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Hello, everyone! How are you doing? Well, I hope.
This time, I'm here to ask you a question about skills:
How useful is each of them, relative to each other?
I ask this partially because I want to see what's the general opinion of the community and partially because I'm thinking of an idea for a future house-rule...
First, let's divide skills in three separate groups: physical/outdoorsy, academic/intellectual and social...
Then, we rank them by-
"Lemmy, you min-maxing muderhobo! All skills are useful!"
First off... I prefer the term "resource-efficient manslaughter nomad". Also, all skills can be useful, but how often and how much changes drastically. No sane, honest person will say Appraise is as good as Perception!
"It depends on the campaign! In my low-fantasy nautical campaign, Profession(Sailor) and Swim were amazing and UMD was useless! Stop generalizing, you a%&@%$+!"
Everything is dependent on the specifics of each campaign... That means nothing. I'm asking about the overall value of each skill... How useful they are in games that face a variety of challenges and scenery. Also, I have a full human body, not just the end of my digestive track.
"What about character role? Your skills are more or less useful depending on what you want-"
I KNOW! Again... This is not about specifics. It's an overall analysis of skill utility, assuming the campaign includes a variety of challenges. Obviously Spellcraft won't be as useful to the Fighter as it is to the Wizard (although it'd still be useful, unlike, say... Fly, which is completely useless if you can't fly). Perform is awesome for Bards and useless for everyone else.... That's not the point.
I believe the base assumption of the game is that characters travel at least a little bit and face various challenges in various environments.
"What about skill unlocks?"
Well... I don't use it. In fact, I use almost nothing from Pathfinder Unchained. So I'm not taking anything from that book in consideration.
Ahem... Back on track...
After we split the skill list in the three aforementioned groups, let's rank them. And remember: This is a general analysis. It isn't taking in consideration specific campaign themes, such as game focusing political intrigue or one based on underwater exploration... Or anything like that, which would make some skills unusually valuable or insignificant.
So... The ranks I give each skills vary from 0 (almost never useful) to 5 (very useful very often). 3 is the average. i.e.: "This won't always be useful, but it'll be useful often enough. You won't regret putting ranks here but it's probably not a game-changer either.".
Now, this is my ranking:
Physical/Outdoorsy Skills:
3 - Acrobatics
1 - Climb
2 - Escape Artist
0~3 - Fly
5 - Perception
1 - Sleight of Hand
4 - Stealth
2- Survival
0~5 - Ride
1 - Swim
Academic/Intellectual Skills:
0 - Appraise
0 - Craft
2- Disable Device
0 - Heal
3 - Kn(Arcana/Dungeon/Nature/Religion)
1 - Kn(All The Rest)
2 - Linguistics
0 - Profession
2~5 - Spellcraft
3 - Use Magic Device
Social Skills:
3 - Bluff
3 - Diplomacy
1 - Disguise
1 - Handle Animal
2~5 - Intimidate
4 - Sense Motive
0 - Perform
As you may have noticed, I tend to value skills that increase your mobility and/or your variety of options. Stealth and Diplomacy may not be as good in combat, but they essentially give you access to areas that are otherwise out-of-bounds.
So, what do you think? Do you agree? Do you disagree? On what points? What skills do you think are not as good as people say? Which ones you think are underrated and deserve more recognition?
Cheers! Keep on finding and creating new paths!
3 - Kn(Dungeon/Nature/Religion) (All of these can identify common threats. Kn(Arcana) is somewhat better than the rest, but not enough to be a 4, IMO)
You're missing Kn(Arcana) in the list itself here.
I would still say that a lot of usefulness is campaign-dependent and GM-dependent. An intrigue game is not a dungeon-delve game is not a historical mystery game is not a kick-the-door-and-steal-the-treasure game.
Social skills are more important in games with lots of intrigue and roleplaying. If your party's first reaction to "I see something over there" is "fill it full of arrows", this will be less important.
Knowledge(Planes) gets very useful at higher levels (say 10+) when outsiders enter campaigns in a big way, and knowledge(local) is hugely important in certain types of campaigns.
Perform is 5 for bards because, hey, Versatile Performance means it _also_ substitutes for 2 good skills.
I would rank Escape Artist a 1 at most. Competent captors will not let you escape, and nobody has a high enough EA check to get out of grappling by something 3 size categories bigger than you.
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I did a weighting a while back for a build-a-class subsystem I made to analyze the comparative values of the class skill lists for each class. I used a simple 1-3 scale, with the default being 2 unless there was an obvious balance above or below the norm.
