Discussion: Extra Skill Point / Level for everyone

[Irongron]

I honestly think that OP’s suggestion is not a good one, for the reasons outlined by some posters in this thread.

Anyway, here is my suggestion for skill adjustments: do not adjust the skills, but the module, so that some less useful non-combat skills have more uses: significantly increase the instances where you can use persuade/bluff to get a secret piece of information or an access to otherwise inaccessible places, increase the utility of appraise, etc.

Consider expanding the info we get on examining of other PCs, as it used to be years ago. For example, I remember many instances players used the Examine to properly react to PCs with high intimidativeness or persuasiveness.

-V-

I'm definitely a fan of world-side adjustments to compensate for these kind of imbalances, though not everyone is of course.

[Vrass]

Um some casters do take the Expertise line... my main for one has both and its saved me multiple times.

[Seven Sons of Sin]

I think the 3.0/3.5 skill systems are super outdated and would be curious if there's any way of modernizing it. The biggest example, is it possible to combine Listen and Spot into "Perception"? And Move Silently and Hide into "Stealth"?

The implications, I'm sure, would be wide-ranging.

I'd also look to combining more feats related to skills. We started this with some of the Epic Skill Focuses, etc., but we could take it further.

I don't think the solution to combat the ever-increasing utility of skills is to add more skills, rather, we should be turning to the system's innate redundancies and relics of the 90s for clean, 2019 solutions.

[Durvayas]

Traps bother me a great deal, in part due to the fact that hostile creatures on Arelith rarely pursue the players. One has to lure in order to use them, and that is generally a huge waste of time when considering the rewards. I'm honestly not sure how to make more of them.

Traps are utterly worthless for anything besides PvP because they're a catch 22.

If you kill the mob with the trap, you gain no exp for the kill.
If you use lower tier traps to avoid a kill, they'll almost always make the save, due to absurd creature saves, rendering the trap fairly useless.

You need to be heavily invested into traps in your build for it to be worth it at all, either to salvage epic traps to recycle them for use(requires high search, high disarm trap, high set trap)... or in crafting them (requires high craft trap, high set trap).

Thats a lot of skill point investment for something with little to no payoff aside from luring a chasing player onto a stack of traps during PvP.

You're virtually always better off just kiting your target or using a summon to distract it instead.

[Kalopsia]

There's actually quite a few conversations where this can come in useful, but it has been suggested it could play a part in NPC targetting - so that with a high intimidate foes will choose to attack other valid targets before turning on the most intimidating.

Intimidate could lower the attack range of NPCs, so that a very intimidating character can walk past entire spawns in a distance of ~15ft.

The effective attack range could also change with NPC level difference to PC level, or spawn size (”strength in numbers”) and maybe NPC race.

Imagine foes trembling in fear, unsure whether to risk attacking a scary intruder.

[Sockss]

RE: AE

Using the track function would be neat, it's useless in its current form.

However Ranger / Druid could do with some large nerfs before that happened, they're both extremely good. (Ranger's probably the poster child of why not to give things free skill points, they out damage wm's vs their FE's and have more utility and survivability while doing it)

RE: Appraise

It's a pretty poor choice and really only picked up by wizards with excess skill points.

A little more complicated, but avoids the stolen confusion; Item purchases from NPC's could be given a hak property which updates its value when someone opens a merchant window, the property decreases the value of the item down proportional to the appraise sale bonus, so you can never sell a merchant item for more than you bought it.

RE Disable Trap:

Traps are very good in PvP, and the issues with trap stacking (Making them ridiculous) I believe have been dealt with (In that if you trigger a trap a PC is immune to further traps for a second or so).

The suggestions wasn't so much a greater variety of traps, which would be nice, but more traps if you recover one.

E.G. every 10 base ranks, when you recover a trap, you get another trap. So a guy with 10 disable trap, removing a sonic trap would yield 2x sonic traps.

RE: Open Lock

There are several ways around exploits.

I believe when you lock something as a PC, the DC is 1. You could award Adventure XP based on the lock DC. If it's less than 10, you get nothing. If it's more than 10 you get adventure XP that scales with the DC of the door and your base open lock level.

This bonus could be limited to once a day, or just once (like portals).

RE: Persuade

Gold is really, really important at all levels.

It only becomes not as important if you're fully 5% geared, but even then you need it to purchase consumables.

Heads offer really small gold incentive and aren't really worth lugging about for most people as is, unless you're a STR build. Getting less than a thousand gp for an epic boss is very underwhelming.

RE: Ride

Riders being thrown is exactly the reason you don't see people utilising horses. Being thrown, even at a 1% chance, is such a crippling thing - it'll get you killed if it happens.

RE: Intimidate

I don't like this idea, purely because it would be a detriment to have. You actually have less control over your PC and party. You'd be reliant on someone guarding you if you didn't want all the NPC attention.

However the opposite of that could work well, in that NPC's prioritise targets with the least intimidate (After all, if someone was intimidating to me, I wouldn't want to attack them).

So if you take intimidate you wouldn't be targeted. (Or at least less likely)

This way you could take enough intimidate on a non-tanky character, and not require a guard - and if you took it on someone who can tank, you can always -guard someone to pick up aggro. It gives you much more control and is a bonus in many more situations.

