Coidzor
2011-10-28, 01:45 PM
So, I was reading a thread recently and the combination of bardic knack and jack of all trades was brought up again. This combination continually underwhelms me for anything other than high level play where having decent modifiers to skills that are easily obviated is kinda irrelevant. Something about having the check of a 2nd level character at level 10 just bugs me, I suppose...
So I sometimes wonder about ways that it could've been different.
Since we have two progressions handy in the form of Good Saves and Average BAB, one of which equals and the other succeeds max cross-class ranks but neither comes near to max ranks I figured I'd see what people noticed about how things would be different in such cases.
With the game being what it is, there's no reason for a character to put max ranks in a cross-class skill, since there are so many ways of making it a class skill, and so it doesn't seem, on the surface, to set the game on fire to make the class feature more relevant or at least relevant sooner.
So, does it have a non-negligible effect if Bards with Bardic Knack start with 2 virtual ranks that start increasing with level 2 rather than one virtual rank that doesn't start increasing until level 4? This seems to me like it wouldn't really alter the strength of bardic knack but it would make it useful from level 1, whereas RAW bardic knack seems like it doesn't really become relevant except for things like forgery where one's rolling against people who don't have anything other than their ability modifiers until about level 10 when it makes one resistant to the grease spell a good while after it left standard combat repetoires.
What would be the effect of it not having an effect until level 2, then increasing once per level for three levels, taking a break, and then going on again just like the bard's BAB? It seems like it would keep it largely negligible at low levels just like the original but that it'd start to become relevant more quickly, for instance making a bard resist grease at 7th level by having 5 "ranks" in Balance rather than not getting active until level 10. It seems like it would do this without competing against the checks of characters that actually want a niche though, as it starts 4 behind a max skill and the gap widens to 8, so they do become relatively worse.
Bonus Round: What if Bardic Knack stacked with ranks in skills? Would that be enough to upset the Factotum as king of skills? On the surface that seems like it would allow the bard to compete with the rogue for number of skills that have a bonus comparable to a class with max ranks bought for low-to-mid levels and then at higher levels it would allow the bard to start edging out the competition where it specialized by being able to make the low-end of epic checks faster.
As an aside would that last scenario make the diplomancer get off the ground faster, or does the current fast-track method still win out?
What about if Bardic Knack gave the equivalent of putting one skill point into all skills every 2 levels? This would make it so that at at level 2, one could attempt any skill check due to that half-rank clause and then at level 4, one would have 1 rank in all cross-class skills and 2 ranks in class skills in addition to whatever skillpoints they had allocated from their HD. Would that be both effective and encouraging a broadening of skill set rather than the hyper-specialization that it ordinarily encourages?
So I sometimes wonder about ways that it could've been different.
Since we have two progressions handy in the form of Good Saves and Average BAB, one of which equals and the other succeeds max cross-class ranks but neither comes near to max ranks I figured I'd see what people noticed about how things would be different in such cases.
With the game being what it is, there's no reason for a character to put max ranks in a cross-class skill, since there are so many ways of making it a class skill, and so it doesn't seem, on the surface, to set the game on fire to make the class feature more relevant or at least relevant sooner.
So, does it have a non-negligible effect if Bards with Bardic Knack start with 2 virtual ranks that start increasing with level 2 rather than one virtual rank that doesn't start increasing until level 4? This seems to me like it wouldn't really alter the strength of bardic knack but it would make it useful from level 1, whereas RAW bardic knack seems like it doesn't really become relevant except for things like forgery where one's rolling against people who don't have anything other than their ability modifiers until about level 10 when it makes one resistant to the grease spell a good while after it left standard combat repetoires.
What would be the effect of it not having an effect until level 2, then increasing once per level for three levels, taking a break, and then going on again just like the bard's BAB? It seems like it would keep it largely negligible at low levels just like the original but that it'd start to become relevant more quickly, for instance making a bard resist grease at 7th level by having 5 "ranks" in Balance rather than not getting active until level 10. It seems like it would do this without competing against the checks of characters that actually want a niche though, as it starts 4 behind a max skill and the gap widens to 8, so they do become relatively worse.
Bonus Round: What if Bardic Knack stacked with ranks in skills? Would that be enough to upset the Factotum as king of skills? On the surface that seems like it would allow the bard to compete with the rogue for number of skills that have a bonus comparable to a class with max ranks bought for low-to-mid levels and then at higher levels it would allow the bard to start edging out the competition where it specialized by being able to make the low-end of epic checks faster.
As an aside would that last scenario make the diplomancer get off the ground faster, or does the current fast-track method still win out?
What about if Bardic Knack gave the equivalent of putting one skill point into all skills every 2 levels? This would make it so that at at level 2, one could attempt any skill check due to that half-rank clause and then at level 4, one would have 1 rank in all cross-class skills and 2 ranks in class skills in addition to whatever skillpoints they had allocated from their HD. Would that be both effective and encouraging a broadening of skill set rather than the hyper-specialization that it ordinarily encourages?