subplotkudzu | More 4E stuff

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More 4E stuff

I commented previously on how the ad hoc difficulty table advises the GM to ramp up the Target Number of checks based on the PCs level (and, by one possible by unlikely reading, whether the PC has the skill or not). The objective appears to be that Easy actions have a success chance of roughly 65%, moderate one 45% and hard ones 10%. The scaling is required because everyone adds one half their level to the rolls, so to keep the preferred targets you have to ramp up the difficulty.

The Skills chapter in the PHB runs a little counter to this, giving some more stable numbers (though it takes pains to point out that these age guidlines and the GM has specific rules). The default Target Numbers for Swim and Climb (just to grab the first ones I see) tie to the suggested difficulties for 1st level PCs in the DMG.

These stable numbers also correspond to the 3rd edition PHB. In 3rd edition, this made it possible for characters to hit a certain reliable level in a skill and then stop raising it - get you Climb or Swim to a +7 at 4th level and you could just "take 10" (an unhindered average skill check) and reliably climb cave walls or swim in rough water. This freed the character up to spend skill points elsewhere if they weren't trying to get really good at something. Meanwhile, some characters would never take any points in those skills and would rely on their attribute defaults and assistance from their more skilled allies.

In 4th edition there aren't skill points in that sense. Everyone just gets better at everything all the time. a 10th level Warlock has a +5 on his Climb and Swim rolls even if he never tries to climb and doesn't practice swimming. Mind you, this only matters if he tries to do something predictable where the PHB numbers would apply - any ad hoc action would have a +5 on the difficulty to balance it against his level.

This just strikes me as madness. Can someone playing 4E explain why this makes sense?

Is it to prevent the problems of bad adventure design, where modules had areas where everyone in the plarty had to make a DC 25 climb test? If so, I would think the very celver 4E Skill Challenge rules dealt with that.

Is it just number inflaction to make the players feel like their characters are better than they are?

The argument can be made that the new skill system silos off the skills that will be useful in a dungeneering/adventure context (the existing skill list) and those that aren't (everything that got cut) to prevent the PCs of casual players from being outlcassed by those who have maximized the rules - anything that isn't directly applicable to the numerics of adventuring is handwaved. I find this unsettling. I happen to like the little character filigrees - Hiram spending weeks wandering Emirikol to get a point or two in Knowledge: Emirikol; Cybele spending a point or two in Craft: Calligraphy, and so on. Yes, we could hand-wave them, but we could hand wave a lot of things. I like the Pcs having the option to flesh out and have the system reflect that, rather than a flat +5 bonus if they have the skill. That hearkens back to 2E Non-Weapon proficiences, which is not a step forward. I don't need the mechanics to protect my players from inefficient decisisions - first, I can do that myself; second, if everyone makes them no one is going to "get ahead".

Maybe that's just me.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Meh, I just can't get that exercised about it. It's simpler, and I'm kind of glad the skill points are gone, as it was a constant bone of contention for those poor f*ckers with 2+INT per level. If the skills are thought of as a customisable part of the character class then I've no problem with them climbing up as the character rises in level.

D&D 4e is clearly a Gamist game first and foremost. The skills are there to be used in adventures, usually down a dungeon. Not everyone's cup of tea, to be sure.

I never really had any problems with the 2+int skill point PCs - it's just a function of their class, alongside good fighting ability. At that level pick 2 skills to be good at and spend 2-6 of your first level points fleshing the character out.

I knopw it's supposed to be gamist, but as I read it I keep seeing doors close on what I could do with it rather than doors open. That's not what I want to see. I appreciate the Skill Challenge mechanics, and the decision to make a challenge rating of encounters based on the idea of basically 4-5 opponents rather than 1 that you can split up because it is clearly more versatile. They're clever and signficiant enough to warrant a new edition, but why not lay those over what I generally see as a working engine in 3E?

I should cruise the web and see if anyone has started reverse engineering those rules into 3E....

Okay, put that way I can see your problem with the skills list and bonuses in 4e. It's definitely less flexible than the points system, but some (like me) see that as an improvement.

I suppose I never would have gone to 3e as a game with a solid or flexible skills system in the first place, so I'm not thinking of 4e in those terms. My yard stick is still the BRP line of games, starting with Runequest.

And I'm still pissed off at 3e for my cleric having to scrape around for skill points, though if I'm being honest it really didn't matter much in play as skill rolls were relatively infrequent for everyone except the Rogue and we had next to no urban encounters where the Diplo-Cleric concept might have had legs. Perhaps I'm just bitter.

Hey, I like BRP, but it can get TOO flexible. Each skill gets subdivided and subdiveded (at last it does in each COC edition), so that we eventually had to prune them all back for our games. And the nature of the system rewards skills that get used a lot, so eventually everyone had carppy social skills (because we fogrget to roll) but 90% guns, library use and spot. It's not as bad as GURPS however, because it doesn't pretend that all characters of the same point cost are equal and force some sort of equivalence between skills.

