DM Removed Skill Rank Limits

[Hedgelord]

The DM for my current campaign has told us that we don't need to follow the rule that limits your total ranks in a skill to you current hit dice, and I was looking for builds that take advantage of this fact. Any powerful prestige classes that could be taken at lower levels from this change or feat paths that are more easily accessible without the skill rank limit.

[flappeercraft]

The DM for my current campaign has told us that we don't need to follow the rule that limits your total ranks in a skill to you current hit dice, and I was looking for builds that take advantage of this fact. Any powerful prestige classes that could be taken at lower levels from this change or feat paths that are more easily accessible without the skill rank limit.

It could be useful for Knowledge devotion builds

[zlefin]

you should tell your dm to not do that; cuz it's going to cause some very stupid things to happen most likely.
also, is this pf or 3.5 or what?

[GilesTheCleric]

you should tell your dm to not do that; cuz it's going to cause some very stupid things to happen most likely.
also, is this pf or 3.5 or what?

Sounds like PF from the "Skill ranks == HD" text. I agree that this could be a bit unbalancing. Is your GM aware of what kind of changes this could make, particularly for skills like Diplomacy or Stealth?

[JNAProductions]

Diplomacy. Be an Humie Rogue, with Skill Focus (Diplomacy), Negotiator, and 18 Int. Then pump Charisma as high as it can go (15, with 24 point buy).

That's +3 (Skill Focus) +2 (Negotiator) +2 (Charisma Modifier) +48 (Skill Ranks) for +55 Diplomacy.

At level 1.

You win.

[Baby Gary]

Diplomacy. Be an Humie Rogue, with Skill Focus (Diplomacy), Negotiator, and 18 Int. Then pump Charisma as high as it can go (15, with 24 point buy).

That's +3 (Skill Focus) +2 (Negotiator) +2 (Charisma Modifier) +48 (Skill Ranks) for +55 Diplomacy.

At level 1.

You win.

you forgot something that will give you a nice boost (+6), its called 'Nymph's Kiss (BoED)', trade that out for negotiator and get +59 diplomacy, to lowest you can get is 60. So now you can make a hurried check (-10) and still always make people fanatic. EVEN BETTER!

[Gildedragon]

On a less cheesy note:
You can enter a fair few PRCs quite early with that.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Go Savage Bard 2 into Ur-Priest.

[ATHATH]

Remember that the Changeling Rogue 1st level substitution level is a thing.

Enter the Chameleon PrC at 1st level! Suddenly, a Changeling Rogue 1/Chameleon 9/Eldritch Master 10 build is feasible (without Bloodline levels)...

[Endarire]

Early Jade Phoenix Mage is possible, especially with Precocious Apprentice.

[Sagetim]

Truenaming becomes viable from the Tome of Magic. That's 3.5, so if you were talking pathfinder the rest of my ramble here is meaningless to your question. Truenaming generally suffers from a problem where your ability to raise your skill modifier is arithmetic, basically just +1 per level, maybe with the odd spike when you get a new magic item. The dc to use truenaming, however, is geometric. It starts a 15+2xCR of the target. So you start with a dc 17 against opponents who are about level 1 or 2 or whatever. Then it gets higher faster than your level.

Now, if you can just dump as many skill points as you have into truenaming, you could quickly reach a Truenaming Modifier that would allow you to take full advantage of feats that normally are practically worthless. So the Truenamer has a 4 + int mod skill points per level, let's go with a 16 starting int assumption (since you're going to be dumping some of your other stats anyway), and human, to net us 8 skill points per level, x4 at first level because 3.5. With 32 ranks of Truenaming, and a +3 int mod, we have a +35 to Truespeaking checks. With two first level feats we could grab Extended Utterance and Empowered Utterance, since we meet the skill rank requirements of the feats. The DC modifiers for these feats are +5 and +10 respectively, and you can use them on, say, Word of Nurturing Least to get a little more mileage out of that crap utterance. Since your party members are CR 1, at best, at level 1, you can easily hit a dc 17 to affect them. You could easily hit a dc of 22 to affect them and have the utterance last twice as long. Word of Nurturing, Least gives Fast Healing 1 for 5 rounds (10 with extended). You can only have one active at a time, but as you go up in level you can get the other Word of Nurturings, and have one of each level active at a time. Furthermore, if you take, say, Minor Utterance of the Evolving Mind at level 1 instead of Extended Utterance, then your level 3 feat can be Utterance of the Perfected Map, since you will know 4 utterances already AND have more than 15 ranks of Truespeaking. This is when it goes from 'wow, you can do that a lot and it's not very impressive' to 'wait, what?'. Because you can now take Shockwave. It's not Fireball, but you can spam the crap out of it because it's a Location True Name, which have a set DC instead of a variable one. And while you might not get a lot of damage out of it (1d4 nonlethal) it has a fort save vs knock down. On a 20ft radius within 100 feet of you. So you can shockwave the goblins over and laugh as they waste their turn standing as you Shockwave them again until they are so subdual that you can just take your time macing them in the face while they remain knocked out. At level 3.

But yeah, most of the shenanigans that are going to arise from this are going to come from either a) exploiting epic level rules for skill usage (which I know are a 3.5 thing, and can't recall if it's a Pathfinder thing too), and generally exploiting skill rank requirements to either enter prcs early, or more likely, get feats sooner than regular.

