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→Just like to call BS
::Ever heard of Druids? Prohibited from wearing metal armor. The spell Heat Metal might also be a reason to avoid it. We discussed the rest of this in chat, but I'll write a bit more for the benefit of others visiting this page. My prime complaint is that skills give abilities completely unrelated to their purpose. Diplomacy gives a deflection bonus, Move Silently gives poison immunity, and for 750gp and ranks in Survival, you can Wildshape like a druid. That leads me to my next point: nonmagical items granting magical abilities. That Wildshape is a good example. Wearing armor gives you a supernatural class ability? What? Even if the skill made sense, why do supernatural abilities come from relatively low skill levels? Finally, about that force, it's not that it hasn't been used that way, it's being changed into something else entirely, which would be fine as it's own variant rule (force is now a material for making armor), but as it stands, it just doesn't work.--[[User:Quey|Quey]] 23:39, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
:::Skill ranks are just a way of ensuring that things are level appropriate without specifically giving things at character level X (so that anyone and everyone could utilize an item) or BAB +Y, where only martial classes might benefit, for instance. It is a way of offering level appropriate abilities to a certain category of characters, and not to others. It more adaptable than saying 'only rogues can wear Z,' and such lists are at odds with further homebrew. The skills are, in that sense, the tie in to 3.5e, in an internal constant that allows these to link to aspects of the game. -- [[User:Jota|Jota]] 00:48, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
::::I've seen a system (which I prefer) that does scale with character level. And I don't have a problem with scaling by ranks per se, but when the skill is completely unrelated to the abilities granted, it makes no sense. How does a silent sneaky person suddenly have the ability to snort, inject, and guzzle oil of taggit or other poisons when they don some armor? If you want to grant a certain category of abilities to a certain group, why not at least make the skill roughly correspond to the ability granted? Make poison immunity linked to Craft(poison), Heal, or even Survival? Why not make Tumble instead of Diplomacy give a deflection bonus? Now I'm still on the fence if there is a problem to be solved here, perhaps leaning toward the cause of making some classes more versatile. But in the end, this seems like a kludge at best. If classes are the problem, make variant classes; people have made many nice ones. But packaging random class features in nonmagical wearables that are often supernatural, spell-like, or just magic item effects doesn't make sense in game. Why is an intimidating man in scale mail immune to fist fights, while the same man without the armor or a non-intimidating liar in scale mail is not? If you can yank an extra move action out of 20gp worth of cords and *immunity* to cold from 30 gp of winter clothes, why is magic special and supernatural? Why is there even a mundane category? Why?--[[User:Quey|Quey]] 02:01, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
:::::I think you are getting a little too caught up in realism or verisimilitude. Like with the hairdryer, for instance, where if it wasn't magic there was no acceptable mundane explanation for energy conversion in absence of electrical to heat energy. As for why a particular skill and not another, perhaps because Craft (Poison) isn't the kind of thing anyone would bother to invest ranks in. Sometimes the guys who get Diplomacy don't also get Tumble, but they are the ones the armor was intended for. Sometimes a modicum of suspension of belief is more valuable than all the mechanical exposition in the world. I don't mean to devalue verisimilitude, and indeed I am inclined to favor it, but sometimes game balance and fun are of greater worth than the inevitable spiral into 'fighters can't have nice things.' -- [[User:Jota|Jota]] 02:33, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