I've found the 3E skill system to be perefctly suited to what I needed it for - more flexible than 2E's Non-Weapon profiencies, not hard to administer (it's easy for me to skill out a 6th level fighter for an opponent), easily allows for character growth (the mirikol PCs are slowly taking points in Wilderness Survival and Ride as they keep having to campaign outside the city) and perfectly servicable for marking the differecness between amature (+1 to +4) competent (+5 to +10) and trained professional (+11 and up) with the take 10 rules.

As for your diplo-cleric, well, that's something to take up with your GM. A diplo-cleric would have fit in just fine in Emirikol, and had I been running your game I would have found more places to put in some diplomacy for your PC to shine. I do note that the same thing would have happened in BRP if you were never presented diplomatic challenges, so it's likely not the system.

I didn't see a need for removing skill points, but it does simplifying things a lot.

More particularly, it allows for the "sensible defaults" rule, which more or less -is- a really nice feature of 4E.

In some ways, its easier to explain why the 3E system is bad than why the 4E system is good. In any RPG, there are certain kinds of things you want people to be able (try to) do. For example, they should be able to lie without being immediately found out, hide and listen to people's conversations, see what's going on around them, search an area and find something interesting there, at least try to balance on a rickety wooden bridge, and make friends and influence people. It's cool that in D&D, there are certain types of people who are -better- at this kind of Nancy Drew stuff than others, but really, everyone should be able to play.

In 3E, due to the large, large difference in skills between characters (I mean, really large; at highish levels, 40 points or higher! I mean, hell, my 3.5 16th level Arcane Trickster (ok, 5th level wiz, 3rd level rogue, 2nd level Unseen Seer, 6th level Arcane Trickster. Same difference), Coravin, has a search bonus of 28, and can have a bonus of 43 once (or more) per day!

So to challenge characters of these levels, you need things with appropriate target numbers. Or worse, you need (since you'll note most of the "Nancy Drew" stuff above is opposed) opposition with appropriate skills at the right level. Which means that after not too long, only the specialists can play -- the rogue (or better, beguiler) does all your searching, the bard does -all- the talking, with anything anyone else says being just an "assist" on his roll, and the entire party will never sneak anywhere without magic or tricks like the "teamwork" benefits in later 3.5 books. At first level, everyone could -try- to do nearly everything, and maybe succeed, but at 10th level, "maybe" has turned into "never" except for tasks that a specialist wouldn't even need to roll on.

So what 4e tries to do instead is start with the idea that everyone's gong to be able to do everything -- by 21st level, they get a minimum of a +11 (+2 bump to all stats, remember) on what they were doing at first level. So the specialists can arguably do incredibly impressive things--and level 21 traps and challenges -should- be more impressive than level 1 traps, even if the relative difficulty is similar--but if an ally needs to step in, they've got -some- chance of success, even if its slim.

Another matter is that page 42 is used to set difficulty for ad-hoc actions. The thing is, if you're doing something that doesn't matter, it doesn't need to be "at level" in terms of difficulty, but if you want to, say, grab a rope and swing into the big torch, spilling burning oil all over the bad guy, the difficulty needs to be at least somewhat similar to that of just hitting him -- which means it needs to scale by level. If it matters, it should be an appropriate challenge.

Of course, some skills should be completely unusable for some things unless you actually know how to use it, but that's why there's "trained only" (ok, only Detect Magic is trained-only. At the moment).

I do think they've got the beginnings of a "little bits of stuff" subsystem in the "backgrounds" system they shopped around on the wizards site.

Your argument runs completely contrary to the way that my groups have been playing with 3E since we started with it in 2002.

Our response to character skill levels getting high in their specialties has been to increase PC skill breadth rather than depth. Got a skill + stat up to +13 or so? Stop spending points in it, because even a bad roll is now over basic difficulty and a take 10 will give you a respectable result. Shift over and spend those limited skill points in something else! This is one of the reasons why you have more skills you'd like than points to spend early on - you can either diversify early and have a slower cirve all round or specialize and not be early as good outside the range.

The initial splay books for 3E reinforced this message, giving players advice on which skills are good to take early and then shift aay from once you've hit certain difficulty thresholds. That the 3.5 player base and later splat books countered with increasing everyone's skill points so everyone could specialize everywhere or set up thge DCs of actions to being beyond the specalist's max isn't a fault of the 3E engine - it's a fault of the "this time will never be different" syndrome.

Plus, I'd argue that with a +28 in a skill the character should be unchallengable in their field. It doesn't mean every search DC for every encounter should be a 40 just to give you a difficulty. I'd argue that maybe one search roll in 20 should be anywhere near that high. You've burned an incredible amount of character resources into something that you want to be good at - well past the level of "I'm reliably good at this" and into "I never want to fail at this". So setting up special circumstances where to force your PC into a chance of failure goes into a place I don't want to go as a GM. Ashacat was jazzed when she learned that she could boost her rogue Boris' move silet to the point where she could reliably be silent at a full run (I think the DC mod for that is +20) and therefore wanted to get her move silent up that high,; that wasn't a request on her part that I give every monster a +20 listen to bring her back to a failure chance, it was wanting her PC to be nigh unchallengable in his specialization.

