Skills in General, and Half-Elves

[Agrippa]

Hey there,

First, I'd just like to say thank you to Paizo for providing a 3.5ish alternative to 4e. I've liked what I've seen so far from the Pathfinder RPG Alphas. Keep up the good work guys.

With regard to skills, I have a suggestion to allow players to customize their classes a little more. Allow a player to pick a number of skills (player's choice) to always be treated as class skills, equal to their intelligence modifier. So, if their character has an Intelligence of 16, the player can pick 3 skills of their choice that are always treated as class skills. Even if the character multi-classes, these three skills will always be treated as class skills. This will have a couple of effects. First, Intelligence will no longer be thought of as a "dump stat" for the more martial classes. Secondly, it will help characters differentiate themselves from each other, even if they are from the same class. It won't give a character any more actual skill points, but it will give them more choice of what to put their points into if they invest in intelligence.

Half-Elves have now become a much more viable option for players, beyond just the fluff they added in standard 3.5. To tweak this a little further, I suggest that they give them two options, that must be determined during character generation, which reflects their upbringing. If the Half-Elf is raised in a Human community, they are proficient in a martial weapon of their choice (or an exotic weapon if they already have martial weapon proficiency). If raised in an Elven community, they Half-Elf treats all weapons with the word "Elven" in their name as martial weapons. Gives a little bit of crunch, but also distinguishes Half-Elves raised by Humans from those raised by Elves.

Just a couple of suggestions for the designers (and the community in general) to mull over and discuss.

[KaeYoss]

With the way skills work right now (in Alpha 2), there's not that much need for this:

Class skill right now means that if you have ranks in that skill, your total bonus is Ranks + Ability Modifier + 3, instead of Ranks + Ability Mod for cross-class skills.

There's no more half-ranks or so, and once a skill is class skill for any of your classes, it's a class skill for your character, and you get the +3.

Of course, you could still allow this, and players would choose cross-class skills they want right now, or that no class they'd ever want to use will grant them (which is all cross-class skills if you don't want to multiclass).

Personally, I'd tie it to backgrounds instead, much like d20 Modern's Starting Occupations.

I like the cultural difference for half-breeds - not just elf/humans, but also human/orcs should get this.

Midnight already introduced that for their half-breeds, at least for the dwarrow - can't remember if elflings and dworgs had it, but dwarrow had extra abilities depending on whether they were raised by gnomes or dwarves. They had a similar thing for halflings, depending on whether they were settled halflings or nomadic ones.

Of course, Midnight's campaign world was rather small and isolated, so it was easy making exhaustive lists of possible half-breeds or human cultures (there were only three, with one being the result of the other two mingling for centuries. All three subraces had different racial traits)

[Agrippa]

In addressing the skills, all that this was going to do was allow a character to focus on a single class, and pick a few additional skills to add to their class skill list (if they invested in a higher Intelligence). It eliminates the need to multi-class or blow feats on skill focus to be a little more versatile, and keep their focus on being X class. Unless one wants actual class abilities, in which case they would have to multi-class anyway. I believe they do a similar thing in the Conan RPG. But it rewards someone for being a "smart" fighter, cleric, or sorcerer (it's almost a given for wizards).

I hadn't thought about it at the time, but yeah, you could definitely apply the cultural differences to Half-Orcs as well. This idea came about from the whole nurture vs. nature argument. Most of the Half-Elf special abilities and racial features come from the biological or physiological side of their development. Humans might see the character as being overly cautious or slow to seize the initiative, while Elves would see the same person as being somewhat impetuous, or too quick to act. A Half-Orc could be seen as a brutal, dumb thug by Humans, yet as being weak or even craven by pure Orcish standards. Either race have tremendous story potential, and will probably be more popular with players if Paizo's final version of the game presents them as they have written them (more or less).