Acrobatics 2
Appraise 2
Bluff 2
Climb 1
Craft 2
Diplomacy 3
Disable Device 2
Disguise 2
Escape Artist 2
Fly 2
Handle Animal 1
Heal 2
Intimidate 2
Knowledge (Arcana) 2
Knowledge (Dungeoneering) 2
Knowledge (Engineering) 1
Knowledge (Geography) 1
Knowledge (History) 1
Knowledge (Local) 2
Knowledge (Nature) 2
Knowledge (Nobility) 1
Knowledge (Planes) 2
Knowledge (Religion) 2
Linguistics 1
Perception 3
Perform 1
Profession 1
Ride 1
Sense Motive 2
Sleight of Hand 1
Spellcraft 3
Stealth 2
Survival 2
Swim 1
Use Magic Device 3
This is based on skill divorced from any class, campaign, build, or other influence. Simply how useful is it based on the skill description in the book.
You're missing Kn(Arcana) in the list itself here.
Oops... Fixed!
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First off, Manslaughter Nomad amuses me.
Physical
Acrobatics 3
Climb 2
Escape Artist 2
Fly 0-3
Perception 5
Sleight of Hand 2
Stealth 5
Survival 3
Ride 0-4
Swim 2
Academic
Appraise 0
Craft 0-5
Disable Device 2
Heal 1
Kn(Arcana/Dungeon/Nature/Religion/Local) 3
Kn(All The Rest) 2
Linguistics 2
Profession 0
Spellcraft 3-5
Use Magic Device 0-5
Social
Bluff 4
Diplomacy 2
Disguise 1
Handle Animal 3
Intimidate 4
Sense Motive 4
Perform 1-5
Something Do is see in Unchained which skills they made background skills and which are left for real skills. Cause that would make background less important.
Perception, spellcraft, Social skills, enemy knowledge skills and maybe UMD are what skills I feel are important and used.
Not to get house-ruley, here, but the worthlessness of climb, swim, and fly is what led our group to adopt the 4E "Athletics" skill, which encompasses climb, jump, and swim as a single skill (it's actually extremely nice.) Since that took jump out of Acrobatics, we put fly into acrobatics as a replacement, which was also nice because we were all annoyed by fly anyway.
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Here is my two cents.
The imbalance between the skills everyone needs and the skills the party specialist needs convinced me to give two scores to each skill. The "everyone" score is the priority for those PCs who are not experts in the skill. The "specialist" score is for those PCs who want to be experts. Sometimes I call the specialist "party role" because the party needs a specialist; in fact, it helps to have a second specialist as a backup in case the primary expert rolls poorly. And sometimes a certain class will always want to be a specialist.
I also rearranged Lemmy's three categories into four categories governed by when the skill is usually used.
Outdoors Skills:
Acrobatics(dex) (Lemmy 3) everyone 3 specialist 5
Climb(str) (Lemmy 1) everyone 1 specialist 4
Fly(dex) (Lemmy 0~3) everyone 0 specialist 3
Survival(wis) (Lemmy 2) everyone 2 party role 4
Ride(dex) (Lemmy 0~5) everyone 1 specialist 5
Swim(str) (Lemmy 1) everyone 1 specialist 3
Dungeon Crawling Skills:
Disable Device (Lemmy 2) everyone 0 specialist 5
Escape Artist(dex) (Lemmy 2) high-CMB character 0 low-CMB character 2
Heal(wis) (Lemmy 0) everyone 0 cleric 0 desperately needing a cleric 4
3 - Knowlwdge(Arcana/Dungeon/Local/Nature/Planes/Religion)(int) (Lemmy 3) everyone 1 specialist 5
Knowledge(Engineering/Planes)(int) (Lemmy 1) everyone 1 specialist 3
Knowledge(Geography/History/Nobility)(int) (Lemmy 1) everyone 1 specialist 2
Perception (Lemmy 5) everyone 3 party role 5
Sleight of Hand (Lemmy 1) everyone 0 specialist 2 some feats 3
Stealth (Lemmy 4) everyone 2 specialist 5
Use Magic Device(cha) (Lemmy 3) everyone 0 specialist 5
Social Skills:
Bluff(cha) (Lemmy 3) everyone 1 specialist 5
Diplomacy(cha) (Lemmy 3) everyone 1 specialist 5
Disguise(cha) (Lemmy 1) everyone 0 specialist 5
Handle Animal(cha) (Lemmy 1) everyone 0 summoning casters 3 animal companion handlers 5
Intimidate(cha) (Lemmy 2~5) everyone 0 specialist 5
Linguistics(int) (Lemmy 2) everyone 1 party role 3
Perform(cha) (Lemmy 0) everyone 0 versatile performance perform depends.