I find your agument about how only the best person (the bard doing all the talking) with everyone else just assisting a little off kilter as that is essentially the basis for some 4E skill challenges (their specifical example is climbing a cliff - everyone else's turn adds a +2 or not). So that's not really a fair comparison because the problem is still there. Except it's not in 3E unless you start ramping the difficulty to levels where no one except the specialist can compete in every setting. And the specialists will have a 11 point bump in their fields (a combination of skill and superior attributes) over their non skilled allies. So why make that +11/+22 instead of, say, +1/+12, with room for the occasional DC of 28 to really challenge the specialist?

I don't have the rules in front of me here, but I think your read of the page 42 chart is what you want to say, not what it says: the example makes mention to the acrobatics roll being for the chandalier swing and kick, to be followed by an attack roll to actually force the monster back. Therefore there's already a roll scaling by level - the attack roll. Your example of the burning oil would also require a scaled attack roll for the burning oil to hit the target.

The example is pretty clear that the chandalier swing is something you want the players to do, so it should be Easy. It doesn't say "so it should be easy for a 7th level character" or "the sort of thing you want a 7th level PC to try". It's an encouraged, fun flair, so it's easy regardless of whether it's a 1st level PC or an 11th. But it's mathmatically not significantly easier for the 11th level PC to do it than the 1st (they get a bit of an edge on stat bonuses). There's no indication of what should be "at level" or not, what should be "appropraite" or not. Just "is the action Easy/Moderate/Hard/Skilled", scaled for the PC level" Whether they knock the ogre into the firepit is handled by a separate roll that has nothing to do with the character's skill.

Hmm. Not going to do a point-by-point, but:

In "stock" 3.5, with no tricks, at 16th level, you're going to see Search difficulties of 34 (by the rules, that's the difficutly of finding a magical trap based on a 9th level spell -- castable, by, say, an enemy just one level above the party's). If one finds (as Stephen has found) that if you give enough treasure out and have a largish group, that the mob will totally destroy any at-level foe and that your enemies have to be Epic at this level to be interesting, well, that +28 starts being unsafe enough to want to be able to boost it to 43 occasionally.

That's actually a big factor; you didn't respond directly, but most of the "Nancy Drew" skills are opposed skill (or should be, but mostly...they are). If you face a level 13 sneaky rogue, you can expect he'll have hide and move silently (er, Stealth) numbers of 16, plus another, oh, 7 for dex at least -- mabye a magic item, so 28 unless he's pretty underpowered or the GM is "playing nice". (really, he could get over 40 without much effort. Reduce person (+4 for size, +2 for dex), a feat or two (another +3), and elixers of Hiding and Sneaking. (+10)).

The PC with a +28 (or +40) skill mod probably doesn't want to fail much -- but they do want challenges suiting their skill. Said challenges will be impossible for anyone -without- their ridiculous modifier -- just as damage that inconveniences the fighter will probably kill a wizard who hasn't spent a lot of effort buffing hit points. (and to hit the business levels here, if they want to design stock modules, well, the module either has traps with a DC of 40, or of 25, or of 10, and they don't get to look at the party composition when designing it). This doesn't mean they don't get "just take 1, you succeed anyway" not-really-a-challenges as well, just as a fighter or wizard will occasionally get to knock down huge numbers of very lower level monsters who all fall over to a single Great Cleave sequence or Fireball.

This actually points out a signficiant difference between 3.x and 4 that is also reflected in the skill system. In 3.x, PCs sometimes get unchallenging opposition to underscore their badassosity. Sneaky people get castles where the guards might as well have their eyes sewn shut, encounters are sometimes filled with low-level opponents can not only not stand up to serious damage, but also can't hit the PCs (or at least, not the fighters, and probably not the rogues. Wizards still typically fear mobs of NPCs unless they have their shield+mage armor up, but they also blow them away in exceedingly large numbers).

In 4, you've still got monsters that get blown away easily, but as you know, they also represent a significant threat to the PCs. Unlike a 3.5 group, who can figure the 12 level 1 archers are ignorable (particularly if the wizard is invisible or has protection from arrows up) until they've dealt with the big bad, 4 follows the adventuring convention of the PCs wanting to -first- deal with the 12 mooks before even touching their leader -- because until they're dealt with, the mooks are a far larger threat. But you never have enemies presented as a threat who are actually just a distraction (or if you do, it's not part of the "monster budget" of an encounter). Similarly, skill rolls are never trivial; they may very well be easy (like minions), but you want to pay attention to them -- which is just fine. (heh. We did a bit of 4e on Sunday, and ran into a bunch of kobolds while travelling. I was the only one (playing a Dragonborn Warlord) to beat the Koblods' initiative -- so I ran up to the group of clustered koblolds and breathed on them -- poof! one minion went down (bad rolls), and I took down another with a charge, cutting the enemy attack power by about a third before they even got a go. Made me target #1 for most of the fight, but since I got some temporary HP from killing the minion (magic lifedrinking sword) and had the second highest AC of the group, it was probably just as well.)

