Devant's page

All in all, I think that while the position of the article is certainly not the same as the designers of d20, it is practical enough to account for most, if not all, needs. The only example I think that fails that position is the scholarly priest archetype, that needs to cast high level spells without being a combat powerhouse, which is covered (considerably less elegantly) in the follow-up article.

...this article...

Actually this was a great article and beyond making me understand what was going wrong with my thought, it provided answers to many similar considerations. The part about crafting was particularly helpful and the title of the article states exactly what I needed: a claibration of expectations.

Thanks for all responses!

EDIT: Thinking about what led me to have such a distorted view, somewhat shameful, considering I've been storytelling in d20 for the past 15 years, I understand that a big part of it were the demographics rules of cumminity generation in 3rd. They were quite clear on having a couple 8-10 level characters in almost every notable city, rather than them being a one of a generation occurence, along with a host of all levels between 1 and max. The Forgotten Realms campaign setting provided a similar view, if not even more extreme.

I understand. I still advise just making it a set value trade. 1 BAB for 3 skill points or a feat. That way there's less to worry about in terms of differing values for differing BAB progressions.

Essentially it's the same thing, but phrasing it 1 BAB for 3 skill points means for example that the wizard gets those skill points every second level. Also, I realize that the relation between the three BAB progressions is 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00 which is not represented by 1, 2 and 3 skill points properly, instead requring 2, 3 and 4 (1 for each 0.25 gained). In practice though, a class with a fast progression should never give up its BAB, except possibly in the case of a fighter becoming a commander that keeps out of actual combat as his career progresses, or similar concepts.

I would not take the Feat option, this would provide very early access to prestige classes thus escaping the purpose of this house rule which is to provide a solution for high level non combatant characters.

It sounds like you don't understand how the math of the game works.

How so?

Seems problematic. I would advise against tracking fractions, and let them trade 1 point of base attack bonus for a set number of skill points, say 3. It's a poor trade in my opinion and I don't see why anyone would want to.

With the scaling nature of opposition every point of BAB is precious.
A free feat would be a better trade. Still likely not worth it.
Ninja'd : I see it's for NPCs, no worries then.About the trade value and needing to be able to hit things.

It's not about presenting an equal trade but merely providing an option to represent characters that although worthy of being considered high level, at least skill wise, nonetheless should not actually pose as considerable combat challenges. A number of examples occur at my second post.

My line of thought begins in the interest of producing representative character stats for non-combat characters, while still providing access to high skill ranks.

A very talented armorsmith, a highly dedicated scholar, a diplomatic aide or a miracle working archbishop are all viable character concepts that by the rules face a simple dillema: making them high level characters means that they are by necessity far better combatants than a level 1 fighter, even though it is highly probable that they never carried, let alone swinged, a weapon. On the other hand, making them low level characters denies them access to high skill ranks which is the essential component of their roles.

This can have two possible solutions:
1) Make those characters high level ones, finding an alternative to the correspondingly high BaB, which is the solution I suggest, or
2) Make those characters low level ones, providing an arbitrary bonus to the skills of interest. This being the simplest solution and the one I run for many years, has the main problem of being awkward when applied to non-combat PCs.

EDIT: An additional problem arises with clerics, where archetypes involving the scolarly kind of cleric, like the above mentioned arch bishop, must be able to cast high level spells yet they should have little in the way of combat capacity.

I was always bothered with the way d20 tied BaB with level. Why should the lvl20 Expert librarian old man that never touched a blade have a BaB comparable to a heroic lvl15 Fighter? He shouldn't be lvl20 you say, since he never fought anything tougher than boredom and bookworms. Then how would he have the +25 to Knowledge (history) so fit for his role? "Just give him what's needed and don't bother" you might say. Well, I prefer a systematic approach, and since I found one that works fine for me, here it is:

Instead of a BaB bonus, at each level a character can gain a number of extra skill points as follows:

+3 for a fast BaB progression.
+2 for a medium BaB progression.
+1 for a slow BaB progression.

Thus, a lvl20 expert can have +2 maxed skills and 0 BaB, a caster character can choose to give up physical combat potential and a score of aimed spells for additional skill options and basically a multitude of non-combat NPCs can receive far more representative stats with a very simple rule that as far as I understand, doesn't break anything at all. What do you think?

EDIT: Of course, this requires tracking decimals of BaB. So for example, a lvl1 wizard has a 0.5 BaB and a lvl1 cleric gets 0.75. As normal, only the integral part counts for all intents and purposes other than tracking.