, in any meaningful respect, *less* flexible now?
Friday, March 07, 2008, 2:47:24 PM
Aranamarunda
@Jeff:
Well, I guess, no pun intended, that not being able to balance a monster using 3.5 rules and needing ad hoc rules to build your monsters, just means that you aren’t that good at it. It also implies that some monsters may not excel at certain skills in your opinion.
What Wizards is trying to do, in my opinion, is trying to put politics into game rules. We are taught at school that it is unfair to excel in certain skills because this leaves others behind…. No, let’s not start talking about that.
Variation is a good thing every time. A rogue with 40 ranks in Hide should excel in that skill and should be able to dupe about 99.9 % of the world’s population, even his fellow adventurers. If a 37th level character can’t arm him or herself versus such extremities, then he or she isn’t worthy of being a 37th level character. Hence, the domination and invisibility examples. And, if you mean, that if you want to make an undead which has a bab of 20 and you need 40 hd to do that, which means it will have 43 ranks in a certain skill but is still unable to hit… Whatever you put it up against, then you forget stats like strength and all those other cool things that kind of ‘balance’ these creatures. These mistakes have always been around and were, I have to admit, even my initial reluctance to use the 3.5 or 3.0 edition. But the truth is, I think that the new rules, to balance out, will result in monsters thatll just have more hd, more hp, and more of everything really, just so they always are at the same strength towards the player characters, which will just result in a lack of imagination. Woohoo! How scary! A monster with a 1000 hit pints and an AC we can barely hit! No, a baatezu with 75 hp and some brains behind the scores can do the same trick.
Finally, what abhors me the most is the class/cross class example, telling us that cross class skills will just differ 5 points! Cheez! That will result in some poor rogues! And, again, the political argument. You may not beat your fellow men by more then 25% is what those rules are kind of telling us. No, give me a hundred different PrCs, a thousand feats and a million spells and items and let me combine all those things myself. Be it for a player of when creating a monster.
Dearest regards,
Me 😀
Thursday, March 06, 2008, 8:57:25 AM
Jeff H
I completely fail to see how having monsters built differently than PCs makes the game rules less flexible. If anything it should make them *more* flexible, by not, for example, forcing you to give certain creature types sky-high saving throws in order to give them reasonable to-hit chances and hit points.
Similarly, I can’t make sense of the paragraph starting with “In other words…”.
I can see the aesthetic appeal of having consistency between building PCs and building monsters, but surely that is VASTLY outweighed by the kind of problems alluded to above (and which you haven’t said anything to address), which actually impact gameplay immeasurably more than whether a creature has the “right” number of feats and skill points. To say nothing of the way the existing rules for monster-building astronomically increase prep time to no good end.
Thursday, February 21, 2008, 12:39:06 AM
Justin Alexander
KOOS:
You’re talking about fundamental changes not only to the feel of the game, but to the actual gameplay of the game.
3rd Edition was significantly different from previous editions of the game — it streamlined the rules; made them consistent across character classes and mechanics; and so forth. But it still played like D&D. Playing a fighter in 3rd Edition felt like playing a fighter in 2nd Edition or BECMI; playing a wizard in 3rd Edition felt like playing a wizard in 2nd Edition or BECMI.
4th Edition, though, doesn’t look like it’s going to play like D&D. Playing a fighter or a wizard is going to be a fundamentally different type of gameplay.
For me, that’s reason enough to be hesitant about the switch.
And then we add in the indisputable fact that 4th Edition is going to be less flexible than 3rd Edition, it pretty much zeroes out any interest I have in transitioning.
JEFF H:
Again, it’s about flexibility.
If you want to make an argument that there are more reliable ways of calculating CR than looking at HD, I think you’d be able to make a pretty strong argument.
But taking the next step and saying, “And therefore it’s necessary to make monsters and PCs incompatible with each other.” doesn’t get any traction with me. Not only does this remove consistency from the game world (a quality which I prize), it also makes the rules less flexible (which, I hope I’ve made clear, is anathema to me).
To put it a different way: I thought one of the most misleading rules in 3rd Edition was “for PC races, your CR equals your class levels”. The problem, quite simply, is that what makes for a good PC may not necessarily make for a good challenge to PCs of the same level.
Unfortunately, this problem doesn’t go away in 4th Edition. If PCs and monsters are fundamentally incompatible, then what is the CR (or CR-equivalent) of an NPC built using the PC rules?
In other words, the problem I see with 4th Edition — based on what WotC has told us we can expect to see — is that they’ve actually made things more difficult in many respects… and then gotten rid of that difficulty by removing flexibility and utility from the system.
To put it another way: In 3rd Edition they made some assumptions so that they could give the fairly useful (if not 100% precise) guidelines of CR. But if you wanted to play away from those assumptions (for whatever reason — you don’t like magic-heavy campaigns; you want more magic; your players are more interested in social challenges than combat challenges), all you needed to do was ignore or adapt the default CR ratings (based on the assumptions you weren’t using).
But at some point they decided that this was a “problem” and that the solution was to hard-code those assumptions into the system.
The result is less flexible, less usable, and less appealing (to me).
YMMV.
Friday, February 15, 2008, 3:44:19 PM
Jeff H
While I’m with you on the main thrust of your comments, I’m a little surprised by your assumption that building monsters and PCs on different frameworks is a bad thing. I can’t see why, and you give no argument that, this would be true.
