Talk:Tome of Prowess (3.5e Sourcebook)/Supporting Changes

Trapfinding Revision

I am profoundly unsatisfied with this trapfinding revision because it admits there is a problem when you don't take 10 with it but does nothing to fix the problem, instead encouraging you to just take 10. I have no idea how to fix trapfinding, but I'd recommend finding something that doesn't slow the game down unless you push players into taking 10. Surgo 02:49, January 11, 2010 (UTC)

I need to rant / write a sidebar about how taking 10 isn't a bad thing and everyone should do it more often in the game. I actually think the game works and flows better when you just say "I do X because my skill is high enough and I can take 10 on it" instead of rolling all of the time for success bonuses that may not even matter. Rolling should be saved for things where you actually need to do better than expected and thus have things on the line (or otherwise have to for rules reasons). Task resolution bloat is a serious concern of mine with this revision.

Still, it's a fair complaint in this situation, what with the way that trap DCs are generally set and the fact that I screwed up posting the search component of dungeoneering. Having fixed that, I should point out that the graduated "search" result has been written such that you get a warning if you fail by 1-5 instead of walking right into it, with actually not seeing the thing in the space only happening if you fail by more than 5. That extra level of result granularity makes the default take 10 option closer to taking 15 in the old system, and the take 15 half speed option would give you results more akin to taking 20 in the old system, at least if you focus on the "people not walking into things blind" aspect of the skill and ignore the part where they may have to spend more time looking for it. Coupled with the ability to search a 30' x 5' area as a full round action (or half that if you're more intently looking) I thought made the revision a quite solid ability, and the make people take 10 thing was a non-issue for me. While I'm honestly tempted to resolve the potential issue by just requiring people to take X with the ability, I guess I could see a single roll for the round against which any potential traps in a 30' x 5' area, or a roll at +5 if you take the slower approach. Are either of those options more satisfying? - TarkisFlux 05:06, January 11, 2010 (UTC)

The ability making you take 10 is a pretty slick idea, I think. Surgo 05:18, January 11, 2010 (UTC)

Done and done. - TarkisFlux 05:26, January 11, 2010 (UTC)

Divine Spellcasting

Has anyone seen a Cleric switched from Wis to Cha in a game? Any thoughts on how it might affect game balance? Story-wise, it seems a very interesting change, but concerned what the mechanical effects may be. --Be well 16:58, February 8, 2010 (UTC)

My previous playtesting indicates that they continue to have stupendous will saves (assuming the save swap suggested later on this page is adopted), suffer no change in their spellcasting, get better at turning/rebuking as they grow in level, and are slightly better at converting people to their cause. So aside from fewer of them taking the Extra Turning feat, I haven't seen much difference at all. - TarkisFlux 17:24, February 8, 2010 (UTC)

Happiness! Its always nice when mechanics and story-concept can fit together :) --Be well 17:39, February 8, 2010 (UTC)

Knowledge and Background skills

I'll do this here, since I hvae no idea where else one would review this.

You have done a fair few good things in this system, but how you handle Knowledge essentially kills this entire thing for me.

Scholars are one of my favourite character archetypes to play and when I run a session, no half hour goes past without the party rolling several knowledge checks. This seems impossible now. Sure, one could write "scholar of X" on their sheet, but then? How to quantify this? How do I find out how much my character knows? Is he the greatest scholar of planar phenomena that has ever happened, or a student who has only heard rumours of the Infinite Staircase? No way of quantifying this. It seems to me that this would lead to enormous amounts of discussion in the game. Has my character read a book about this phenomenon once in university? How much does he know about the continent across the sea? Is he familiar with Zardep Zalk's theories about the Ordial Plane? Has he made measurements of this or that in that year he spent studying before the adventure began?

Who knows. You take this out of the rules and leave it hanging entirely up in the air. With a sensible DM and sensible players, one could discuss this out. With numbers, one wouldn't have to. It annoys me greatly.