(to be continued...)

I'm not sure how much of this is cross purposes because you're discussing 3.5 and I'm discussing 3.0, and the 3.0 DMG doesn't have anything like those search DCs - the samples cap out with a DC 28 search trap.

The rules weren't constructed to handle a "largish group", being designed for a party of 3-5 players. Moving outside that (and its relevant treasure guidelines) will have the same effect as giving out monty-haul treasure amounts. I expect that 4E will suffer from identical problems when players inevitably hit 28th level with a group of 8 PCs.

i.e. the Nancy Drew skills: if I advise my players to cap out skills when they get to really high levels why on earth would I then design NPCs on a different formula? The default 13th level Rogue (from the oh-so-handy 3E DMG NPC charts) has a hide and move silent of +21 after magical and attribute bonuses. That's high, but it's not out of reach for him to be spotted by PCs with a good roll (Melas and Cyble in Emirkol both have +11 Spot at 8th level), but such an NPC should be just as sneaky as the PCs would want to be if it were them with a +21 on their roll - to be able to take 10 and run at full speed past unsuspecting normal people. Even that is very high from what I've actually run - the 13th level fighter thief in my Fantasyt Revolution arc had a +13 hide and sneak, but the monk (who was the the team ninja in the supers universe) had a +30 - but that's because he expected to be able to sneak past everyone because he was a super-ninja. If I could plot for that in my supers game, why wouldn't I be able to challenge him in other ways in D&D?

I think we're coming att this from totally different angles when it comes to "challenges that suit their skill" - you're talking about maxamizing the skill and then asking for challenges that will force them to roll over a 10. I'm talking about telling the players up front that Target numbers hover at 20 and cap out at 30, and letting them allocate their points accordingly. I prefer my method - in part because it fleshes the PCs out more and in part because it prevents challenge inflation where things get more difficult, forcing the players to take multiple feats, stearch out buffing items and then cast additional sidewise buffing spells like Reduce Person to get their already very high skill over a DC that I will have to ratchet up next time to accomidate for the spells the players will make part of their standard munchkin routine.

Hmm. How do they handle searching for/disabling magic traps in 3.0? Do they have trapfinding there?

Re "philosophy" -- yeah, there are some interesting differences. I don't see a lot of munchkinism in maxing out at least a few skills (obviously, ones where you're going to be going against at-level difficulty and where there's a big penalty for failing) -- after all, that's the point of a level-based system, right? By having skill capped by level, you set a baseline of where someone "good" at a skill is expected to be at a given level. So players doing relatively trivial optimizing is just an expected part of the system contract.

By contrast, it looks to me as if you cap the difficulty faced on the skill front at a certain level for many skills, but try to make up for it by encouraging broad skill capabilities. Which does work, functionally, within the social contract, but also relies on the social contract (kinda. If you challenge players on a broad base of skills, with targets that they have a hope of making at low levels, it pushes players into making their characters broader rather than deeper, but either side can bend it -- a player can decide they want their character to auto-succeed a key skill and bump it up, or a GM could make an exception for a particular NPC and massively overpower the PCs in one area) to enforce the norms, rather than the challenge level/level system enforcing the norms. (also: stock monsters of types that get a lot of skill points--outsiders, dragons, even some intelligent undead -- tend to have max skill ranks in appropriate skills in 3.5 Is this not true in 3.0?).

FWIW, I -don't- think you should be consistently failing when you're playing a character that's good at something. What's the point of that? But even rolls that give a maxed out character a -chance- at failing in 3rd ed (ie, fail on a 2) will be auto-fails for characters with a very small investment (not "no"). And challenges that give them a -chance- of failing (or would give them a chance) are what make it worthwhile to play such a character in the first place.

It seems to me that you're actually taking a very similar approach to 4th ed, except for the skill inflation with level gains (which really just match stat/monster inflation with level gain -- after all, what's the difference with fighting 5th-11th level monsters at 8th level? Why not just keep the power level the same and fight more orcs?) and that you're doing it by norming at a certain set of target numbers rather than by artificially limiting the skill gulf.

re Trap Finding: I apologize - the PHB does go up to a 34 DC for a Search roll on a magical trap by a 9th level spell; the examples in the DMG just don't correspond to that or go up that high. A quick look at the other skills doesn't show much else that hits that "higher than 30" threshold - escaping masterwork manacles, making Hostile or Unfriendly NPCs Friendly or Helpful in a single roll, opening an Amazing lock (for which you are likely intended to take 20)...oh, hearing an owl glide in for the kill through a stone wall is DC 45! But there aren't many so I missed it.