Building monsters as pseudo-PCs has miserably failed at any reasonable purpose it could have. It doesn’t make it easier, if anything it makes it much harder, to estimate the power level of a given critter or design it as a balanced challenge for a party of any given level. To do that, you need to get its AC, hp, saves (soon Defences – and I see no reason why streamlining that should be a problem either), etc to be in a certain range. So which makes more sense – rules that do *THAT*, or rules that do something completely different?
I too was seduced by the illusion of giving solid guidelines for this that 3E offered, but I soon got over it. It’s really just codification for the sake of codification. There’s no reason why rules with fundamentally different purposes *should* mirror each other. I’m sure you understand why CR and ECL bear little relationship to one another – they *measure different things*. Well, exactly the same reasoning applies here.
Sunday, February 10, 2008, 6:45:18 PM
Koos G
To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that you’re so glum about ‘major’ changes to D&D:
* setting? who cares? it’s fluff anyway, you’re free to use your own.
* removing saving throws… Well, no problem with that. One defense for all. Simple. Clean. and if it works, it’s fine by me. I don’t want byzantine rules. I’ll have those on a computer game. It’s about roleplaying, not roll-calculate-recalculate playing.
* more focus on combat rules: Fine, as long as it doesn’t get too byzantine. You can’t have it all and personally, it could use a cleanup. Screw realism, enter ease. Combat takes way too much time as is anyway.
Feats vs class abilities? If multiclassing is no-strings-attached (as in star wars), who cares? You can’t say that you’re a full fighter, but do you need to be able to say that?
Now, as for skills:
The fact that characters become doc savage IS what they want to epitomize: high-level characters aren’t easily fooled. However, in 3.5, a 3rd level specialized rogue will on average easily pull the wool over the eyes of 90% of the adventuring population, and thats including the level 30 ones. (I mean, how many level 30 fighters, monks, wizards, sorcerers, clerics, druids have ranks in sense motive?). That is for me the fix they made: high-level characters aren’t easily duped by low-level ones.
Specialization was a very powerful concept in 3rd edtion – too powerful in my opinion: a fighter totally dedicated to his two-handed sword decimates just about everything if he can use it, and is outdone by half the party when he can’t. A wizard with intellect at 200 will win just about anything as nothing makes the save. So deciding to take +2 int or +2 charisma for a wizard is a nobrainer, even though you might want to roleplay that your character, along with more power, becomes more involved, and more social. 3rd edition had balance issues between powerplay and roleplay: simply put: you couldn’t do both very well.
By ensuring that specialization doesn’t pay off as well as it did, there’s more room for roleplaying.
Regards,
Koos
Wednesday, January 16, 2008, 7:28:10 AM
Justin Alexander
Thanks for the compliments.
Personally, I’m going to pick up the PHB. I’m going to look at it carefully. And if I decide I’m going to convert, then I’ll pick up the DMG and the MM. If not, I’m not going to put any more money in WotC’s 4th Edition pocket than necessary.
I really am trying to keep an open mind on 4th Edition. But the more I hear, the less I like.
Friday, November 30, 2007, 5:46:06 PM
Tetsubo
I also do not plan on migrating to 4E. I will pick up the three core books. I’ve been collecting RPGs since 1978. But I just can’t see myself jumping on the 4E band wagon. Not to mention I have far too much money invested in 3.5 books. I’m too old to be buying the game again just to put Hasbro in the black.
I am glad that the new logos mean that people might well keep publishing 3.5 material. I look forward to new and wondrous things…
I love this site BTW. Great option rules… your Turning idea is great…
Friday, November 30, 2007, 9:12:02 AM
I think the reason behind the “too many options” reaction is that a lot of people have trouble ignoring options they are presented with, even if they don’t actually want or need them. The mere fact that these other options *exist* distracts the players.
Mark Rosewater (head designer for Magic: The Gathering, ICYDK), has a story he likes to tell about this. One time he was playing a deck against a fellow WOTC employee that involved four Grizzly Bears (a staple M:TG creature with no special features). He won the first round 4-0. Then in between rounds, he was informed that the Grizzly Bears were supposed to be proxies for Kavu Titans (a creature with the same base cost and stats as a Grizzly Bear, but with a “kicker” ability that let it become more powerful if cast with more mana), and the second round he went 2-2. Because he knew that the kicker ability was an option, he held his Titans back too long and lost those two matches.
I hope I can make you see Jeff’s point, Mr. Alexander, by telling you about my experience with adapting an existing Pathfinder adventure for more players who also were more optimized than the average party.
I had several giants, as part of an encounter, who were suppoesd to look scary and put the characters in a spot, but they were unadequately statted to do so. Some had spellcaster levels on top of their racial HD which meant they had a very low caster level and very low spell levels despite spellcasters levels counting less towards the CR of a brutish monster.
I had to bring all values up: HP, to hit, AC, saves. I started adding class levels and templates, trying to reach my target numbers.
And everyone around me kept telling me “don’t spend all this time finetuning, just decide which AC and to hit bonus they should have”. This is precisely what 4e does. It’s a level 14 monster, these are the numbers. It’s a brutish monster, so add a +2 there and a -2 there.
Now, the downside I see is that all monsters of the same level and role had pretty predictable devensive and offe4nsive ranges, which I didn’t like. But once I doubled their damage output I never had to balance a fight with more than that once, cutting preparation times enormously. A huge QoL improvement.