Open Discussion: Increasing Available Skill Points

[Maiyannah]

It's well known that 3.0/3.5 have a bit of a dearth of available skill points, to the point where many of the sourcebooks find ways to cheese their special characters into having more skill points than they would have otherwise.

I would propose we increase the number of available skill points for characters, so that people have a little more freedom in what they are able to learn and what they are able to do.

There's a variety of ways to do this, but I think the best way to do this that won't affect existing class balance too much is to increase the die for each class by one size, ie, classes with 1d2 skills get 1d4 instead, ones with 1d4 get 1d6, and so on.

What do you think?

[Ouroboros]

I'm reluctant to just flat increase the pool of available skill points for PCs, given how powerful skill points can be. I've seen another implementation where players still retain the 'default' pool of skill points which can be spent on anything and then an ancillary pool of 'roleplay' skill points that can be spent on a restricted pool of skills that would see little to no mechanical usage, but would be very valuable in roleplay or DMed events.

This approach I think solves the chronic issue of affording too many skill points to players, which are then spent to max out mechanically incentivized skills like Tumble, Spellcraft, etc. They're still forced to make tough build choices, but then are freely able to allocate further skill points to things that make narrative sense.

[Maiyannah]

To me that seems a little like admitting certain skills are much more desirable than others.

From a practical point of view you would have to reimplement the onLevelup script to take that approach. Not impossible but a decent amount of work.

[wilkins1952]

I'm supporting of this and sure while there are some skills that are always going to be picked, Notoriously there are more than a few classes that don't even have enough skill points to pick their class skills let alone any additional RP ones. Sure people might end up just spending these in the best mechanical skillpoints But then that comes at the Detriment of RP ones. Overall this is also not a huge increase and gives build/RP choices a bit more freedom where NWN is already more restrictive than PNP.

[Ouroboros]

To me that seems a little like admitting certain skills are much more desirable than others.

From a practical point of view you would have to reimplement the onLevelup script to take that approach. Not impossible but a decent amount of work.

Well truth be told, that is what I'm saying. The variation is in what the player is trying to achieve and the context of that. On most NWN 1 servers, the tip top hierarchy of skill point distribution is Concentration, Discipline, Tumble, Spellcraft because they have across the board, powerful and arguably best-in-slot applications. Having low Knowledge: Arcane might mean you don't get to pass that DM skill check in that one event, but having low Discipline might mean that you die repeatedly every time an enemy with knockdown closes into melee.

This leads to the divergent state where people have to choose either optimal gameplay or measurably worsening their character's efficacy in exchange for skills that have far reduced usecases and far less important outcomes.

Implementing the above system of increasing skill points/level, while also locking off those extra skill points into 'roleplay' skills means that characters don't necessarily have to be built objectively worse off than their munchkin'd counterparts for the sake of pursuing roleplay. Simply adding more skill points/level just means that people will continue to invest those additional skill points into other, lower-hierarchy mechanically useful skills; spot, listen, lore, open lock, appraise, search, heal, UMD are all somewhere on the spectrum of mechanically powerful and will inevitably be taken by players if they have sufficient skill points. Even to the exclusion of roleplay-centric skills. Which I think will lead to an endless cycle of skill point bloat where every class becomes more homogeneous relative to each other's skill distributions.

As to onLevelUp script; I think the way this was implemented elsewhere was simply to run a script at rest to update the 'additional' skill points balance and the improvements those allocated skill points put into other skills. Unsure if that is a preferable implementation or not.