Skills

[witch]

Why would we want to delete skills like discipline, parry etc etc.
its not just deleting skills but you would be getting into feats, combat mods..basically core things of NWN.

This aint PnP people..

I am all for adding skills we like to have, but if the option is to delete stuff..which has significant impact.. on game mechanics. well hmm maybe we are taking it a bridge too far.. (again)

[psycho_leo]

Well, unless it was added again in MotB (which I still can't buy ) discipline got scraped. Parry as much as isn't a PnP skill is part of game mechanics and you would at the very least have to alter teh duelist PrC, since parry is a prereq and the PrC adds a bonus to it. And Set trap? You'd have to mess with the whole trap system thing. I don't know what's involved in it, but seems like more work than it's worth.

Pick the most important skill we want added and let the rest out. As much as we'd want, like Witch says.. this isn't PnP.

[darrenhfx]

Why would we want to delete skills like discipline, parry etc etc.
its not just deleting skills but you would be getting into feats, combat mods..basically core things of NWN.

This aint PnP people..

I am all for adding skills we like to have, but if the option is to delete stuff..which has significant impact.. on game mechanics. well hmm maybe we are taking it a bridge too far.. (again)

This has already been considered and the full slate of 3.5 skills sit waiting in 2da format. We stopped developing these skills as we were unsure if we'd be able to implement them. The majority of the added skills would not have effected game mechanics one bit.

For reference, I'll necro Ronan in this thread http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpbbforum/ ... hp?t=30925

*edit* Oops, I see what you're saying now on second read. If we can't do a complete replacement to make sure the game mechanics are solid, it might seem like more effort than it's worth. Unless we have the discussion, we won't know if it's worth he effort or not however... and if there is a way to fully implement the 3.5 skills I think it would be well worth the effort.

[Runestaff]

Well, unless it was added again in MotB

It wasn't; Discipline has never been in NWN2. The mechanics of Knockdown were also changed since release.

I have to agree with fons and witch. Altering in game skills is going to have larger ramifications beyond what PCs can do at level up. Parry and Lore both affect PRC eligibility, and the problems with Set Trap have already been noted (not to mention that rogues already get the shaft from stealth problems). All three of these skills also live quite peacefully in the current incarnation of ALFA, unless a recent hak has changed matters.

Yes, it would be great to have Sense Motive in the game, but not if it comes at the cost of removing existing skills. At this point, implementing systems that are likely to delay the march to Live or fundamentally change PCs created after Live is of debatable usefulness.

[psycho_leo]

The only problem I see with getting rid of the lore skill and replacing it for a more specifc set of skills is that it might gimp bards somewhat. Granted they're not such wimps in NWN2, but bardic lore is a big deal for bardic RP.
Aside from that, lore doesn't play a great role in game mechanics, and it's mostly a RP feature, like sense motive. Edditing PrCs prereqs isn't such a big deal either. We've done it for NWN and I think it just involves 2da editing.

[Rusty]

If we're reduced to subsitution, rather than adding new skills, then the skills we would cut are Parry, Set Trap, and Taunt. (Potentially, we could also cut three or all of the four crafting skills if thought necessary.) That would allow us to add Sense Motive (which is a key skill), and two of Balance, Climb, Disguise, Escape Artist, Forgery, Gather Information, Handle Animal, Jump, Ride, Swim, and Use Rope of which I'd initially think that Climb and either Gather Information or Use Rope would be the most sensible. With ten Knowledge skills, it looks like we're going to be stuck with Lore regardless as the maximum 2da slots we can free up seems to be seven.

[psycho_leo]

If you cut set trap how would rogues... hmm.. set traps?

[Rusty]

They don't: http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/traps.htm

[AcadiusLost]

To clarify, for time being the limitiations of the NWN2/MotB platform restrict the total number of skills that can appear ingame (frustrating limitation, not present for feats/spells/classes/etc- just skills).

There are some "slots" that can be freely used, ones that were deleted from the game before release, but still appear in the files (discipline being one, ride being another).

There are also a number of skills that don't appear in PnP D&D, which /are/ ingame by default, that could potentially be dropped in favor of custom skills- these are, by and large, much more difficult calls to make, as they may represent significant changes to class/game balance. The mission of ALFA is to try to represent Faerun via the D&D 3.5 PnP mechanics, where possible- as best I understand it. That said, we want to /add/ to the possibilities of the platform, at least as much as we subtract from it.

My impressions from NWN1-ALFA were that the Parry mechanic was not terribly useful unless maxed out with skill points, feats, maybe even a skill focus. (this came from our then-standards-head, who spent most of his time in ALFA playing a finesse/parry built fighter/rogue) - maybe NWN2 improved on this, but I think it's fair to say the need for the parry skill is debatable. As a fencer for the last 13 or so years, I'm quite partial to anything that makes finesse/dex based fighting more significant ingame. (and yes, not only are PrC requirements editable, I would expect they will be edited at least once before they go "on the table" for ALFA).