I see the point of a level based system a ready way to formulate the character's ability in their classes key aspects (which for anyone not a Bard or Rogue are non-skill), and secondarily to that their rough breadth and depth in skills. The cap is there to show how good the very best PCs are of that level, and to prevent a first level rogue from taking 16 ranks in Move Silent and Hide. By giving rogues roughly 10 points a level to select between 30 class skills I also expect that they will not be aiming for maximal rank in every skill because it's impossible. Even if they're only interested in half of the class skill list it's impossible. So your assumption that maxed out indicates where the character would be considered 'good at level' runs counter to my interpretation of 'best at level'.

To be clear, it's not MY capping of the difficulties, it's the systems. The DCs I'm mentioning are being pulled from the 3E PHB. I have to assume that they were intentional. Likewise the DMG sample characters at level has skill-based 20th level PCs maxing out at +30 or so key skills after buffing, feats and stats - high enough to roll a 1 and still not fail DC 30 check, but still occasionally be challenged by the rare DC 30-40 difficulty. (3E does have some monsters max out, but my quick perusal doesn't turn up as many in Nancy Drew skills as you might expect.) This is the system as presented, not my social contract for it.

And challenges that give them a -chance- of failing (or would give them a chance) are what make it worthwhile to play such a character in the first place. I'm confused by this statement. If my PC has an insanely high skill in something it's because I want to be reliably really good at it, and occasionally face things that are nigh impossible. So when I face those challenges, I'm not likely to bring the rest of my party along, because they aren't insanely skilled. There's no difference between a Hide/Move Silent/Climb +20 rogue and a Feng Shui Ninja with intrusion of 18, or a super with Invisibility and wall crawling - no one else in the party can even compete, so these are my niche skills. I will be kickass most of the time and challenged occasionally. So why the complaint about D&D that I haven't seen you level against other systems?

As to the question of "why not just keep the power level the same and keep fighting orcs", I see this as a false question. I use tougher monsters because they have different places in myth, and require different tactics. But I don't expect 1st level characters to free scale brick walls over lava pits while dodging an evil archer (DC 30 twice a round to speed climb, plus DC 25+damage taken whenever you're hit) - sure it's a cool image, but it's something for the greatest 18th level hero to face, not a large group of 1st level ones. And if none of the PCs have a +20 climb skill to get past that situation, I expect them to resolve it a different way - but the cap of 30 on DCs hardly denies me breathing room on my skill tests.

I see the level->skill differently, particularly for classes with a lot of skill points to throw around. For them (which is to say, more than half of them, particularly since one is Wizards who get a good number of skill points from Int), getting to max ranks in a skill is easy, so that's "good at a skill at this level" (they can't get good at -every- skill, but yeah). -best- at a skill means you've also thrown in feats, but that only makes sense if you really want to be the best, since a feat is really expensive, particularly for a high-skill character (otoh, once you've spent the feat, you might as well keep the skill maxed; otherwise you've burned a feat to go from 1 to 4 in a secondary skill).

Re other systems; most other systems don't have a huge level gulf, which gets magnified into a huge power gulf for those who are acting like a first level character for some aspects. In a superhero game, nobody can compete with the invisible ninja in sneaking around, but they -can- sneak up on the bad guys. In 3E, by the actual monster books, bad guys do tend to have higher and higher spot and listen rolls -- so while at first level, the would-be ninja gets spotted over half the time (been there), at high levels the ninja is like the night, but nobody else can sneak at all. (Against monsters, who seem to not have much to do with their skill points other than getting spot bonuses of +19 or higher. Opposing characters might very well spend points on skills that suit their role, in which case the non-sneaky PCs playing Nancy Drew are probably ok).

Just looking at d20srd (a Very Useful 3.5 resource), at monsters of CR 10 and higher:

Aboleth mage: CR 17, Spot+17, Listen + 15 (oddly worse than Aboleth, CR 7, Spot + 16, Listen +16, but I guess ten levels of wizard don't help your senses)
Air Elemental, elder: CR 11, spot +29, Listen +29 (actually, that kinda makes sense)
Astral Deva: CR 14, Spot +23, Listen +23
Animated Object, Colossal: CR 10, No skills (yay!)
Trumpet Archon: CR 14, Listen +18, Spot +18 (actually, pretty much all Outsiders have good listen/spot numbers)
Abyssal Greater Basilisk: CR 12, Listen 10, Spot 10 (Magical Beasts tend to have lousy skills)

(part 2. Hmm. This got long. Sorry about that).

In general, I think the static target numbers for things like Diplomacy, Tumble, Defensive Casting, Aid Another, and the like are a design problem in 3e -- it means the PCs have very few ways to stop enemies from tumbling around, stealing stuff, and casting, which is no fun at all -- and if you add tricks to let the PCs prevent enemies from doing this stuff, the enemies get to use them too (which is fine if you scale things, not so much if you only move to a "step it up" system when someone moves in that direction, rather than having the baseline be the limits).

