Skills Handbook?

[Sintanan]

Is there a handbook on maximizing or generally abusing different skills?

I mean, I know of the diplomancer, and some tricks to abusing jump to deal massive damage ala dragoon lancer combat, and the maximizing of basketweaving, but outside of those three skills, I've never come across a detailed description of how to max out or abuse a skill.

Specifically, there's three skills I want to know about:
1) Use rope. There has to be some nasty tricks hidden in abusing this one.
2) How can you max Disguise and Bluff easily?

[Gotterdammerung]

I don't know about specific guides.

I've talked on a few threads about ways to optimize handle animal.


Marshall, Factotum, and Magic of Incarnum are all useful tools to check before you try for amping a specific skill.

Then there will always be skill specific feats and some of them will be pretty obscure.

I will fill in stuff as I find it that boost the specific skills you listed.

Sailor's bracers- +4 insight bonus on use rope. Another +2 per essentia invested. Highest possible bonus of +18 with 7 essentia invested (would require an 18th lvl character with at least 15 lvls of incarnate and 1 feat).

Silvertongue Mask- +2 insight bonus to bluff. Another +2 per essentia invested. Highest possible bonus of +16 with 7 essentia invested (would require an 18th lvl character with at least 15 lvls of incarnate and 1 feat).

Rapscallion (dragon magazine)- add your int as well as your cha to your bluff checks.

The appropriate motivate aura from marshall will add your cha to the skill in question.

Brains over brawn- (factotum ability) would let you add your intelligence modifier to use rope (as well as all other str and dex based skills and str and dex based checks).

Warlock has a low lvl invocation that gives +5 bluff.

[Bloodgruve]

Item Familiar allows you to gain a bonus to a skill equal to the ranks you have effectively doubling it. This comes with some risk though as you can lose a lot if the item is lost/stolen/destroyed. Check with your DM before you bank on this, some people really dislike this feat ;)

For Bluff the bard spell Glibness gives +30.

I believe skill bolstering items can be created at a cost of Skill Bonus^2 x 100gp. I've only seen +15 to a skill so I'm not sure if something is in place that disallows you to create a higher bonus item. A +20 skill would cost 40K gp with this formula.

Blood~

[Sintanan]

So a factotum/marshall rapscallion with incarnum and an item familiar, a few potions of glibness, and skill enhancement magic items gets us where we want to go... but what can we do with this?

[Ketiara]

I mean, I know of the diplomancer, and some tricks to abusing jump to deal massive damage ala dragoon lancer combat, and the maximizing of basketweaving, but outside of those three skills, I've never come across a detailed description of how to max out or abuse a skill.



Now im curious because Ive heard about something involving these skills, but its always been assumed ppl knew what was ment. Can someone please explain them?

[eggs]

Diplomacy is an utterly broken skill as written. One roll can make enemies lose the interest in fighting the party, or even turn their worst enemies into devoted allies - and it doesn't matter who the enemies are or how badly they want to stick the PCs' heads on a pike; the DCs are the same, and tend to be rather on the low end.

There's a class in Complete Adventurer called the Exemplar that allows any skill check to be used in place of a Diplomacy roll. That's where Jump comes in. Jump can be easily raised higher than any other (it gets bonuses from common speed boosts, the easy-to-raise Strength stat and a few specific spells targeting it), so using it for the core of a diplomacy build makes it fairly easy to hit the epic DCs to turn Hostile creatures into a character's Fanatic allies.

Underwater basket-weaving is what makes liberal arts students the brokenest.