[Seven Sons of Sin]

In general, I think all skill changes should be made with the principle of utility for non-combat purposes.

Skills should be utilized as a way to interact with the server environment, and in social interactions with PCs.

I think a way of combating, overall, the supremacy of mechanical strength is to make such prowess difficult to employ. I know there was a lot of flak with the Climbing Rope controversy, but I thought that was an excellent example of how your build can influence how you interact with the server.

The use of Bluff, for example, to access certain areas is a great example. I think a similar mantra should be adopted for stuff like Intimidate, Persuade, Animal Empathy, and Lore.

And to be tangential, I think this could be a good way of making levelling up in Arelith more fun again. Skills are sometimes reduced to this predetermined quantum of necessity. If you could even tempt someone away from their prebuilt character to drop 5 ranks in something off-kilter, that'd be great.

[Might-N-Magic]

I disagree for a few good reasons.

1. Balance-wise, it's terrible. "Utility, Skill-monkey" is quite literally an idiom and role in the game right along with Tank, Healer, Buffer, etc and some classes (most notably Rogue) are intrinsically balanced for this. Adding more skill points to all the other (or even some) of the other classes weakens not only an already weak (arguably weakest) of the roles, but makes it pointless.

2. There's more than enough skill points for the things that are deemed usually "necessary" to play the game, even for a plain ole straight Fighter. Add 14 Int and you've got enough for all you "need" to be complete, anything else beyond that is a luxury. Your average Fighter doesn't need max Bluff or the ability to take off his armor and sneak around if he feels like it, those "luxuries" are the purview of the actual Skill-monkey set or the random "interesting" Fighter who decided to sacrifice a little in the Str department, just so he could have 16 or 18 Int to be "different." Keyword: sacrifice.

3. Suggestions like this risk turning the game into something akin to Ultima Online where one guy can "do everything" and doesn't need others for party roles. Now your whatever is a Tank, Buffer AND Skill-monkey with Striker damage if you choose wisely! Battleclerics and Spellswords are bad enough since they're one-stop shops grabbing up multiple roles, now they can be masters of disguise or scouts without giving up anything for it.

4. By contrast, does this mean a Rogue should be able to impinge on the Buffer role by repeatedly reading scrolls til he gets a full-blown Wizard spellbook? Become a Tank by repeatedly letting himself get beat on for tens of thousands of damage til he sprouts a d12 base hit die and damage resistance?

5. Frankly, a little selfish, admittedly, but I don't want to rebuild all my characters to get an extra skillpoint (LOL). Especially since I (wisely) added a couple of points to Int to cover what I wanted in the first place. Are we going to refund those (now) wasted stat points too? Free rebuilds!

6. Skill-monkeys are already pretty trash-tier classes. Almost all situational or circumstantial in usefulness who are never seen as valuable for groups since skill points don't impress monsters and the words "skill-based dungeon" doesn't exist on Arelith in any meaningful way.

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

@Irongron I see where you are coming from and think stat related skills would be cool. It also sounds like a lot of work (not only making them but then the balancing that would have to come after since you are completely revamping how the core of the game works), especially since most of what I think you are trying to solve can be fixed by something as simple as making tumble ac go down based on the weight of the armor you are wearing (you could probably tie this into the max dex bonus an armor gives or the skill point penalties) and with spell craft maxing the save bonus out to 1/2 caster class levels.

As for gifts that add skill points, if its just a blanket gift that's going to be too good as a lesser reward. That being said, class specific gifts (similar to how drow and a few other monsters have race specific gifts) might actually be good at shaking things up while being controlled for balance, you would just have to make sure its only active if you reach a certain criteria in levels in said class to stop people from say taking a rogue gift, going three rogue, then 27 something else. But yeah, with something like that you can do all sorts of things to make variety more viable without too much of a risk of unintended consequences if its well thought out for balance.

An example of how I see it working: You still pick two major gifts, but can swap the minor gifts for two class gifts. Options for Fighter would be something like;
+5 disc, fighter levels must be more then half your level (meaning you would have to have 16 at 30, ect)
+1 skill point per level, fighter levels must be 5/6ths of your total level or higher.
+2 dodge ac once you reach epic levels, fighter levels must be 5/6ths of your total level or higher (this example would only work if tumble ac in a full plate was lowered. Who tumbles around in a full plate anyways?)
……

.....and a few more, giving six to 8 options for each class. Based on how these forums go it sounds like you would have all sorts of help with ideas to fill out the options if you asked From there you can pick and choose and tweak as you will.

[Baseili]

Giving everyone free skill points would be nice in theory and make fun things like traders who actually have ranks in appraise become a thing but sadly it would just make every character slightly stronger due to the mechanical pointlessness of anything thats not a combat effective boost.

Instead I'd suggest a system of aspiration and profession, doing away with the social skills all together.
The selections would offer bonuses to various character traits without increasing stats, skills or other mechanical power.

Aspirition would be what you are aiming to be, things like martial expert, trade magnate, master criminal or political figure. Aspirations would be selected every 2 - 5 ingame years as it represents your characters drive in life and not something changed on a whim.