Sense Motive(wis) (Lemmy 4) everyone 2 party role 5
Downtime Skills:
Appraise(int) (Lemmy 0) everyone 0 party role 5*
Craft(int) (Lemmy 0) everyone 0 specialist 4
to streamline a Craft-heavy game. But those players chose a unique path to success. Most PCs buy stuff instead of making stuff.[/ooc]
Profession(wis) (Lemmy 0) everyone 0 sailors 3
Spellcraft(int) (Lemmy 2~5) everyone 0 spontaneous casters 2 spellbook casters 4 magic item creators 5
Looking back at my post, I realize that the skills that I labeled "specialist 5" split into two categories.
Appraise, Diplomacy, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Knowledge(Arcana/Dungeon/Local/Nature/Planes/Religion), Perception, Ride, Sense Motive, and Spellcraft are labeled "specialist 5" because having more ranks in it makes a very useful skill better. Okay, Appraise is a useless skill in my games, but against a GM who would rob the party blind if they could not Appraise, it is very useful.
Acrobatics, Bluff, Disable Device, Disguise, Stealth, and Use Magic Device are labeled "specialist 5" because failing at that skill could waste a valuable opportunity or leave the PC in a dangerous situation. A specialist is going to use the dangerous side of the skill, so he or she had better be good at it. Climb could fall in that category, too, except that dangerous climbs worth doing are few.
And apparently I forgot to scroll down when previewing my post for typographic errors. The broken link is Lemmy's Custom Weapon Generation System, which I mentioned mostly for the contrast that Lemmy created a system that relies on a skill he rated useless. I suspect it was an effort to make the Craft skill more useful, which I applaud.
One other thing to keep in mind might be the difference between "even a little bit of this skill is helpful" (for instance, to aid another) and "if you take it at all, max it out and boost it as much as you can" (because if you fail the roll it doesn't help at all.)
For instance, a lot of creatures don't have Bluff, so even a little bit of Sense Motive might make a difference. But since CMDs scale up (faster than) CR, if you want to be using Acrobatics at all, it needs to be a steady investment.
Trained-only skills (like Knowledge) benefit a lot from having one rank (you can roll higher than 10, with a rank, a class skill bonus, and anything else at all, you can take 20 and get a DC 25 when doing research).
Ride might be either 1 rank so you CAN control a mount, or maxed-out if you have Mounted Combat.
I value these skills enough to take traits to make them class skills:
Perception (often)
Diplomacy (often)
Disable Device (occasionally)
Bluff (occasionally)
What? No love for Stealth and Sense Motive?
IMHO, traits are only worth it for skills that are useful and often require opposed rolls... For all the rest, simply assigning enough ranks is usually more than enough.
Looking back at my post, I realize that the skills that I labeled "specialist 5" split into two categories.
Appraise, Diplomacy, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Knowledge(Arcana/Dungeon/Local/Nature/Planes/Religion), Perception, Ride, Sense Motive, and Spellcraft are labeled "specialist 5" because having more ranks in it makes a very useful skill better. Okay, Appraise is a useless skill in my games, but against a GM who would rob the party blind if they could not Appraise, it is very useful.
Acrobatics, Bluff, Disable Device, Disguise, Stealth, and Use Magic Device are labeled "specialist 5" because failing at that skill could waste a valuable opportunity or leave the PC in a dangerous situation. A specialist is going to use the dangerous side of the skill, so he or she had better be good at it. Climb could fall in that category, too, except that dangerous climbs worth doing are few.
I think you're overvaluing the "specialist" role...
Skill whose DC are easy to reach with little to no effort (Climb, Ride, Swim) and/or can be easily replaced by common, low-level spells and abilities (Climb/Swim/Heal) have that reflected in their rank.
Notice that most skills I rated 2 or higher require at least quasi-continuous investment.
And apparently I forgot to scroll down when previewing my post for typographic errors. The broken link is Lemmy's Custom Weapon Generation System, which I mentioned mostly for the contrast that Lemmy created a system that relies on a skill he rated useless. I suspect it was an effort to make the Craft skill more useful, which I applaud.