This doesn't, BTW, mean I think 4e gets everything right. I do think that Aid Another staying at 10 throughout all levels is effectively broken; it means that the mechanic becomes meaningless (an automatic bonus, up to the level the GM cuts it off) at high levels, and just trivially scales up for no good reason. I also think the skill challenge system, while a good idea, was broken in initial release and still isn't perfect now.

That said -- in the chandelier example, the PC is trying to do something cool, so it's an easy roll. At high levels, it's still an easy roll -- because if it matters at all, it's a roll (of course, at high levels, you've got access to flying steeds and even fly spells, so sometimes it won't matter even if that stuff is much more limited than in 3.5--IIRC, they recommend that the spaces that encounters happen in get larger with level).

Getting back to the topic...in 3rd ed, you've got 1-13 skill points per level. If you want to get a bit of a skill, you drop a few points into that skill as a dip, and if you're a skill based character, you probably have a couple of skills at max levels either to meet prerequisites or because they have difficulty that scales with level (combat casting, spellcraft, stealth & spot). In 4e, you effectively have every skill at a scaling level for most purposes, start with (for non-skill-based characters, anyway) more skills at a decent level, and you get a reasonable number of feats you can use to bump up skills once you've worked through your key feats either to "trained" levels or beyond that with skill focus or buying magic items that improve the skill. (or you could just buy the magic item if you're short on feats, though with 7 feats between first and 11th level (plus another one if you're human) you can probably spare one). So what's the problem? It seems like you have ways to spend 5, 3, or 2 skill points, and enough of a baseline that that's all you need to spend. The archetypes that have vanished are the "skill monkey" with a few points in every skill(except that with the Jack of All Trades feat, -bang-, it's back) and the guy with stratospheric skill modifiers who hits epic skill ranks (still there, really, if the GM is willing to throw below-level challenges in, just as the GM is free to throw a few below-level encounters in). But as per page 42, it seems as if -except- for Aid Another, they're doing things right -- if you're doing something unusual that helps you do something normal, it should require a level-appropriate roll to work. If you're doing something unusual -instead- of something normal (like attempting to lure the baddie into a trap, or improvise a disarm) it should involve a harder level-approprate roll. But you shouldn't get a bump on your already at-level abilities for free; you're already bad-ass; if you want to do something clever that makes your life easier, that should be "sure, roll; that's fun and clever, so it's easy", not "sure, that happens because you're 21st level and can automatically do nearly anything. Want to try to con me out of more free goodies for being so high level?" If it doesn't matter, there's no reason you shouldn't get it for free (and I haven't read the DMG in enough detail to see if they talk about that, but it's certainly a natural extension of the flavor associated with your powers growing substantially between first and 29th level), but then it shouldn't substantially help you; it's just cool.

I'm not sure where you're getting the assertions concerning the static numbers as a design problem, but I think it might just be different schools of thought in play. I just don't have players who are going to max anything out like that. I have one PC in emirikol with a "maxed out" skill - the Bard's perform. To me, it's just not an issue. They recently faced an equal level wizard with a very high concentration and combat casting, who after a few rounds they grappled and knifed to death.

I just can't get gamist enough for the idea that rolls should scale with level. If the difficulty for a chandilier kick is 20 for a first level rogue with 16 dex and 4 ranks in tumbling then it should be a 20 for a 12th level rogue with a 20 Dex and 15 ranks in tumbling - it's just that the 12th level rogue had a +20 on the skill precisely so that they can do this sort of thing all the time without having to worry about failing.

I don't have players maxing out skills to meet prerequisites because I have a limited number of prestige classes in game, most custom designed, and as a rule they don't have high skill barriers to entry - they cap out around 8 ranks, and all are designed for entry between 6th to 8th level. I don't have PCs maxing out even the skills that scale with level. But I do have characters who acknowledge that they are bad at riding because their background didn't include horses, whose skill with riding shouldn't scale up. Likewise with Knowledges, and all the skills that have been cut out. So an automatic scaling just doesn't work for me.

I appreciate the concept of the chart on page 42, but, as I said elsewhere, I see it as approaching the issue from the wrong direction. Want to tell me that I should put DC 22 skill challnges against 10th level heroes, and that would be approrpaite? Fine! I'll work out how the stone bridges are angled and wet to produce the right balance DC. Tell me that if a player asks to balance atop the cornice to improve his hide - just like he did 3 levels ago - that it is now objectively harder for him to do because he is more skilled and I'll call a foul on the play. It's a problem that ONLY exists because of the scaling, and it's one that other games avoid by giving a simple list of what sort of actions would have what sort of Target Numbers - and those go back as far as the WEG Star Wars, if not earlier.

Re scaling: Why not just have that be a voluntary automatic rule? I mean, characters that are bad at Athletics -stay- bad at athletics compared to the challenges they actually face (and actually, characters who are bad at something doing "badly" but successfully at a task that would normally be considered hard is a movie cliche), and if a player wants to auto-fail a riding roll (not that ride is its own thing in 4 rather than an aspect of athletics) they can. The point is tha they shouldn't get worse.

