Time of Unparalleled Darkness

I have been slowly but surely looking at making our skills more "pen and paper" aligned, as we can, and where it makes sense for us to do so.

One thorny issue is the Knowledge feats. They are often useful to show specialized domain knowledge, but they are a complete skill point sink.

I would propose an "Occultism" skill - essentially a Knowledge skill representing a collective knowledge of the darker and more obscure parts of the Core, so kind of a collective single knowledge skill, but a little less confusingly named.

Thoughts?

Also could use this for Decipher Script since its probably not going to have enough specific implementations to be worthy of its own skill.

Part of the dual problem in this is that 3.x heavily employs skill point sinks to incentivize players building towards narrow but tall philosophies; in combining multiple knowledge skills into one, you run the risk of creating a 'best in slot' situation where taking ranks in a given skill is the meta.

Occultism in all it's varied forms can stretch between the 3.x knowledge fields of Arcana, Religion, History, the Planes and even touch on stuff you wouldn't think of; Nobility for example, in the case of the Drigor and the Mandrigorian, or Geography in the case of knowing about the Whistling Fiend's roamings through Darkon. It's the opposite of 3.x's 'build tall' philosophy, so accordingly one would expect the knowledge gleaned to be shallow.

One compromise I can think of is to combine the two; allow players to take ranks in Occultism, but if they want to have specific, deeply knowledgable applications it has to be combined with their max ranks in another field. 10 ranks in Occultism plus 10 ranks in Knowledge: Arcana makes you an authority on all things Occult concerning the Arcane. This means that players would be instead sinking skill points into two or perhaps three skills, instead of trying to cover five or more.

Decipher Script I've always felt should fall under Knowledge: Arcana being that it's clearly intended for magical purposes, as opposed to historical or archaeological uses.

The design problem here that Im trying to solve is that having most Knowledge skills is going to be dead weight taken on for PrC requirements as we cant reasonably make enough hooks for a bunch of these skills but if we combine them its not as egregious.

I love the Knowledge Skills in PNP but in NWN I think Generalising them into Lore (And potentially renaming that to Knowledge) Is the best solution that said, An Occultism skill that focuses on Occult lore specifically. I feel would be a nice addition, So while someone who studies say Geology would roll a Lore (Knowledge) Check someone who wants to know a specific Fiend would roll Occultism.

Yeah, the idea is to differentiate between general knowledge (Lore), magical knowledge (probably Spellcraft to some degree which isn't in lore) and the forbidden stuff - deeper knowledge of the mists, secret religious things, and the, well, occult.

In tabletop, one can tailor a campaign to make use of the disparate skills the players might have, so having a variety is not a negative thing, here, we're less able to do that, so its best to try to be a little light.

My chief concern with putting so many potentially in-character roleplay fulcrums behind one singular skill is that it will inevitably be the roleplay-skill equivalent of being the absolute best possible choice for your skill point distribution. That along with the omnipresent concern of associating skill points invested with knowledge assumed to be known by the character creates weird situations where a PC can have a high amount of points invested into a relevant Knowledge skill, but have no earthly way to know specific things that the skill could be assumed to cover; knowing Werewolves are generally vulnerable to silver is one thing, but knowing very particular things like a Maledictive Therianthrope's unique weakness to the thorns of a desert cactus or the yowl of a black cat throw everything out of balance.

I can't discern a way to make an Occultism skill simultaneously valuable enough to be worth investing to, without it also being disproportionately powerful relative to other roleplay-centric skills, short of finding a way to subdivide it into broader fields. Which is really just trading 3.x's Knowledge: Everything for an identical horse with a different name.

Well, part of the design problem Im trying to solve is that many of the Ravenloft classes require Knowledge skills youre otherwise never going to use elsewhere. Anchorite of the Mists requires a handful of them for instance.

I can see some utility in dividing it up a little more than a single skill but do keep in mind that means the development and implementation times become longer.

Splitting Occultism into 2 or 3 skills seems a good medium, compared to 3.x's 10 Knowledge skills. The question is along what lines would one divide Occultism up in such a way that it makes sense and attempts to be roughly even with one-another?

I would split it as:

1. Occultism - the arcane, planes, getting into the deep lore of Ravenloft like beyond the False Historiess or the Dread Possibilities
2. Religion - Theological underpinnings of their given religion, its history and dogma, their view on other planes and other gods.
3. Culture - History of the Core and its nations, the who's who, societal norms of the different groups in the core, etc

This only really leaves the Nature knowledge untouched, but I think that would mostly fall under the purview of Alchemy (or like, Herbalism or whatever we choose to call it if we make the curative stuff seperate) - or Survival for the trailcrafty stuff. There's an argument to be made for it granting skill synergies, but that's very time consuming to do on the coding side.