Oddly enough... You can use pretty much all of that homebrew without ever investing in Craft (or Spellcraft, for that matter). ><'
You can still use Spellcraft to create magic weapons and with the Warrior Smith feat, you can use create and modify weapons without a single rank in either Craft (or Spellcraft). :P
Besides, you can always buy/loot the weapons you want. ;)
I am huge on using skills to help you DM.
I hate Mathmuse's idea of appraise. I tell PCs they have a gem and tell them to write where they got it from. Then I put in my notes how much it is, and makes PCs haggle for the price of items.
If the PCs use skills that are relevant I will reward them with information. Often that information makes the game easier. I have no problem punishing players that do not use their skills. I also reward players that pick and use their skills.
Perception is the most important skill, and I personally dislike how potent it is. For me I feel you either are great or better at it, or garbage. You can get away with it being low if someone in the party is amazing at it. Many 0 level spells or Scan abilities can make this less important, but it is still vital.
The other skills are only needed if they fit your character. You can evade many skills with spells or calls abilities so I find it silly to rate the skills as a whole. I think it is more useful to rate them for each class as the micro rating is much more honest.
I think you're overvaluing the "specialist" role...
I agree that my words left the specialist role overvalued. I failed to find a good way to say, "Hey, specializing in this skill will rarely pay off." Specializing in Handle Animal pays off only if the character has a combat animal for whom communicating requires Handle Animal, specializing in Intimidate pays off only if the chracter can demoralize as a free action, specializing in Ride pays off only through the Mounted Combat feat, etc.
There is a strong "in for a penny, in for a pound" effect on several skills. Being inadequate at those skills means investing in ways to avoid needing the skill, which makes the skill itself less valuable. But being good at the skill will pay off, so investing in alternatives becomes less valuable instead. Or having a certain feat or class ability makes an otherwise minor skill into a valuable one.
Notice that most skills I rated 2 or higher require at least quasi-continuous investment.
Ah, I interpreted 5 is "maximum skill ranks," 4 as "close to max," 3 as "up to +10 eventually," 2 as "up to +5," 1 as "throw a rank or two in there if it is a class skill," and 0 as "don't waste your skill points."
My character's desire for skills is often limited by skill points per level. For example, if a character receives 6 skill points per level, I frequently choose 3 skills to max out and use the other skill points to gradually put one rank into each class skill. Once the class skills are covered, I chose 4 or 5 other skills to keep improving in a quasi-continuous investment.
Besides, you can always buy/loot the weapons you want. ;)
Except when you can't. I played in a Serpent's Skull adventure path where the party spent several weeks stuck in the wilderness. We ran out of arrows. Craft(bows and arrows) became a valuable skill.
More recently, my savage technologist bloodrager NPC in my Iron Gods campaign had her pistol stolen (poor NPCs--I would never do anything that cruel to a PC). She would have had to travel back to her hometown to buy another firearm. But she was designed as a crafting support character, so had a +9 on Craft(mechanical). The party had defeated five 1st-level gunslingers and had their worthless beginner pistols available. On a successful craft roll, she found enough good parts among the junk pistols to assemble one functional pistol.
And the true master crafter in that campaign recently built a robot and is working on restoring a small spaceship. Okay, as the GM I had to change some details to allow this, but I expect that over-the-top crafting will make the campaign more fun rather than imbalanced.
I hate Mathmuse's idea of appraise. I tell PCs they have a gem and tell them to write where they got it from. Then I put in my notes how much it is, and makes PCs haggle for the price of items.
I am willing to credit my nerfing of Appraise to a lack of imagination. I don't see how haggling can be interesting. I remember our party roleplaying haggling back in 2nd-edition D&D. It consisted of handing the treasure to the PC with the best Appraise and saying, let us know when you are done selling the stuff for the most money.
Social interactions often have that flavor of one person doing the work for the entire party while everyone else waits. But I allow Aid Another on Diplomacy and often require it on Bluff. ("You are a group of merchants, you say? You in the plate armor: why is a merchant sprouting more weapons than our entire armory?" "Uh, I'm the bodyguard for one of them, Brodrick I guess." "The fighter means that Brodrick hired him as a caravan guard.")
I think that the Unchained Background Skills variant could be kind of applicable here since it roughly groups the skills into ones which are likely to be useful on a typical adventure and ones which are less likely to come in handy. A lot of the skills you rated 0 or 1 are categorized as “background skills” (Appraise, Craft, Sleight of Hand, Handle Animal, Knowledge skills which don’t ID monsters, Perform, Profession). Granted, Handle Animal can be useful for folks with animal companions, and Perform is great for Bards, but those seem like the sort of class specific benefits you wanted to mostly ignore for this comparison.