But re the believability of page 42 scaling -- who says that the "balance on a cornice" trick that the rogue used at 7th level isn't now part of his routine (not requiring a roll, but now being part of his standard bonus at 10th level), and that in order to improve his hide beyond the tricks he's already doing, he has do something that's -now- tricky.

Also, just a quick note re Initial Thoughts; I think the reason difficulty scales up by slightly more than stat+skill is because at higher levels, you also have access to feats, items, and utility powers that increase your skills -- so character power raises slightly over time compared to expected difficulty (even so, I calculate the difference in skill bonus without feats & items for an in-class, primary ability skill between first and 16th level to be 10, not, as you describe, +7. Between first and 16th level, you gain 4 points of dex (at levels 4,8,11, and 14) and get a +8 bonus over first level)

1) because now we're adding another layer of table rules to the book for no real purpose. The old system handled it just fine by letting the player choose which skills to increase, with most skills requiring a minimal investment to be basically competent.

2) because if I say that the balance on the cornice trick is now standard I should, in logic, ding the player whenever cornices an the like whenever cornices aren't around. If you want to say that the PC should only be able to get a bonus from a tricky move once in their careers to keep them tricky I could accept that, but it's another layer of table rules, and it plays into the mindset I mentioned before of "now I have to make the DC 45 because you figured out how to eke out another 5 points of buffing when I had the DC at 40." It's a layer of GM/Player competition where the villains/world automatically adapt to the players clever action, and I don't want to venture down that road.

3) That makes it even worse to my mind, because it starts to defeat the purpose of the automatic level based bonus to everyone else. Again, why give everyone a +.5 per level when you're going to ratchet up the difficulty by +.6 per level? Especially if you, Josh, are going to argue against the static number targets that would make that +.5 per level truly useful to the characters. I could accept the argument of "these are all adventurer's skills, and every PC is inherently an adventurer, so they go up in all of these skills as a matter of course. And by 10th level all of them can reliably perform at X level". But the table on page 42 flies in the face of that by scaling the difficulty to level. The the whole thing becomes an exercise in Large Number RPG theory.

I think it's more that if you're already rolling +20, you shouldn't be able to improve that with a DC 10 roll. It's the same reason I personally think that Aid as a fixed 10 is out of wack -- yes, I can see the idea that having some help is good, but after a certain point (i.e., people providing circumstance bonuses//"gm's best friend bonuses" because you need warm bodies), you should only get useful help by something on the same order as the initial task.

I think the best mindset here is that the "ever scaling challenges" are really for things that -are- challenges; for things that are either: 1. direct help defeat monsters (and give you xp) or 2. -are- challenges that give you xp. Either way, the difficulty should match the level of the challenge (otherwise, why are the players being rewarded for being challenged?). But if it's not a challenge, it doesn't need a scaling DC (and quite a number of 4e things don't have a scaling DC -- Jump checks, acrobatic rolls to reduce falling damage, swimming, Insight, etc).

Reversing the argument would be that at higher and higher levels of skill, you can do more and more to help yourself (or your friends), so this should be accounted for in the numbers; you'd have part of the difficulty of a high-level challenge assume that you'd be getting extra-special help (and thus be, say, 8 points higher if it expected that two people could help you for +4 each or whatnot). The problem with that is that then the difference between "I came up with a way to get help" is between certain failure and probable success (which is clearly worse than "I came up with away to help" being the difference between probable failure and certain success, but neither is all that compelling; you want a situation where you've got a good chance to fail, but with skill and teamwork, you've got a good chance to succeed instead).

I'd argue that 4e isn't an awful solution (some static number targets that give you a baseline, just as bigger and more interesting monsters give a baseline for how more powerful you've gotten even though your odds of success per-fight are similar, but the math in both cases remains the same), but I certainly won't say it's the ultimate expression of the idea.

I don't think I ever posted this:

aand, I totally forgot to actulaly put my reply chain up here. Here it is!

(mind if I stick this reply verbatm (including quotes) into a reply or
a couple of replies? It's nice to have it all there, and it's been an
interesting discussion overall, so it would be nice to have it up).

Brian Rogers writes:
>My read of the 4E rules is that they are moving towards a looser, broadly
>based, more adventurous style for the use of skills.

Moving toward, yeah. Not quite there yet, but they've made some
f that direction.

>stats for a hero (2d+2 to 3d+1) you have a fair chance on a lot of tests
(TN
>10). In 4E A 8th level cleric with a 10 Dex has a Sneak of +4 rather than
+0
>Move Silent in the old system. This is a legitimate design decision, and
one
>I have no problem with - it's nicely heroic, even if it is more simplistic
>than I care for in D&D.

*nod*

>But as in the d6 system nearly everything can be framed as a skill check,
>and there's no penality to not having the skill: an easy action has a DC
of
>X, a moderate one a DC of X+5, and a hard one of X+10.