Profession is linked to what your character does in its day to day life be it guard, farmer, thief, explorer etc. This can be changed whenever but would require 1 year of no profession in order to switch, this is to demonstrate learning a new role and to prevent abuse.

These choices would not be visible to other players but would apply bonuses with various NPCs, for example a master criminal aspirant would start with being able to detect the DC on locked doors and gain access to certain items from a vendor and after several years would be able to rent special hideouts and bribe NPC guards.

Granted this all a moments inspiration with fudged bonuses, but you get the idea.

[DangerDolphin]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I have withdrawn my suggestion now by deleting the original post in the suggestions forum as it's clear this needs a lot more thought. The content I moved into the original post in this thread.

I do think the action of simultaneously improving how the module reacts to weaker skills such as persuade / bluff, and slightly nerfing "must have" skills would be a good start. The flat "other" classed AC bonus from each 5 ranks from tumble, even when wearing full plate is particularly questionable and very powerful.

I also really like the idea of splitting out combat and non-combat skills in order to ring-fence some point allocation for the non-combat ones.

[CptJonas]

Actualy...about tumble...and whole Dex bonus...
Its actualy oposite...its only for balance purpose...in reality full plate dont hinder your movement as drasticly as in games...

For referece....https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bnM5SuQkI

[Kalopsia]

I don’t think it’d be a good idea to make tumble AC exclusive to DEX builds, as they are already known for their high AC. Remove tumble AC from STR builds and you’d need to buff plate armor AC by the difference to keep things balanced.
However, in that case STR chars would suddenly gain 30 skill points for free, resulting in the unbalance Sockss described earlier.

[Reallylongunneededplayername]

I don't get all of it, But, Let's just make all skills class skills, Hm?

[monkeywithstick]

Something d20 modern did that I really liked was a background system where the backgrounds "unlocked" a specific skill or two as a class skill irrespective of the class you too at level up.
So a background as a police officer might grant spot and search, or a criminal might get hide/Ms.

It seems a little less extreme than unlocking certain skills for everyone or more skill points. And the actual list arelith used could if needed be picked to try and avoid the "power skills" if necessary. It might also open up some alternative options for those builds that do a 3 level dip for access to one skill.

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

I don’t think it’d be a good idea to make tumble AC exclusive to DEX builds, as they are already known for their high AC. Remove tumble AC from STR builds and you’d need to buff plate armor AC by the difference to keep things balanced.
However, in that case STR chars would suddenly gain 30 skill points for free, resulting in the unbalance Sockss described earlier.

I get your point. Here's the thing though. Not counting monks which are a completely different animal with all their buffs, you are gimping yourself by going a dex build if you are on a top tier ab progression. A strength based fighter/wm/rogue can peak their ac around 60, have solid saves, and do insane dpr. A dex based version can have a few more ac and have their damage cut by a third (before crits, the percentage goes up to about half I think if you count in crits). Given the numbers of the server, the trade off of giving some damage back for ac that is negligible is a fools path. So by limiting tumble ac to those builds, you are actually making dex fighter builds viable, because now its a trade of +9 ac (around) for a third of your damage (before crits). Removing tumble ac from heavy armor (and lessening it for medium armor) would encourage a wider variety of builds, which imo is always a good thing.

[Kalopsia]

I don’t think it’d be a good idea to make tumble AC exclusive to DEX builds, as they are already known for their high AC. Remove tumble AC from STR builds and you’d need to buff plate armor AC by the difference to keep things balanced.
However, in that case STR chars would suddenly gain 30 skill points for free, resulting in the unbalance Sockss described earlier.

I get your point. Here's the thing though. Not counting monks which are a completely different animal with all their buffs, you are gimping yourself by going a dex build if you are on a top tier ab progression. A strength based fighter/wm/rogue can peak their ac around 60, have solid saves, and do insane dpr. A dex based version can have a few more ac and have their damage cut by a third (before crits, the percentage goes up to about half I think if you count in crits). Given the numbers of the server, the trade off of giving some damage back for ac that is negligible is a fools path. So by limiting tumble ac to those builds, you are actually making dex fighter builds viable, because now its a trade of +9 ac (around) for a third of your damage (before crits). Removing tumble ac from heavy armor (and lessening it for medium armor) would encourage a wider variety of builds, which imo is always a good thing.

By removing 6AC from STR builds, you’d force them into a pure DPS role. An AC of ~56 is not enough for most high level PvE content, and that is what a usual STR-based 20/7/3 would most likely have. (The other option is a “Draconic Armor”-meta.)

Essentially, PvE would be very difficult without a DEX-based tank, while DEX builds would have a substantial AC advantage in most PvP encounters. I imagine this difference would be similar to a current 2h WM dueling a 1h+shield one, as 2h has higher damage, but 1h effectively has 4 more AC (Adamantine Tower AC minus the attacker’s two-handed bonus AB).

Personally, I’d rather see a fraction of DEX being added to melee damage (maybe half the DEX modifier?) than the AC of STR builds being lowered by such a substantial amount.