Steel Mirror
2014-04-20, 02:46 PM
In my group, I've noticed a definite trend over the years that the skill list is the portion of the character sheet that players get the least excited about (barring the occasional player who plays a skill-heavy rogue for RP reasons). As I think about a swashbuckling-type campaign that I am planning to start up soon, I am realizing that I want to buff skills to promote the sort of derring-do that the genre celebrates. In particular I want to make it quite simple for any character class to achieve impressive and reliable ability with a small set of skills appropriate to their archetype, at very little investment of character resources. To that end, I am thinking of changing the Skill Focus feat to the following.
Skill Focus
Choose two skills that you have at least one rank in. You are particularly adept at those skills.
Benefit: You roll two d20's when making any skill check with one of the chosen skills, and take the result you prefer. Additionally, both skills you chose are now treated as class skills even if they were not before you chose this feat.
Special: You can gain this feat multiple times. Its effects do not stack. Each time you take the feat, it applies to new skills.
Now this is clearly powerful compared to other skill affecting feats and options in Pathfinder, and that is the point. It makes it much easier to succeed at routine or moderately challenging tasks, makes succeeding at very difficult tasks somewhat easier (though not as much as the normal Skill Focus feat does), and crucially it makes it very rare for characters with a decent amount of competence to fail at easy tasks. I think that last one is particularly important, because nothing rains on your master-saboteur super-spy's parade like making it all the way through a big heist flawlessly and then setting off the alert because you rolled a 2 on your check to turn off your car alarm in the parking lot. Or whatever.
Another thing that I notice with low-level characters (and this will probably be an E6 or E8 game) is that they are incredibly feat starved, so every character will be starting with an additional 2 bonus feats. My group also uses critical success/failure rules on natural 20/1 respectively. I mention those houserules only because it might affect how you evaluate this feat in the context of my upcoming game, and how likely it is that players choose Skill Focus as one of their precious feats.
So after looking at the modified feat, are there any pitfalls you can foresee that might trip me up if I let my characters take it? Any non-obvious synergies that break the game? Some loophole that leaps to your mind that I should be prepared to nip in the bud if any players look to exploit it? Or is there some change that you would make to my version of the feat that you think makes it work a little better? Thanks for your honest critique, and for reading my ramblings!
Skill Focus
Choose two skills that you have at least one rank in. You are particularly adept at those skills.
Benefit: You roll two d20's when making any skill check with one of the chosen skills, and take the result you prefer. Additionally, both skills you chose are now treated as class skills even if they were not before you chose this feat.
Special: You can gain this feat multiple times. Its effects do not stack. Each time you take the feat, it applies to new skills.
Now this is clearly powerful compared to other skill affecting feats and options in Pathfinder, and that is the point. It makes it much easier to succeed at routine or moderately challenging tasks, makes succeeding at very difficult tasks somewhat easier (though not as much as the normal Skill Focus feat does), and crucially it makes it very rare for characters with a decent amount of competence to fail at easy tasks. I think that last one is particularly important, because nothing rains on your master-saboteur super-spy's parade like making it all the way through a big heist flawlessly and then setting off the alert because you rolled a 2 on your check to turn off your car alarm in the parking lot. Or whatever.
Another thing that I notice with low-level characters (and this will probably be an E6 or E8 game) is that they are incredibly feat starved, so every character will be starting with an additional 2 bonus feats. My group also uses critical success/failure rules on natural 20/1 respectively. I mention those houserules only because it might affect how you evaluate this feat in the context of my upcoming game, and how likely it is that players choose Skill Focus as one of their precious feats.
So after looking at the modified feat, are there any pitfalls you can foresee that might trip me up if I let my characters take it? Any non-obvious synergies that break the game? Some loophole that leaps to your mind that I should be prepared to nip in the bud if any players look to exploit it? Or is there some change that you would make to my version of the feat that you think makes it work a little better? Thanks for your honest critique, and for reading my ramblings!