Your initial rankings for most of the skills seem pretty accurate. Here are my own thoughts on a few.
Appraise - 1 - I'd normally agree that Appraise is a big zero. I tried adjusting treasure sale values based on Appraise checks but found it wasn't much fun. Probably the best use for Appraise is to let skilled PCs notice mundane treasures which others might miss like, "Wow, that's a rare Qing Qang tea set worth 200gp!" or "That Marani suit is worth 1,000gp!". I guess the net effect on WBL would be similar, but at least it seems a little more interesting somehow (or you could just forget Appraise entirely like most games)
Acrobatics - 3 - The “Avoid AoO” function can fail a lot in games with tough monsters, but I usually put in at least in 3 ranks to get the improved AC boost for Fight Defensively and Total Defense. That can also help with consistently passing basic Acrobatics challenges you’re likely to run across as environmental factors (the DC 5-12 stuff which gets thrown in for environmental “flavor” but can still ruin your round if you roll low)
Intimidate - 5 - All 3 of my current PCs have this maxed out, as did 1 of my last generation of PCs. Like Acrobatics, intimidate actually does something in combat, and if you invest max ranks you’re almost guaranteed to succeed at least on your first check. More chances to use skills in combat would probably result in more skills with high ratings.
Perception - should be 5 but often performs like 3 - As Admiral Ackbar would say, “It’s a trap!” I’ve rarely seen a DM who will allow the PCs having sky high Perception scores stop the monsters from gaining surprise frequently. Some achieve it “fairly” with super high Stealth modifiers. Others basically just do surprise by fiat (perhaps with a flimsy excuse). I’m usually disappointed that I invested max ranks in Perception instead of just making sure I have Uncanny Dodge. At least it is good for finding stuff.
Knowledge (ID Monsters) - 4 overall but 2 individually - I find Knowledge skills tough to rate since while being able to ID monsters is useful it seems like 6 skill points per level to keep this capability maxed out is an awful lot even across multiple PCs. Sometimes I wonder if everybody should get something like Bardic Knowledge to represent stuff they’ve learned while adventuring. Another solution might be having another skill like “Monster Lore” which can cover all monsters (perhaps with a tougher DC on the check if it seems like that would be too powerful)
Stealth - 4 or 2 - I run a game for two stealthy ratfolk PCs, and they do really well with it (4 stars). However, in a lot of games Stealth seems like a 2 star skill which is likely to split the party, sometimes with disastrous results. It also seems like a skill other players will actively try to prevent you from using (ACP Man wants to come along and will get upset if you ask him to stand back a little). Maybe that’s because people figure that you’re likely to go off alone and do things that don’t involve them, resulting in them getting bored and or needing to come rescue you. In some cases that actually isn’t a completely unreasonable concern.
I suppose my title is a little misleading... I guess a better way to put would be "The (Overall) Value of Ranks Assigned to Each Skill".
Of course, if your class/build has an specific way to make a particular skill more useful, then that skill will raise in rank (e.g.: a Bard can easily turn Perform into a rank 5 skill). But as I mentioned, this is an analysis and discussion of the overall value of skills.
In contrast to that, there are skill that are useful even if you don't specialize in the skill role they are part of...
e.g.: You don't need to be a devoted scout to make good use of Perception, nor do you need to be a devoted scholar to make good use of Kn(Dungeons). And you certainly don't have to be the party face to make good use of Sense Motive... And so on.
I weighed all of this when ranking the skills. I like skills. I refuse to play any character who doesn't get at least 4 of them per level. Even when I play Int-based classes, I'm far more likely to use my FCB on extra skills than on extra HP.
:)
PS: I also hate Appraise and haggling... Whenever the PCs are somewhere they can reasonably find whatever gear they are looking for, I simply handwave the shopping scene away and tell them they spent X time buying stuff and go back to the adventure
PS 2: I'm sorry to hear you needed craft to get arrows... I just handwave ordinary ammo away. Unless it does something special, I don't consider ammo worth the extra bookkeeping. Although I admit it adds to the atmosphere of the game in certain types of campaigns, where limited resources are part of the fun and challenge.
Little offtopic. Appraise should have been fused with Craft or perhaps some kind of Profession the same way that Gather Information was fused with Diplomacy, missed opportunity from in the transition from 3.5 to Pathfinder IMO.