Skill Points or a Bonus to Level

A long time ago at a gaming table far away, there were two kinds of systems. There was D&D which was thought of as a 'class' based system. Your abilities were defined by what class you were and howyou progressed through that class. In response to this rigidity there were 'skill' based systems. Skill based systems allowed you to buy whatever set of skills you wanted giving you more flexibility in terms of how you built your character. As game design evolved very few systems were completely class or skill based. D&D added 'proficiencies' and then in 3rd edition had a full-fledged point based skill system that was influenced by class.

The traits of a skill system were that you had a set of skill points that you could spend on skills and this skill spending was very separate from any kind of 'level' or 'class' notion. Third edition embraced this entirely although it gave a 'class' feel by giving different classes access to different sets of skills with out of class skills costing more. Fourth edition, however, took a step away from this system and became very level focussed. I think that one of the reasons for this was that skill selection was actually the most complex part of character creation. So in fourth edition you either have a skill or not. The growth of the skill is based on your level and not any points you decide to put in it.

So what is better, having a point system where characters can move around points and have greater flexibility or to have a flat bonus which is much simpler and requires less tracking. Well, let's take a quick look at how people spend their skills in 3rd edition. Most simple choose a set of skills and keep those at the maximum possible. Typically spreading out leads to situations where your skill can not really keep up and be meaningful. Skill difficulty rolls tend to be geared towards a character that has maxed out his skill. Also since many skills are used by the party as a whole, like a knowledge skill or a search skill, the only useful skill will be the highest one in the party. Of course, many skills are individual based such as Concentration, Tumble, and Climb for example.

Another thing to consider is that in 3rd edition some skills have diminishing returns at high levels. For example, if you have 16 points in Tumble you can tumble past two opponents without having to roll. If you have 23 points in Concentration you can defensively cast any spells. Appraisal is another example. But some skills require extremely high levels in order to be useful and don't have much use if you only have a few points, notably Use Magic Device.

So one thing that should be mentioned when talking about skills is rogues. First and second edition D&D mainly had the rogue as a utility character that dealt with dungeon hazards like traps and locks. They were the only ones that posessed several key skills. One unforunate thing is these editions was that they sucked at these skills at low levels and when they started to get good at them they were far surpassed by simple spells. In 3rd edition, with a full skill system rogues became the 'skill' characters (whereas wizards and clerics were spell characters and fighters were feat characters). Now rogues have evolved. Sneak attack can make them a potentially powerful role in combat. Rogues changed from a character focussed on dungeon hazards to a damage dealing role since many of the skills they have became less of a focus. Locked doors could be chopped down with an admantium axe or opened with a knock spell. Stealth was best achieved through spells. Although not D&D, I remember playing Neverwinter Nights as a rogue with my friend playing a barbarian. It took too long to deal with traps so they barbarian would just run through them all and them rest on the other side.

Anyway, most of my posts here have always sided on the side increased flexibility, but in this case I think I might lean towards either having a skill or not with no skill points. I used to love skill points because you could use them to customize your character, and I still feel that skill selection should be a part of your character development, but there are many other factors that give you much more power to customize your character. And frankly I feel that the headache of counting skill points outweighs the benefits of having fine control of your skills since most people just max out their skills.

Ok, so some quick problems with the 4th edition skill system are that picking up new skills becomes much harder and so does picking up new languages. The way 4th edition handled this was to make new skill acquisition and new language acquisition based on feats. The issue with this is that for the most part you will want to use your feats for other things. It is true that 4th edition feats tend to be much less powerful than 3rd edition feats, but I suspect that feats will climb in power as splat books come out and few characters will want to use them for feat acquistion.