Hot answers tagged skills
32
They don't actually need it.
I realize this is radical, but bear with me. We need to not expect them to be masters of wilderness survival --in all honesty, they aren't. Animals die in the wild all the time. They starve, they freeze, they get lost, they fall in caves and can't get out. That said, they're actually not awful at Survival and the way they're ...
24
Your total bonus column is your total bonus column, and it's comprised of your Ranks, your Ability Modifier, and any other modifiers you might have. So your first option is the right one - Ranks describes the number of skill points you explicitly put into that skill. Anything else is your "total skill modifier", not the number of Ranks.
22
This exact setup happens all the time in movies, so let's examine how they handle it.
If they are the only character, then as a GM, completely tune the story to them. They shouldn't have to do hacking, or at best they have to shoot their way in to where the Russian hacker who already knows stuff is. James Bond doesn't use keyboards. Avoid his minimums ...
21
Do they actually need to roll? No, seriously, why are they rolling dice to do this?...
You can have automatic successes if the character's skill is high enough. This would solve the vast majority of the problems you seem to have. Second, some things will not be possible unless you have a high skill enough. I might know kung fu but that does not help me ...
20
A few games resolve this situation by dealing with it explicitly in the rules, and building the check system to accomodate how it handles this situation. The most notable one is Burning Wheel and its Let It Ride rule:
The result of one test stands for the duration of the situation.
When in a situation like this, the success or failure of the attempt ...
19
First of all, it's a Knowledge check
Don't lose sight of the fact that the player asked to make a Knowledge check because he or she wants information. There's no way around that. Don't worry about that information breaking the flow. If the player doesn't want to break the flow by getting that information, he or she would not be requesting the check.
Tease ...
17
The original Runequest was a lot like that: the world was quite magical, and most PCs had some magic available to them. Experience worked just like you're thinking about. When you used a skill, you checked it off, and if you could roll higher than that skill during the downtime, it'd improve. It was thus easier to get better at a skill the worse you were at ...
17
[The following is based on my experiences in 3.5e, but from what I know about Pathfinder it should be trivially adapted. Also, I apologize in advance for what I'm certain will be a post filled with incorrect terminology -- I've been playing 4e for quite some time now, and it's been even longer since I last sat down with 3.5e.]
If you think Diplomacy is ...
17
No, they do not.
Skill ranks refer only to the number of well, ranks that you've put into the skill.
I can't find an exact reference to back that up, but they make a big deal when referring to ranks vs bonuses:
Each level, your character gains a
number of skill ranks dependent upon
your class plus your Intelligence
modifier. Investing a rank in ...
17
I'm often unable to find where my cat is sleeping, so I'd say yes, sleeping characters can still be hidden. I'd say have the character make a single hide check when they go to sleep to establish a DC (you should probably throw in a negative circumstance modifier since they won't be able to adapt to circumstances like an active, conscious hider would). ...
17
Allowing skill checks to use different ability scores for skill checks in unusual situations is already an official rules variant suggested on page 33 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. It's in the page footer, and in addition to some examples of using different ability scores with your skill ranks, has this to say:
These sorts of unusual situations are ...
16
First things first: from what I can tell, that rule has never been errata'd, so we can go by what's in the Player's Handbook.
I would say allow it at pretty much any time, but don't forget that you can add circumstantial bonuses and penalties (+2 or -2). If the enemy's side is clearly winning, the bloodied creature would be less likely to retreat. Many ...
16
Creatures' skills are listed at the bottom of their info sheet/card.
Creature sheets have ability modifier + half level, which is what you should be using, already calculated at the bottom of the sheet.
For example, a level 14 lich necromancer has the following ability stats at the bottom of his/her monster sheet:
Skills: Arcana +18, History +18, Insight ...
15
So, here's my approach:
A custom skill can be bought at the cost of any 2 other skills. This includes skills a character gets as part of his class.
The custom skill must be some sort of role (sailor, soldier, blacksmith, whatever) but it must also have a setting specific context (i.e. a sailor must have sailed with a particular navy or merchant fleet or ...
13
Classes:
Artificer
Assassin
Monk
Runepriest
Warlock
General Backgrounds:
Burglar
Circus Performer
Curious Archeologist
Cutpurse
Early Life - Imprisoned
Early Life - Test Subject
Martial - Guild Orphan
Occupation - Criminal
Occupation - Poison Master
Occupation - Thief
Penitent
Recent Life - Explorer of the Ancient
Recent Life - Freeing Slaves
Recent ...
