I was going through some of the classes here and I thought back to the days when I played on Elements of Aesyr. I feel its feasible to implement more pnp skills as that will allow us to 1) set pnp requirements for PrCs and 2) give us more variety with characters and their various 'skills'. At least with skills like sense motive, or the knowledge skills, or even the more physical skills we would have more flavor with our characters.
Another perk is that module builders can then script in little requirements that make skill checks for some of these skills. I can remember an underground river on aesyr that forced a swim check every so often while you were in the river. If you failed it would sweep you back towards a side exit that threw you to the world map. Hehehe. That was nifty. I can also remember climb checks in another couple parts.
Anyways, its another project I'm putting on my cue of things to work on.
The one annoying thing about adding extra skills would be the need to rebuild our characters to take advantage of them.
That said, I always thought a few extra skills would be nice--especially in the case of something like sense motive, where an ability roll just doesn't cut it. I would suggest that climb/swim/jump etc. all be lumped under a generic strength-based athletics skill, however. Considering how little we'd actually be using them individually (occasional DM quest situation or one roll in a dungeon), I have the feeling nobody would want to take "swim" or "climb" by themselves (and they're hardly skills that tend to get maxed out in PnP either, if taken at all).
I'd suggest narrowing down to things that would actually be useful/ required while at the same time not punishing people who don't invest in those skills. One thing that really needs to be remembered; playing a video game is VERY different from playing PnP for many reasons, and it doesn't make sense to translate/ break down all of- or even the vast majority of- the pnp skill sets.
WHile I am not saying that we shouldn't add skills at all, I would rather we not have the sheer overload that PnP does. Lore for example is something that i'd rather leave in the singular lore skill rather than break it up into several specialized things.
What I would suggest adding, skill wise, is something that would be warrior specific. As it stands, warrior PC's really don't have much in the way of useful skills besides forging and intimidate. I'd suggest grapple, but the last time this was looked into in Beldin, the result was....a little awkward visually. Still, if we can work around that, i'd be good with adding in grapple.
Question; would it be possible to add an "improvise weapon" skill and system? Something that let you arm specially tagged items (like a tankard or club with a particular tag) and get bonus damage for it based on your "improvise weapon" skill? Would make sense for the grand assassin or warrior whose able to pick up a rolling pin and use it as a deadly weapon :P .
Regarding skill requirements for PRC's...again, like I said in the other thread, i'm kind of uneasy about altering such things.
Grappling isn't a skill, it's a standard action alongside other unimplemented crowd-controls such as bull rush, trip, overrun, sunder, shield bash, aid...
See, thats the point. If you invest in the "improvise weapon" skill, your penalties get increasingly negated and you might even get bonuses for wielding objects tagged as say, "mundane" .
You'd be surprised when the uses for those skills come up. It really depends on how much variety we have in the available areas. Contrary to the fears of the extra skills being useless. They prove to simply be viable options to take. Likewise, the notion of min-maxing skills is really just one approach to building characters in an online setting to 'excel' in the game. I personally see no harm in the additional skills. If people want to take them they can take em. If they don't. They can skip em. However it would go a long ways towards eliminating the old argument with nwn. "We don't actually have that skill in game so lets roll this instead."
In pnp you don't really go all out to totally maximize one or two skills necessarily so a variety of skills taken that fit a particular character can only accent the character and the rp done with that character. I can personally attest to having made use of many skills that I kept to a few ranks of training. It was enough to do a crude job of the task but not really intended to demonstrate mastery by any means.
As for the knowledge skills, I understand why they did what they did with it. It does not make sense for all knowledge to fall under one measly skilll that you can shoot up to ungodly totals.... The breakdown represents a particular specialty knowledge and frankly if we were going to attempt to rewrite the epic spells to function like pnp, we would definitely need the respective skills that determine available epic spell slots for a class.
Elements of Aesyr had the skills available and it did not punish anyone in the least for skipping certain skills. The whole concept of class based skills would kinda imply that some are gonna be inclined to be skilled in certain areas while others are not gonna know squat. The physical skill breakdown to an extent is kinda excessive in the split. However I wouldn't totally toss out the separate swim check as opposed to the other skills. Coincidentally 3.5 PHB doesn't include the athletics stuff.
As I had mentioned, this is all stuff to mull over and implement in time. Its not something that would be rushed in.
Well I support splitting up lore a bit, I never liked the idea that somebody would know everything about the planes, gods, ancient languages, and generic lore-things all from maxing out one skill.
In PnP (i.e. core rulesbooks 3.5), the athletics-type skills are, as you said, excessively split, and I don't see the point of carrying all of that over.
Rewriting the epic spells (and adding to them) would be awesome, if there was time for it at some point.
But, as far as the areas go, how much we want to add in skill checks and enviromental effects is a whole different discussion. In general, I'm for the idea (hey, we can have the swim and ride systems in, no problem), but the argument can also be made that it makes the areas less flexible.
I wouldn't think it would cause the areas to be less flexable I think it could add incentive to allow for new ways to use the maps. Instead of designating that the only way to cross this section of the river is to swim across.. Or Jump across this hole or what have you. Would of course mean map designers would have to provide alternate options.. or areas to get a cross.. Also It could be possible for someone with a survival and spot / search to discover a well disguised path down the embankment . Or what looks to be the ruins of a bridge is actually a ploy to discourage. admittedly this could also be handled by the DM, but some of it would be nice to have scripted into the maps to some degree. incase the DM may forget what the map has to offer.
