Spatzimaus
First Post
Delkain, I think he meant how Loremaster requires Skill Focus as a prerequisite. Many PrCs are this way, since most require some sort of "useless" Feat, and Skill Focus is general-purpose enough that it gets picked a lot. Toughness, too.
About my versions of Skill Focus:
The key was, we wanted something that scaled with you, never becoming less useful, and providing access to a new mechanic helps this.
Math note: "re-roll 5 or less" adds, on average, 1.875 to your roll. More importantly, it really reduces the chance of critical fumbles.
"Re-roll 10 or less" adds, on average, 2.5, but it's really more effective than that since you can choose not to reroll if you only needed a 7 or something.
I haven't made the Epic version yet, but it'd go something like:
> Requires 20 ranks
> Lets you Take 20 in 5x normal time instead of 20x
> Can re-roll no matter what the first roll gave (effectively giving 2 tries at every skill check for one skill at the cost of 2 normal and 1 Epic feat)
We also reworked the Alertness-style Feats along these lines. So, while Skill Focus gives two benefits (Take 10, re-roll 5 or less), Alertness gives the re-roll part to both Spot and Listen. Same kind of thing for all the FR ones like this; for each +2, give one of the two Skill Focus benefits as appropriate.
Due to popular demand, most people just replaced Combat Casting with Skill Focus (Concentration), since being able to Take 10 on a concentration check is huge.
Ironically, the problem we ran into is that while Skill Focus is now well-balanced against other Feats, it screws up PrCs a bit. I mean, one of the costs of Loremaster was "wasting" a Feat to get a +2 to a Knowledge skill, at a point where you already had 10 ranks or more. But, if you rework Skill Focus so that it's actually useful for things like Knowledge skills, it skews balance a bit.
One other thing: the Take 20 ability of Greater Skill Focus works much better if you do the +10/-10 rolls for rolling a 20 or a 1. That way you still have a reason to roll in some situations.
About my versions of Skill Focus:
The key was, we wanted something that scaled with you, never becoming less useful, and providing access to a new mechanic helps this.
Math note: "re-roll 5 or less" adds, on average, 1.875 to your roll. More importantly, it really reduces the chance of critical fumbles.
"Re-roll 10 or less" adds, on average, 2.5, but it's really more effective than that since you can choose not to reroll if you only needed a 7 or something.
I haven't made the Epic version yet, but it'd go something like:
> Requires 20 ranks
> Lets you Take 20 in 5x normal time instead of 20x
> Can re-roll no matter what the first roll gave (effectively giving 2 tries at every skill check for one skill at the cost of 2 normal and 1 Epic feat)
We also reworked the Alertness-style Feats along these lines. So, while Skill Focus gives two benefits (Take 10, re-roll 5 or less), Alertness gives the re-roll part to both Spot and Listen. Same kind of thing for all the FR ones like this; for each +2, give one of the two Skill Focus benefits as appropriate.
Due to popular demand, most people just replaced Combat Casting with Skill Focus (Concentration), since being able to Take 10 on a concentration check is huge.
Ironically, the problem we ran into is that while Skill Focus is now well-balanced against other Feats, it screws up PrCs a bit. I mean, one of the costs of Loremaster was "wasting" a Feat to get a +2 to a Knowledge skill, at a point where you already had 10 ranks or more. But, if you rework Skill Focus so that it's actually useful for things like Knowledge skills, it skews balance a bit.
One other thing: the Take 20 ability of Greater Skill Focus works much better if you do the +10/-10 rolls for rolling a 20 or a 1. That way you still have a reason to roll in some situations.