13
Caveat: the answer to this question is going to depend heavily on your DM, and how they feel about and portray the use of social skills. Some DMs don't much care, and will allow you to use these skills with little penalty or roleplay required. Other DMs may view social skills as potentially game-breaking, or at least very important to handle correctly. If ...
13
They do stack. You won't find any help in the rules for Armor or Shields, but the Rules Compendium (p 314) has a general entry for penalties:
Penalty
A number subtracted from a die roll. Unlike bonuses, penalties don’t have types. Penalties add together, unless they’re from the same named game element (such as a power or a trait).
Shields and Armor ...
12
Knowledge (royalty) I'll give you. It's dumb and should get stuck into Kno(history) or (local) unless you are running an all courtly intrigue all the time game. But Knowledge (nature) is used for "monster ID" of animals, fey, giants, monstrous humanoids, plants, and vermin - it's one of the better ones! And Knowledge (local) has been invaluable in my ...
12
A list of classes that start with thievery, ordered by ability:
Thief (Essentials)
These folks are rated the highest due to the Level 2 ability: Skill Mastery (which gives an extra success on a 20) and Dex is their primary stat. They also get rogue utilities which can enhance thievery significantly.
Rogue
Excels in thievery for the obvious reasons.
...
12
There's really no answer to that.
First of all, if we look at skills. BESM did something quite smart which is have genre based skill costs rather than fixed skill costs, most systems don't even do that, yet they have similar costs. FATE is already like that, so you've already got a situation where the ranks aren't worth the same even if you pay the same. ...
12
Yes, she would
This isn't explicitly laid out in the rules, but it can be inferred.
In addition, each class has a number of favored skills, called class
skills. It is easier for your character to become more proficient in
these skills, as they represent part of his professional training and
constant practice. You gain a +3 bonus on all class ...
12
From Player's Handbook 1, pg178 (emphasis mine):
The DC depends on what you're trying to accomplish and is ultimately set by the Dungeon Master... The DM sets the DCs for specific situations based on level, conditions, and circumstances.
Staying conscious is likely to be a much lower DC for the heavy drinker than it is for the teetotaler. Likewise, ...
12
I personally allow use of Perception to find obvious things - like "Oh look he has a bunch of big slash wounds." But I require Heal, as the general doctoring skill in Pathfinder, to make any definitive medical sense out of them, like "those slash wounds are/are not what killed him" (DC 15) or "those slash wounds were postmortem" (DC 20). Generally I'd just ...
12
Easiest way is to note the players perception skill (and other useful info) on a stat reference block and make the roll yourself.
This means you're making a roll for some reason however, which may get the players meta hackles twitching.
An option to avoid this that doesn't even involve rolling a dice (if you don't even want that to be seen) is pre-roll a ...
12
In an average deadlift, a character with +3 Might and Inhuman Strength have the same level of capability.
However, that is nowhere near the whole story.
First of all, the game doesn't care about the average deadlift. They only care about deadlifts that might advance the story - and in those cases there is going to be a choice about whether or not to spend ...
11
It can be any of the following approaches:
The GM describes the skills needed, and the players play them as they roll them.
The GM has a set of needed skill rolls in mind, and as the players interact appropriately, allows rolling them to accomplish the skill challenge
The GM has more skills than are needed for a skill challenge, and fills in the skill ...
11
Sources for converting from
Other Gamer forms:
Video Gamers into CRPGs
Board Gamers into character driven and/or character scale boardgames
Miniatures Gamers, especially those into 1 figure represents 1 man games
LARPers (but many of them already are into tabletop RPGs)
other übergeekly types
Trekkies/Trekkers - but you need to break them in with a ...
11
As usual, the SRD knows all.
What you see are two steps of a single process:
First the wizard must interpret and understand the spellbook/scroll. This is a Spellcraft check, and takes eight hours.
Once understood, the wizard writes the spell into his spellbook. This process takes 24 hours.
The total time to copy a spell from another wizard's spellbook ...
11
For Skills when you multiclass all your skills immediately get the +3 class bonus provided you have at least one one rank in them.
Thus for your example:
Bob the fighter has 1 rank in acrobatics, and no stat bonus.
Bob gets +1 bonus.
Bob levels and takes 1 level in rogue. Bob now get +3 to acrobatics as acrobatics is a class skill for rogues, even ...
11
One good way to handle this is to assign one person as the "leader" in the action, and the others as "assistants." Even if they're undertaking the tasks independently, you can flavor their actions as the use of whatever aid-another mechanic your system uses. ("I loosened it for you!"; "Your joking comment reminds me of something my grandmother once told me ...
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