Lisa Chippendale's page

* I agree with the earlier poster who said that Bardic Knowledge should grant breadth of knowledge rather than in-depth knowledge in a specific area. From that standpoint, I like that Bardic Knowledge in Alpha3...

On first read, I like the new Bard. I like the way they've handled Knowledge, and I don't mind that the Bard gets to be specialized in one area. The Bard was always meant to be one of the party's key Knowledge characters, along with the Wizard, and this just strengthens something they were already supposed to be strong in anyway. I'm glad it gets rid of the confusion of the Bardic Knowledge trait; sometimes it was hard to figure out if something counted as Bardic Knowledge or not.

I like the way they've specified which types of Bardic Perform work for which abilities; it makes more sense and gives incentive for putting ranks into more than one kind of Perform.

I like the pathfinder ranger, but I think somethings are missing:

There is something else missing that's been bothering me since 3.0. How do you adjudicate rangers knowing things about their favored enemies? Yes, they get +2 to Bluff, Spot, Survival, etc..., but what about knowing whether or not to use cold iron, silver, or magic weapons against specific creatures? A ranger would likely know that information about a favored enemy. Unless you want to rule that they just automatically know all pertinent information about favored enemies, I propose that rangers can roll the appropriate Knowledge check to know information about a favored enemy, with a bonus equal to 1/2 ranger level + Int bonus + any ranks they already have in that particular Knowledge skill.

The new cover rules made my head swim. I would just stick with the current rules rather than fool around with drawing lines & counting them & doing a calculation every time. Ouch! It may be more realistic but seems much too cumbersome.

Please keep skill points! A you-either-have-it-or-you-don't system for skills takes away so much of the ability to customize your character. I think the current system is really pretty much fine, although I agree with your plan to combine some of the skills to get rid of useless or redundant skills.

For those who want a simpler system, let them just always pick a set of skills and max rank them.