Only related tangentially, my group finds the Craft and Profession skills to be useless and are dump skills that receive one or two ranks at best. I know they can be fairly useful, but no one in my group ever bothers with them.
|
ALLENDM, I think you can simplify your descriptions a bit:
1) No longer identifies spellwork, spell effects. These have been moved to spellcraft checks.
2) Magical components, history, traditions, writing, symbols, rituals, and afflictions.
3) Identifies dragons, constructs, and magical beasts.
4) Astrological information
Dungeoneering
1) Identifies underground creatures and oozes/slimes/fungus.
2) Underground civilizations, folklore, history, geography, minerals, and other resources.
3) Underground survival and recognizing hazardous conditions.
Engineering
1) Technological, Architectural, and Mechanical subjects.
2) Building of structures and underground complexes.
3) Identify constructs, robots, and mechanical creatures.
4) Identify how a trap works (not locate or sense a trap).
Geography
1) Read and amend maps.
2) Identify humanoids and monstrous humanoids.
3) Identify lands, cultures, agriculture, and weather.
4) Astronomical information
History
1) Strengths and weaknesses of historical figures, monsters of historical significance or ancient myth (eg dragons).
2) Historical events, figures, and locations.
Local
1) Local customs, laws, organizations, rumors, leaders, trouble makers.
2) Locations of importance.
3) Identify humanoids.
Military
1) Military history, hierarchy, traditions, tactics, and logistics, including siege equipment.
2) History of battles, major engagements, and wars.
3) Military races.
Nature
1) Identify animals, fey, monstrous humanoids, plants.
2) Weather, agriculture, Druidic traditions, fey lore, lands of the First Realm.
3) Identify fresh water and edible plants.
Nobility
1) Noble lineages, heraldry, traditions, and history.
2) Laws, diplomacy, court gossip.
Occult
1) Identify aberrations and ancient outsiders, undead, alien lifeforms.
2) Identify strange rituals, cults, and practices.
3) Summoning of creatures, Great Old Ones, Outer Gods, and similar creatures.
4) Obscure religions and practices. Apocalyptic history/myth.
5) Psychic magic, lore, components, properties.
6) Languages, symbols, runes and texts tied to these items.
Planes
1) Myth, history, and properties of the planes.
2) Outsiders.
3) Summoning, Possession, banishment of outsiders.
Religion
1) Identifies undead, outsiders associated with Gods and religion.
2) Religious folklore, symbols, customs, rituals, history, materials, and writing.
3) Astrological information
4) Identifies magical afflictions (curses, possession, lycanthropy)
I also agree with Aldrius that it's risky to add new knowledge skills without getting rid of old ones. I like the idea of combining local and geography and folding together history and nobility into "government."
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Only related tangentially, my group finds the Craft and Profession skills to be useless and are dump skills that receive one or two ranks at best. I know they can be fairly useful, but no one in my group ever bothers with them.
Craft can save a character money if they put in the time. Thus, I find the value of the skill to be largely dependent on the DM.
As for Profession, perhaps consider a house rule I use: For associated skill checks whose DC is under 20, Profession can act in place of other skills, provided a justification can be provided and agreed upon by player and DM. This way, you can get a little horizontal mileage out of the skill, but save specializations for the skills that actually cover the "high skill" functions.
Allen: While your list is thorough in the topics it covers, it's a bit difficult to digest so many different skills, and it also means the party may find itself unable to expend all the skill points needed to properly act on it. Their knowledge would simply be spread far too thin. Other than that, it's a good list for categorizing, and perhaps if your campaign is more setting-focused than others it might work as a way to pick-and-choose. I do agree with your notion that profession and craft skills should be capable of being used in place of some knowledge rolls, such as using alchemy to identify a particular type of poisonous plant rather than knowledge (nature).
@lily: Yeah, gonna need to play with it for a while. To open the campaign, you gotta open Maptool, select 'file', and then open the campaign file from there. That might be why you couldn't open it before.
I can see your point. I remember in the late 70's, I started playing D&D and AD&D around nine or so and there was not the level of detail that you have now in your character development. Skills are one of those additions that really flesh out your character. The key is to let the players know what the benefits are to having that skill and then provide moments when they can utilize them.
Personally, I don't mind the additional knowledge skills and have not found it to be a problem. For one thing the minimum skills rewarded for any class is 4 + INT in my games. The other thing I do for campaign groups is background skills. Each player gets 2 skill points in any CRAFT, PROFESSION, or KNOWLEDGE of their choosing. These are listed as BG (BACKGROUND SKILLS) and are written into their backgrounds.
I tend to reward players that have their characters utilize their skills well.
AllenDM
ALLENDM, I think you can simplify your descriptions a bit:
** spoiler omitted **...
Thanks, Weirdo.
I tend to scribble things down during games as I go and that list has grown. I like your edits. I just cut and pasted it into my Onenote :)
I can see your point and this conversation came up when our group decided to add Military Knowledge and after two nights of discussions followed by emails we play tested it for several campaigns and it worked fine. It gave the combatant class (especially fighter) more depth. The occult was a natural add after the addition of Occult Adventures and now Horror Adventures. I think as long as the addition is a positive to the role playing experience and it helps to flesh out and provide more depth to a character the benefits outweigh the negatives.
