Here is the basic structure I've devised for acquiring skills. Instead of skill points, characters will be built with skill selections. The difference here is that they will be free to choose whatever they want for some selections but restricted to pre-defined lists with others. Here's the breakdown.
Basic Attack Skill - You gain one at first level, which must be Melee Weapon 1, Spell 1, or Unarmed Attack 1. You have to meet the qualification normally, so only mages may choose Spell 1 and only fighters may choose Unarmed Attack 1; everyone else is stuck with Melee Weapon 1. This ensures that newbies can't make the basic mistake of building a character who has no ability to fight.
Class Skill - You gain two at 1st level and another one at every odd level (3rd, 5th, 7th, etc.). These are restricted to a list of choices appropriate to your class or classes.
Free Skill - You gain two at 1st level and another one at every fourth level (4th, 8th, 12th, 16th, and 20th). As the name implies, a free skill can be chosen from any list, although you must still meet any necessary prerequisites.
Racial Skill - You gain one at 2nd level and another every four levels thereafter (6th, 10th, 14th, and 18th). Racial skills may be used to gain access to race-specific actions or they may be chosen from a list of more generic skills that befit the race. For example, an elf could use his or her 2nd-level racial skill selection to pick up a Perceive effect or buy skill with bows. To preempt the question, yes, humans will get racial skills, too.
Using this structure, a character starts out with five skills and gains a new skill of a rotating type at each new character level (Racial at 2nd, Class at 3rd, Free at 4th, Class at 5th, Racial at 6th, etc.).
Bonus damage skills will be popular choices, and will be available at every 5th level. Fighters can buy Melee Weapon 2 at 5th, Melee Weapon 3 at 10th, etc., while mages can buy higher levels of Spell, druids can buy Wild Form, monks can buy Unarmed Attack, and so forth at the same levels.
In addition (kudos to Scott on this one), path skills start to become available at third level. These are the special at-wills, immunities, and persistent buffs we've been talking about for awhile. These will be purchased as class skills and use path and level as prerequisites. For example, a 3rd-level theurge will be able to take the hierophant path and use his/her class skill selection to pick up Touch, "Recover" at will.
I am a fan of this structure (THS 7), but more work needs to be done on the skill list itself. By doing away with Specialty Action and putting professions and lore into the downtime system, the list is pretty bare. Adding in racial skills and at-wills helps somewhat, but there should be enough depth and variety that players have plenty of good choices rather than being pigeonholed by the number or usefulness of options available.
I've got an incomplete working list of skills that you can read. Many were previously addressed in the combat group. I'll be adding more there as we go along.
Okay, the structure's pretty nice and I'm generally on board, but I'm just worried that it'll feel like we aren't getting any stronger over a long period of time, especially during later levels. I do realize that the professions and lore downtime systems are supposed to help alleviate that. Is one skill selection a level going to be enough? Are current skills going to be higher-powered to compensate, especially skills like fortitude? Are there going to be a wide variety of skills, so that every wizard doesn't pretty much have to choose the same set of skills?
I'm guessing weapon specialization is out, just to be replaced with melee 2, etc. Are we going to be allowed to save skill selections? I ask because melee 2 is available at 10, but level 10 is a racial skill selection. Will we be allowed to replace old skill selections?
Well, okay then. It sounds good enough. It'd really take seeing what the skills look like to decide about things like saving selections. I could just easily see a situation where respending your skill selections at a higher level will allow you to make a more powerful character than you could levelling it up normally.
Are we talking about Actions as in say "+5 sharp"? How do those overlap with skills? Or are you considering just adding them to skill set choices?
As far as the general layout for skills as you have above; the more and more I think about it, the more I like it. I'm pretty on board with you on how the skills will work.
Yes and no. Here's what I'm considering:
- We had already discussed the prospect that you can't learn every action available to you. I believe Tom brought up something like "action points" in the preliminary brainstorming thread as a way of differentiating two characters of the same class and path.
- Most of the non-combat skills have already been removed as skills. Combat styles (armor use, basic weapon attacks, shield use, etc.) are most of what's left. Some of these could just as easily be described as at-will actions. Melee Weapon 1, for instance, could just be described as an at-will Melee Weapon, Attack, 1 Damage action.
- We're already discussing using skill selections to pick up at-will path actions. A 3rd-level hierophant will be able to pick up an at-will Spell, Packet, "Recover" action with a skill.
- Following this logic, maybe we don't have skills at all. It could be an oversimplification, but maybe we dump skills and just give people action choices. You get, say, 10 actions at 1st-level and two or three every character level after that. We arrange them with prerequisites, so, for example, you need to be a 1st-level fighter with the Basic Weapon Attack action in order to learn the Focused Attack action.
It's only a thought right now (THS 2). Some skills (Armor) don't translate as nicely as I'd like, but others (Medicine) translate very nicely as at-will actions.
No, I'd rather see them kept separate. I think too much simplification now could be limiting in the future.
As an example, we'd be removing the ability to add bonus damage:
Aren't actions like the "+2" damage supposed to add on to whatever your base damage is? Making the 1 damage swing an action instead of a skill would cause possible problems. What would we add +2 to? What does the 2-hander skill do as an action? Almost everyone will improve their base damage, so the +2 can't be simply written as a 3. Later on, that same plus 2 could be calling 6 damage.
As another thought, perhaps skills like "Theurges now have an at-will recover action" could simply be written as, "Your recover action is now treated as an at-will action". That way, we can have skills that modify actions instead of adding new ones.
I honestly don't think it will cause too many problems. I'm still on board.
Correct me if I'm wrong in this thinking Thad. I'm using faerie racial actions as an example because I think it lays out a possible way to make this and easy combined transfer.
Faeries have a racial called Winsome Verse. Now to take the first base level in the system we currently use, it cost me 4 skill points. HOWEVER! Every time I "level up" that action, it only costs me 1 skill point. (It's the Refresh # action for the Fae). For bonus damage and the like, couldn't we just apply the same system and say it increases as you level automatically? You could even get risky with it and take the skill point spending for those out and just say at levels 2, 4, 6, and 8 so on that the bonus damage increases with level.
Yes to all of your questions, Nathan. Professions and lore are meant as the substitute for the loss of progression between levels. Skill choices will generally be more significant than they were before. And, ideally, we'll have a nice diverse skill list for people to choose from.
That last one is the real problem in my book. Racial skills and path skills will help here, but it will be a challenge to come up with a list of skills that is diverse, useful, and balanced.
I'm torn on the last part about saving selections. On the one hand, you do run into snags like the one you point out. On the other, letting folks save them until the optimal moment creates imbalance, with characters being weaker than they should for a few levels and then stronger than they should afterward. There will be a way to selectively resend skill choices with boon, of course, but it's generally assumed that the choice is immediate and permanent otherwise.