And how about your flutist example. If I write down "flutist", how good is my character at it? Can he play his instrument passably well, or can he write a symphony that makes Eladrin weep? If I write armourer, can he just make a suit of mail, or can he make the best suit of adamantine plate the world has ever seen? How does one differentiate a master craftsman from a journeyman? And how does a player become one?

Overall, this is a massive hole in the system.

-Sincerely, Eldan —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.203.46.187 (talk • contribs) at

Hey Eldan, thanks for the comments over here :-).

Let me start by just saying that I have seen these concerns, and I'm not discounting them. I am very aware that this requires a somewhat cooperative and fair-minded DM to work well, and that many sorts of adversarial DM are going to make it work extremely poorly. Having numbers baked in makes that a bit better, but getting numbers to use in these sorts of things requires them to either conform to the current skill framework, which I don't think is workable mechanically and "ability"-istically (yay made up words!) or desirable from a narrative and world functioning standpoint, or a different subsystem entirely. And that last one I think pretty workable.

So a different subsystem was what I was working on (as described near the end of the GitP thread), to better describe ability level of any particular individual. The one that I have sketched up has rules for completing tasks relating to the background skill, for competition between individuals in the same background skill, and for advancement from one level of the background skill to another (including acquisition of new ones). Which I think covers all of your concerns here to one degree or another. It's just a very on/off development as I get sidetracked with other things, and so it has been sitting in a sandbox here (note: we use 'sandbox' to mean a subpage of my user page not shown in main nav) for about 9 months now.

When I get around to finishing it (which may well be after my current skills edit pass, or could be in a month or two), it will replace the current 'handwave things' section on knowledges and professions because I am happier with it than I am with the current plan. You're welcome to read it / critique it / contribute to it if you like though, and any sort of commentary on it would probably get me moving on it a bit more quickly. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 00:26, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Interesting, and good to know you are doing something.

I do disagree on one point, however, namely that background skills are not important for adventuring. Maybe it's a question of style, but when I run it many of the things you kicked in there tend to come up. Craft comes up ever so often, when PCs try to build things, from traps to bridges to boats to their newest plans for an experimental gargoyle-powered flying machine. Various knowledges are rather essential, to find ways of solving legal disputes to knowing about handy portals that save on travel time to predicting the route of the Great Modron March. I'd say Knowledge comes up a good deal more often than most other skills. Certainly the various Athletics and Acrobatics, I can't even remember when I last used those. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.203.46.187 (talk • contribs) at

To use one of your examples, should a PC who has ranks in knowledge (planar) know about the obscure treatise of a supposed madman and have heard / know anything about the Ordial? Should they know more than Zalk? My strong preference is to answer these questions with "probably not, no matter how many ranks they put in the skill". It may be because of my grad school time, but specialized and rare information is not stuff that I want PCs to be able to pull out of thin air with a good die roll. I would much rather have them go and ask someone who has put in the time and research and whatever about it, have them remember seeing it one time and go look it up / track down Zalk, or even have the PC put effort into being a master sage of the planes with a specialty in planar mechanics beforehand. If the characters need that knowledge, they can acquire it as a result of further adventures or as a reward for other character development. That sort of "adventure for it instead of roll for it" thing is certainly a style preference, but it's what I prefer so it's what I'm writing towards.

Craft comes up in different ways, but almost always during downtime (unless you're MacGuyver or the A-Team I guess). It certainly helps determine what you can bring with you on your adventure, but I've never seen it function much differently than a pre-game shopping trip without magical assistance like fabricate. It impacts your adventuring the same way that having more gold on hand impacts your adventuring. Which is an impact, but not in the same way as your skill / spell selection is.

I'm not suggesting that craft and knowledge and profession don't come up during the course of an adventure, only that the "roll to see what you know / can build" and "bonus based on level" model either hurts immersion or limits story progression. This isn't to say that I don't want them in the game, I just don't want them in the game in the same way as the other skills are setup.