Right. The penalty for not having the skill is that you don't get the
+5 -- but racial benefits and a good stat can more than cancel that
out (wrt a character with training but no other bennies, anyway).

>For me to make the system workable in my head, I have to set the target
>numbers on that score: "Is this easy/moderate/hard for anyone", not "Is
this
>easy/moderate hard _for someone with training_".

Ok, now turn it around -- you've got a set of difficulties:

1. Trivial. Anyone can do it, even if they're normally bad at this
sort of thing. (~level/2+5).

2. Easy. Anyone can do it if they get lucky, on raw ability, but
skilled people will rarely or never fail. (~level/2+10)

3. Moderate. Anyone with raw talent has a good chance of doing
this. Easy for someone with a relevant skill, but not an automatic
success. (~level/2+15).

4. Difficult. Someone working on raw talent -might- have a chance of
doing this. With a relevant skill, possible, but as good a chance of
success as failure. (~level/2+20).

5. Nigh-impossilbe. Only someone with serious skills has a chance of
succeeding at this, and even they have a very good chance of failure
(~level/2+25).

6. Impossible. Even the most skilled character would have no reason
to believe they could accomplish this, and if they do, it's only by
the intervention of fate (~level/2+30).

Of course, what these really are are two set of difficulties -- from
"below level, you probably don't need to roll" to "this is an
above-level challenge, but feel free to try" for both skill-uses and
not, just overlapping on the same chart. If it's plausible that
someone without a skill would be able to do something, it's in the 1-5
range. If it's really something you'd -expect- someone to need a
skill for, it's in the 2-6 range. And, of course, some thing can
reasonably be slotted into "trained-only", though 4e discourages this
for the most part (though the obvious is that only Arcana-trained
characters can detect magic, as that's actually in the rules).

Now, -some- challenges really should scale difficulty, as using one
stat is of similar difficulty to using a different skill -- for
example, I'd argue that using Strength to open a chest vs using
Theivery should be of similar actual difficuties (ie, the theivery
challenge should be at +5 difficulty). Of course, in that case, using
Strength destroys the chest and risks damaging the contents -- but
that's why they're not exactly the same.

(cont in next comment)

>I start having real problems. By giving everyone bonuses in everything
they
>set a certain expecation for game play - everyone can try everything. By
>stating that task difficulties should also be judged on _whether the task
>requires special training_ undercuts that expectation.

Does it, though? I mean, if you've got a trap that can be destroyed
through damage, or bypassed via Theivery, shouldn't the thievery check
be scaled such that an expert thief with tools will -probably-
succeed, whereas a longsword fighter (with a 16 dex) without training
or tools will -probably- fail? (and, in fact, such that the rogue
will disable it faster than the fighter will, but the fighter isn't
better off using thievery than just swinging a sword at it?)

>In my vision the GM would set the easy/moderate/hard DC and then if the
>player can frame a skill bonus, so be it.

Personally, I'd rather set the DC based on the 1-6 scale (including
ranges in between). If this means the difficulty is on the upper end,
well, yeah, you do have to look at your PCs when you're framing
nigh-impossible challenges (or make sure that those are bypassable
without ruining a game).

>This would be very different if the rulebook had framed this as "this is
the
>DC that would challenge PCs of this level - compare this to the suggested
>DCs for various actions under each skill; if the closest approximate has a
>DC lower than the 'easy' listed, don't bother with a roll, the PC just
does
>succeeds.

I think this was more or less what they intended -- but the rules are
framed to only model the things that are challenging and give
experience and synergy bonuses.

It -is- important that only "challenging" things give synergy bonuses,
btw -- if the same thing that gets you a +2 at level 1 also gets you a
+2 at level 30, then the system has to escallate the normal challenges
to assume you're going to be cheesing things up with cheap potions,
skill synergy, etc. Yeah, I know, we've gone around this row before,
but I think it's a really important part of the 4e design, not that at
30th level, that characters find the same kinds of tasks of equal
difficulty (as you've mentioned, that's silly), but that at 30th
level, that characters have -roughly- the same level of difficulty
from the actual tasks they're dealing with than they did with the
tasks they encountered at 1st level. Otherwise, you end up with the
situation that was noticed with previous editions of D&D -- that
characters start out utterly unsuited to the tasks that present
themselves, during a certain few levels are capable individuals who
are challenged, but with skill and teamwork, can overcome the tasks
they face (ie, the sweet spot), but after a certain point find
themselves becoming supermen and women who laugh at any "reasonable"
challenge that attempts to get in their way.

If one attempts (as the 4e designers clearly, by result and direct
claim, have) to maintain this sweet spot over all 30 levels of play,
one must not only make first level characters capable and worthy
individuals, but also make sure that 30th level characters face
challenges worthy of them -- this does mean letting them jump 30 foot
gulfs with ease (and without a roll), but it also means that when they
want to climb up the rock wall and ambush the acid magma god in his
lair, they're going to find that the wall is made of glass and covered
in acid.

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