Set Trap is another bioware invention, one with a rather more strained connection to plausibility. Traps in PnP are dungeon installations, which often take weeks and hired craftsmen to install, at great cost. Rogues have PnP class skills to disable such devices, but the concept of taking a few seconds to install a cunning device that blasts your pursuer with negative energy is kind of a Diablo2-ism. I can see tangle traps potentially working via the Survival skill, along the lines of hunting/gathering- but that could be accomplished without the actual Set Trap skill. Again, this is balance-altering, so it's not a call I'm going to make personally.

One of the strengths of rogue (and to an extent, bard) PCs in PnP is their flexibilty- with a wealth of skillpoints per level, and almost every skill in the game as a class skill, they can build a number of specialties. The NWN mechanic tends to drive those skill point allocations into a defined set of abilities (spot/listen, hide/ms, set/disabletrap, parry, open locks), with maybe a few left over for lore or slight of hand. My hope is that if we do remove one or more of the NWN2 "rogue abilities", that we add enough useful and attractive class skills to keep a balance that makes the class interesting and enjoyable to play.

It's also possible we can just add a handful of custom skills in the few slots we have to work with without deleting any- going to be harder to decide which to add, though, if we have to narrow it down to 2 or 3.

We can also hope that 1.11 gives us back the ability to read from an expanded skill listing- but we don't know how long we'll have to wait for that.

[psycho_leo]

So rogues can't use traps on their own? I assume they could still craft with a DM. Still think rogue types are getting teh shitty end of that stick.

[AcadiusLost]

This is all very much to be decided, as far as I know. My suggestion above was that rogues (and other PCs) might be able to set simple traps (tangle/snares, maybe simple spike traps as well?) via the Survival skill, while still freeing up a slot for another useful custom skill. This would make something of a compromise position, though it's still going to be unsatisfactory for folks who want to drop james-bond-style knockout gas cylinders in the corridor behind them, or nonmagical holy blasting tripwires of Power. Ideally the balance to the "stick" is freedom to build the additional skills (knowledge skills to ID monsters/know weaknesses), sense motive, climb (if we adapt mobility scripts like zelknolf's from NWN1) etc.

[psycho_leo]

The idea of adding teh greatest possible number of PnP skills is of course, enticing. But we do have to consider, as put, the balance issues. This isn't PnP. Greatest difference being, due to different timezones and matching difficulties, PCs don't have a DM with them all the time and don't have a balanced party all the time, like most PnP groups.

So taking out skills that actually have a coded effect and replacing for RP skills will usually result in upseting class balance.

That said, the use of traps by rogues, reflect their skill to set up ambushes. They don't deal a lot of dmg and are usually in trouble if they have to get to melee, traps are their way to soften up enemies, before they get too close. Now, I've never seen any rogue (as a DM or player) go nuts with traps and walk up to an enemy and set a trap right behind them. Traps play at least in my experience a great role in rogue PCs survivability.

[Brokenbone]

In PnP, one'd use "Craft (Trapmaking)" to create traps.

A simple 400 gp "Razorwire Across Hallway" (one of the cheapest CR1 traps) would take about TEN WEEKS to Craft, if a PC succeeded (but only barely) against DC20 for each of ten consecutive Craft (Trapmaking) checks. This assumes PnP use of silverpieces though, as part of the crafting formula. How one'd adapt to ALFA's NWN2, I cannot say.

Why ten feet of razorwire would take two-and-a-half months of painstaking work to string across a hallway, I do not know. Most DMs, without first being told about Crafting rules, might figure it takes about ten minutes to put a neck-level wire in a dark hallway and hope for the best. Boy would they be wrong! Heh.

Anyhow, serious topic drift, I suppose there was some "traps" related thread Rusty started a month ago that not many people participated in. Maybe now's the time to check again.

[psycho_leo]

If we're going to price simple traps at 400gp we might as well go ahead and drop them.

[Rusty]

Not having NWN1-style traps just changes rogues, and how people play rogues, slightly. It makes them, as AL points out, less predictable, and while it does certainly remove a source of power, it also makes them like Rogues in D&D - which is the goal, after all. The whole Set Traps concept is really a fairly nasty (and frequently ludicrous *assembles 20d6 of damage in 6 seconds* - not that the PnP Trap Crafting rules make a whole lot of sense either) non-core addition to NWN and one of our goals for NWN2 is to get our core D&D rules in place and working right from the start. Even if we could add every D&D skill to the game (including all the Knowledge skills) I think we'd still be looking to remove Set Traps.