On the last two... if you don't remember the last time you used athletics, then you don't remember the last time that the PCs climbed walls, ropes, sheer cliff faces, or ship rigging, nor the last time they went swimming because they fell in the ocean, fell into an acid pool trap / volcano, or had an adventure at the bottom of the sea, nor the last time they were swinging from chandeliers or jungle vines. If you don't remember the last time you used acrobatics, then you don't remember the last time the PCs tumbled around a foe to avoid AoOs, nor the last time you skydived without a parachute, nor the last time you walked on a surface that would not normally hold you weight or was in the process of collapsing. The skills cover a fair amount of ground, but you could cut that ground out rather easily in the right sort of campaign. These are all 'mundane' options though, and if you're playing a spellcaster you probably don't interact with those at all because spells. It is also possible that these things happened in your game and you just handwaved them because the rules for doing them were nonexistent or crappy, or they could have been bypassed because a spellcaster shared some magic with the party or because of an item. That would have the same effect of not remembering when they came last came up without actually not having them in the game. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 21:16, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

But see, why do the players have to go find an expert? Why can't one of them be the expert? For that matter, why does acquiring knowledge or learning to craft take a time investment, but not learning new spells or combat techniques? Why does a character get automatically better at pickpocketing or geomancy, but not armouring? Or do you also require them to invest a few months in an apprenticeship in a circus to increase their animal handling?

I don't really see why the distinction needs to be made. You may not like knowledge pulled out of thin air, fair enough. But if a character can bypass a trap with just one roll, without consulting technical diagrams or heal a wound without his handy medicinal codex and dissection drawings, why can't he just know stuff? Especially once you get into the high levels where anything you do is beyond human anyway. I mean, I'm a lowly human university student with a 14 or 15 intelligence, sure. But my character could be a 2000 year old dragon with an eidetic memory and 30+intelligence.

And an aside: I don't remember any of the things you mention under acrobatics, yes. I don't think we ever did any of those things in the campaign I'm currently running. I don't tend to run much physical adventuring. We had a heist, a siege situation, a two-session political debate, some spying, a bit of wreck-salvage on Acheron, but no climbing or swinging that I can recall.

And before I forget: you never tried to build a bridge in an adventure? Patch a leaking boat in storm? Impress someone with your harping? Find out which smith crafted a sword? Help repair a cart before the bandits arrive? That's all craft.

Umm, I don't see why you think that you can't know things. You can know whatever you want. That's the whole point of breaking it away from a skill point / level based system. You can be the expert in however many things as you want to spend time on. Your dragon would have a lot of time to amass a substantial amount of knowledge and background skill if he wanted to. If you were a dwarf, you would be able to start off as that amazing smith that the fluff wants you to be. These things are in there, just not at the cost of level based skill points. The distinction needs to be made because one set of abilities needs to be level gated and number limited for the desired balance, and another doesn't.

Beyond that, you're supposed to just know things related to your skills. Though that could be better written up in retrospect.

Anyway, when the new system is finished there will be rules for dealing with a lot of the things you're concerned about. Just not in the level-gated skill system. If you're not happy with that answer, I need to ask if there is some reason you think knowledge and crafting, profession, and instrument skill should be level-gated in some way? Or some reason that characters should sacrifice high level abilities in order to get slightly better at those things? Because that's what its inclusion here as a regular skill would mean.

As for not requiring a time investment for the level skills and abilities, I'm comfortable with experience points and on-the-job training substituting for that. But if you wanted to extend the training metaphor to this side of things as well, I actually have zero problem with people grabbing new levels with significant time investment. It solves some world building concerns about what the town guards had to kill / achieve to be 2nd level.

