Skills

[PumpkinEater]

Soo... Skills. They're useful, aren't they? Unfortunately, in a typical Dungeons and Dragons campaign, their territory is stepped all over by magic. Climb? Pfft, we can have our sorcerer wizard fly or levitate us up there. Diplomacy? Suggestion. Disguise? Alter self. Hide? Invisibility.

Okay. Damn. Rogues Skills are starting to feel a lot less useful now.

Anyway, I came across this issue when I was looking up the Heal DC for performing surgery. It wasn't there. (Cure Serious Wounds. Why do Clerics even have Heal as a class skill? In fact, evil-doer tyrannical cleric warlords apparently need the benevolent Heal skill more, as they can't spontaneously cast cure spells. Odd.)

Soooo... I was wondering if you folks wanted to help me come up with a list all of the other things you could do with the skills. Every DM and player have different ideas of what the DC should be for the Handle Animal DC of a rabid dog. 25? Who knows. Well, uhh... this is what this topic is for. Haha.

I'll stick on skills as we get further down the road. And I'll also put up the DCs of some of the tasks listed in the PhB to act as guidelines.

Handle Animal

• DC 15
  
  • Rearing an animal with 5 HD.

• DC 25
  • Handling a rabid animal.
  • Rearing an animal with 10 HD.

[AstralFire]

For starters, there are too damn many of them. Combining several of them increases the individual value of any one, especially in situations where you may not be able to (or may not want to) use a spell.

Hide+Move Silently, Spot+Listen+Search, Spellcraft+Psicraft, UMD+UPD, Bluff+Intimidate, Forgery+Decipher Script, Climb+Jump+Swim, Sleight of Hand+Use Rope, Balance+Tumble I believe were the ones I usually ran together.

[PumpkinEater]

For starters, there are too damn many of them. Combining several of them increases the individual value of any one, especially in situations where you may not be able to (or may not want to) use a spell.

Hide+Move Silently, Spot+Listen+Search, Spellcraft+Psicraft, UMD+UPD, Bluff+Intimidate, Forgery+Decipher Script, Climb+Jump+Swim, Sleight of Hand+Use Rope, Balance+Tumble I believe were the ones I usually ran together.

Hmm... that's true, however, I'd rather not, mainly because this is for everyone's use, and I'm not totally sure whether or not everyone houserules it like that. Still, it's a good idea. Haha, I don't think Use Rope has actually ever come up in the game (I wasn't even aware it existed, actually, but I just checked and... uhh... it does. Haha) On a side note... I've got single names down for all of them except for Forgery+Decipher Script. Penmanship? :D

Oh yeah, and Sleight of Hand + Use Rope.

I've never even seen the rules for psionics before.

[AstralFire]

I called them Scribe and Sleight of Hand.

Use Rope comes up if you have kinky players, or just immature ones. or just ones who tie lots of people up. Or get tied up. See the first listed item.

I've actually won an entire encounter solely with Forgery before; I snuck into an enemy camp and replaced all of the general's orders with ones that were meant to be completely opposite and unhelpful. The GM was so surprised that I found a use for Forgery he did it to piss off our overoptimizing Wizard player who never shut up about how awesome his character was and how much he was gonna smoke the enemy army.

[Lysander]

One possibility is to use skills not for brief checks for long periods of time. For example instead of having a climb check to climb a cliff, you have a climb check to see how well the person traverses a mountainous region over several days. Flying for a few minutes isn't going to help out with that.

The other thing to do is make skills more comprehensive. For example, Alter Self just makes you look like the person. Disguise could include faking accents, making correct assumptions about personality and behavior, etc. Suggestion slips an idea in someone's head and temporarily alters within narrow parameters. Diplomacy can get them to genuinely like you, and use all their own resources and creativity to help you. It's the difference between telling a guard blocking a road "Let me pass" "Ok" and "Excuse me sir, may I pass?" "Sure. But if you want a shortcut, you should go that way. And watch out for troll attacks in these parts. They use bird whistles as secret codes, so if you hear something an ambush might be coming" Hide for example can help you with burying treasure so it won't be found, or finding a safe place to set up a rebel base camp that enemy patrols won't find.

[PumpkinEater]

One possibility is to use skills not for brief checks for long periods of time. For example instead of having a climb check to climb a cliff, you have a climb check to see how well the person traverses a mountainous region over several days. Flying for a few minutes isn't going to help out with that.

The other thing to do is make skills more comprehensive. For example, Alter Self just makes you look like the person. Disguise could include faking accents, making correct assumptions about personality and behavior, etc. Suggestion slips an idea in someone's head and temporarily alters within narrow parameters. Diplomacy can get them to genuinely like you, and use all their own resources and creativity to help you. It's the difference between telling a guard blocking a road "Let me pass" "Ok" and "Excuse me sir, may I pass?" "Sure. But if you want a shortcut, you should go that way. And watch out for troll attacks in these parts. They use bird whistles as secret codes, so if you hear something an ambush might be coming" Hide for example can help you with burying treasure so it won't be found, or finding a safe place to set up a rebel base camp that enemy patrols won't find.

Haha, you've got some good ideas. I don't know about a Climb check for traversing a mountainous region, because that is extremely vague.

I haven't thought about trying to use skills in forms that magic can't produce.

[Mongoose87]

My DM has taken to using the Pathfinder skill list, with the exception of Fly. It generally makes more sense.

[Jergmo]

Why would someone be able to Handle a rabid animal?

[Debihuman]

If you want to handle a rabid animal, then the DM needs to decide the Handle Animal DC check. It's not up to WotC to make a suggestion for every situation that comes along but for the DM to look at the guidelines. Or check with d20 Modern rules and compare. Or take a educated guess.

+10 to DC to handle a rabid animal makes a lot of sense and failure could lead to the handler acquiring the disease himself. How hard is that to make up on the spot? Other conditions will be a factor as well. If it is a wild animal and not in cage you can add +2 for each factor giving you a total of +14 to the DC. If it is a pet, familiar, or cohort then you might make that a mitigating factor of -2 so that the DC is +8 rather than the +10. All this is the job of the DM.

That was the whole point of modifiers in the first place. The DM is supposed to assign the DCs -- for attempting surgery with a Heal check think like an Army doctor from the Civil War--what are you doing and with what equipment? Are conditions sanitary or not. DC 30 might be appropriate depending on the situation but that's a call each DM will have to make.

All these should also depend on how much this adds to the adventure. If you make it a blip in the grand scheme of things, then success shouldn't be unobtainable. If it's a major plot line then the tension should be a higher by adding a time factor or what not.

The skills work just fine. It sounds like your DM is unable or unwilling to do the work to figure out what a reasonable DC value should be unless it is spelled out in front of him. That's not a problem with the skills but a problem with the DM.

Debby