I am always concerned about rolling knowledge skills together. A good example is LOCAL and HISTORY. I don't see those as very similar...A Wharf Rat Rogue will be well versed in LOCAL but no so much in HISTORY. Were as a Cloistered Monk would be well versed in HISTORY and not so much in LOCAL... It boils down to preference though and that is what matters :)
ALLENDM
|
|
Glad that was useful!
There's definitely a balance between having skills that are too broad to express characters' varied abilities and skills that are too specific to be useful.
For example, I would not be a fan of a system that had the knowledge skills "Magic" (Arcana, Planes, Religion) "People" (Local, History, Nobility) and "Science" (Nature, Geography, Dungeoneering, Engineering). On the other hand, no one seems inclined to split "Nature" into Botany, Zoology, Meteorology, and Fey Lore, despite the fact that those are very reasonable distinctions in real life (aside from not having IRL "fairy science" T_T).
I think at minimum there's a good argument to merge History into one or more related skills. Nobility is the best bet, since "lineages, heraldry, personalities, royalty" are interwoven with a good chunk of history and education in history is likely to be much more common in the upper class, to whom noble lineages would also be important. Geography's a little harder, but it's distinctly less useful than the other knowledge skills and can probably be covered by some combination of Local (where do the people live?), Nature (what is the terrain and weather like?) and Survival (how do I navigate?).
Of course, you could also combine a relatively broad approach to skills with a more detailed list of background skills. I wouldn't put Knowledge (Nature) into background skills because it's a fairly useful skill. But I could absolutely offer Botany as a background skill, functioning like Knowledge (Nature) but only to identify plants and plant creatures.
Glad that was useful!
There's definitely a balance between having skills that are too broad to express characters' varied abilities and skills that are too specific to be useful.
For example, I would not be a fan of a system that had the knowledge skills "Magic" (Arcana, Planes, Religion) "People" (Local, History, Nobility) and "Science" (Nature, Geography, Dungeoneering, Engineering). On the other hand, no one seems inclined to split "Nature" into Botany, Zoology, Meteorology, and Fey Lore, despite the fact that those are very reasonable distinctions in real life (aside from not having IRL "fairy science" T_T).
I think at minimum there's a good argument to merge History into one or more related skills. Nobility is the best bet, since "lineages, heraldry, personalities, royalty" are interwoven with a good chunk of history and education in history is likely to be much more common in the upper class, to whom noble lineages would also be important. Geography's a little harder, but it's distinctly less useful than the other knowledge skills and can probably be covered by some combination of Local (where do the people live?), Nature (what is the terrain and weather like?) and Survival (how do I navigate?).
Of course, you could also combine a relatively broad approach to skills with a more detailed list of background skills. I wouldn't put Knowledge (Nature) into background skills because it's a fairly useful skill. But I could absolutely offer Botany as a background skill, functioning like Knowledge (Nature) but only to identify plants and plant creatures.
Those are all great points. I think History and Nobility could easily be rolled into one... I also see how they could be separated if you are running a campaign heavy in social classes and you are running a intrigue heavy campaign...especially if it is heavy in mixing classes... I think someone mentioned already but adaption to the campaign has to happen as well :)
I also think you make a great point on Nature but I could also argue that in a fantasy world the Fey myth...history would tie strongly into all aspects of the nature...
But again these are great points... This entire thread has been an outstanding one.
Crap, you guys just pointed out something: nobility should've been bunched together with history, not geography. It makes more sense that way. Hmmmm.
One of the biggest conundrums I find are that often history gets terribly under-regarded, at least by my group. It may be that history just doesn't seem to take a center stage in our campaigns (we tend to be more 'PRESENT ACTIONS AFFECTING THE FUUUUTUUUUURE' kind of people) but it's also because we're all RPers, so a lot of the lore in the game is already known to them. Perhaps I need to present the information more ambiguously, but generally they can figure things out on their own OOCly (Oh, well, we're in ruins that used to be Xin-Bakrakahn, so clearly that's a statue of Alaznist.)
Trying to figure out ways to diversify it. I almost feel like state legislature should be history instead of local (or in my case geography). Maybe holiday trends too given their historical significance. Geography/local could detail how to celebrate the holiday, but not the story behind it.
|
|
Ah, your first post mentioned rolling together History and Nobility, and I lost track as the idea developed.
I think there's no problem with Local/Geography covering the broad strokes of the folklore behind a holiday, but not being able to assess how much of the story is true without History.
For example, if reflecting on American Thanksgiving then Local might give you the "First Thanksgiving" story, for example, but History would tell you that the pilgrims didn't call it "Thanksgiving" or wear big buckles on their clothes and that it took quite some time for Thanksgiving to become a regular national holiday.
Oh, huh. Wow, I do not keep track of my own previous assessments... well, it was a long while back. Excellent example, Wierdo. Will help me explain it to people when there's a chance.
I'm coming back, Aldrius, to try MapTool again. When I can. (I got distracted this past week, I'm afraid.)
I kinda wanted to dust this off a bit as a self-reminder and also to revivify the conversation, see if one year later people have new opinions on the matter.