A Pathfinder exploit that you could use from this involves Path of War. Since you don't have a rank cap, you could pump skill points into Knowledge (martial) and take various levels of Martial Training far sooner than normal, starting with your first level feat and working your way up from there to basically staple maneuver using onto any other build. Normally that feat chain has a BAB or Knowledge (Martial) rank requirement, starting with 3 for the first one, then going to 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. You would still be subjected to actual level limits on some things though, so taking the second feat at level 1 would actually be a detriment, since your effective initiator level wouldn't be high enough to take any second level maneuvers (since that's still locked down by your actual level).

[Particle_Man]

Well in core, the Assassin and Dragon Disciple are doable at character level 2. The prestigious spellcaster feat can plug in holes in spellcaster level progression, so Dragon Disciple looks attractive, if this is pathfinder. The assassin will never be super-powerful, but a death attack at level 2 is at least interesting (if this is a good party go bard 1/assassin X so that you can hide your alignment with a level 1 bard spell).

[chaos_redefined]

Truenaming becomes viable from the Tome of Magic. That's 3.5, so if you were talking pathfinder the rest of my ramble here is meaningless to your question. Truenaming generally suffers from a problem where your ability to raise your skill modifier is arithmetic, basically just +1 per level, maybe with the odd spike when you get a new magic item. The dc to use truenaming, however, is geometric. It starts a 15+2xCR of the target. So you start with a dc 17 against opponents who are about level 1 or 2 or whatever. Then it gets higher faster than your level.

That gets you past the problem where truenaming is near impossible to use (although it is both arithmetic growth, +1 per level and +2 per level. Geometric would be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc...) It still doesn't get past the problem that the levels at which you get stuff are horribly delayed compared to when a warlock would get them, and he doesn't have to use a skill check to do stuff.


A Pathfinder exploit that you could use from this involves Path of War. Since you don't have a rank cap, you could pump skill points into Knowledge (martial) and take various levels of Martial Training far sooner than normal, starting with your first level feat and working your way up from there to basically staple maneuver using onto any other build. Normally that feat chain has a BAB or Knowledge (Martial) rank requirement, starting with 3 for the first one, then going to 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. You would still be subjected to actual level limits on some things though, so taking the second feat at level 1 would actually be a detriment, since your effective initiator level wouldn't be high enough to take any second level maneuvers (since that's still locked down by your actual level).

I'll also point out the maneuvers that are dependent on a skill. In 3.5, there are a whole heap dependent on concentration in Diamond Mind. In ToB, there are multiple maneuvers that care about a skill, just stick to your preferred disciple and have, for example, an effective once-per-encounter AC of way-too-high.

[Sagetim]

Maneuvers in path of war also have some that are skill based, but instead of the diamond mind "everything keyed off concentration, the maneuver" it tends to only be counters (defensive moves that eat an immediate action to use). So having dizzyingly ridiculously high ranks in any given skill isn't going to blow your maneuvers that far out from what their effectiveness might already be at anyway. After all, if you can beat the opponents check on a 1 anyway, then how much you beat it by really doesn't matter.

The dangerous element would be when you combine it with skills that are useful outside of maneuver context, like Diplomacy and Golden Lion for Pathfinder or White Raven for 3.5. As mentioned, diplomacy is ridiculous when you can just dump it up into the high heavens, so being able to shout down an enemy attacking your ally with an impossible to beat diplomacy check rather bolsters your ability to back up any claims you may have made while trying to negotiate.

Also, it was 2 am, and it's now 4am, I'm using tiredness/insomnia as my excuse to hide behind for confusing arithmetic fighters vs geometric wizards and 'truenamers get murdered by their dc'. It sounded good in my head at the time.

But yeah, the point about path of war is that they replaced Martial Study and Extra Stance (or whatever it's called) with Advanced Study and Martial Training 1 to 6. In 3.5 you could take Martial Study up to 3 times and get some one shot per fight tricks and a class skill, or use it to add some out of class maneuvers to your initiator. And then extra stance was, well, more stance. But for Pathfinder, they made it so that if you already have maneuvers, you can take Advanced study to get 2 more maneuvers known, or 1 stance, but if you have no maneuvers at all, you need to do some light hoop jumping, essentially setting a minimum level requirement with the BAB or Skill Rank requirement. But once you take that skill rank maximum away, that no longer becomes an effective means of enforcing a level requirement, and suddenly those maneuver feats open up to non-initiators from level 1 instead of level 3.

[ericgrau]

Re: diplomacy & etc. the DM could easily say "No, you can't do that no matter how high your diplomacy". And it's perfectly reasonable, many things you can't do no matter how silver your tongue. It's not anti-RAW because RAW is ambiguous on how far you can take diplomacy. It's probably RAI actually.

It's still a bad idea because any reasonable player will insure auto-success on all his rolls which is dull and boring even if you do limit what skills can do. Sure foes can pump their modifiers too for opposed but then it's an arms race where you're better off giving up. Unless all you care about is 1 skill, then you just dump everything in it. 99% of the time you auto-win, the other 1% of the time when it's nuke vs nuke whoever is higher level or etc. auto-wins.

Yeah you can abuse prestige classes too but that's like gaining 2-3 levels. It's no worse than the DM telling players to use Gestalt or etc. Heck some of the biggest potential abuse effectively gives you Gestalt.

The biggest abuse is probably replacing such and such roll with a skill roll and auto passing such and such and/or doing huge 1 hit kill damage.