And for the last bits: never built a bridge in an adventure because a rope across is faster (bridge building has happened in downtime though); never patched a leaking boat (though that would be crafting, but probably passed off on crew); impressing someone with harping is already supported by being a good harpist (though competitive harping isn't at present, but it's scheduled); finding a smith could just as easily be appraisal (and is already supported); never helped repair a cart before bandits arrived, because they normally arrive and it turned into a defend encounter. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 23:56, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

[Edit] It occurred to me that I could work it both ways, and let people spend skill points to learn or upgrade background skills (or upgrading background skills) immediately, so long as the points were eventually refunded after the standard upgrade period time. Which allows for adventurers who want to pick up a new background thing on the fly and doesn't cause them to pay for it with level based resources (just paying for the *right now* portion of things instead, and that only temporarily). It needs a bit of fine tuning to fit with retraining and some other edge cases, but I like the shape of it. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 05:39, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

I'd say they should be level-dependent mainly for consistency's sake, as I value a consistent system. Combat power depends on level. Money depends on level. Magic depends on level. Why shouldn't knowledge? It seems weird to me that one single category of character power works so differently from all the others. In 3.5, as it stands, a better smith or scholar or bard was a higher-level expert, just as a better fighter was higher level. That made sense to me, and I don't really feel comfortable with divorcing one source of power from level.

And, after all, XP aren't just given for combat. They are solved for encounters. Which means in the system as it stands, pretty much anything that challenges your character. The town guard arrests some disorderly drunks every other month, succeeds on a series of search checks to find the smuggled goods in a cart of hay and rolls high on his diplomacy check for getting bribed. That's encounters that bring in XP, he doesn't have to kill anything. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.203.46.187 (talk • contribs) at

This is probably the root of the disagreement then. Level is a number that implies an approximate degree of competence in combat and utility IMO, whether that comes from skills or spells. It is also a minimum requirement for many abilities that the system says you just can't have without it, because possessing them earlier skews you too far from the intended competence. Money is only tied to level as a byproduct of attempting to assist mundane characters with that minimum competence through gear dumps. It is otherwise not tied to level at all, as there are kings and merchants rich as Midas who do not have the level to support that floating around in assorted settings. Similarly, knowledge is actually not tied to level at all. You can go out and learn whatever the story requires of you without having any ranks in a knowledge skill. You can know your way around the local thieves' guild without ranks in knowledge (local), or who the king's second son is without ranks in knowledge (nobility). The system does not enforce you being unable to learn things about anything if you lack a sufficient rank or level.

What the knowledge skill actually does is allow you to not pick something to know about in advance, and instead randomly roll for whether you were studying something in the past or not when it comes up. Being higher level and putting more in a knowledge skill means you've put more undetermined studying in, but it's still an entirely mundane thing. Having written that out, I could see retaining that sort of ex post facto narrative ability (and probably will), but it's not the sort of ability that puts it with the more fantastic skills I've been working on here. The profession, craft, and perform skills don't work in quite the same way because they are various flavors of actually doing the thing, but the things that they do are similarly lacking in fantasticness (without stepping on the bard's toes anyway).

I see absolutely no reason, narrative or mechanical, that these sorts of non-fantastic things should be tied to levels which ultimately reach into the fantastic. I don't see any reason to limit some aspects of them to people over level 1 even. Further, divorcing these things from level better supports the stories I want to tell. I don't want the renowned concert flutist, the master smith, or the wizened old sage to have mandatory combat ability. That approach to these things doesn't strike me as inconsistent in the least. There is nothing inconsistent about tying things that can not or should not be acquired early to level and not tying things to level that can be acquired independently of level, so long as they are are treated that way throughout. You could argue it's less elegant perhaps, but that's a different thing entirely.

So I'm sorry if you don't feel comfortable divorcing these things from level, but that's the path I'll continue to take with these. There should be plenty of places you can hook level back in for your own games if you prefer. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 17:20, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

This homebrew might be helpful. (You of course already know about it, Tarkisflux, but might not have thought to apply it here.)--Ideasmith (talk) 00:38, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I had actually forgotten about that Ideasmith, so thanks for pointing it out again. I want to move away from single point investment for these things though, because the differences between a 4 and 5 rank blacksmith just don't seem worth keeping in the ToP context. If you're interested, you can see what I'm working on here. It's mostly done other than some polishing and tables and time bits. I will probably steal the aging flaw thing though, because it's a great way to show that getting old sucks. I'll have other comments for you over there. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 16:20, 28 May 2013 (UTC)