Skill Bonuses

While your ranks are important for providing a level of competence and opening up new abilities, equally important is your total bonus to these ability checks. Each skill ability is designed to be usable, but not necessarily reliable, when you first acquire them in order to offset the fact that you can basically use them all of the time.

Bonuses to skills are broken up into five groups, each detailed below.

• Skill Ranks are a bonus equal to the amount of skill points invested in a skill.
• Attribute modifiers are gained from having a high attribute related to a skill.
• Conditional modifiers are those gained based on actual conditions when you use a skill ability, and are generally detailed in the skill descriptions. Bonuses arising from different conditions stack, unless otherwise noted in the condition description.
• Competence modifiers are any racial ability, class feature, feat, gear, spell, or any other bonus or penalty to a skill that does not fit into one of the other groupings. Bonuses do not stack with other bonuses, and are capped at +3 in order to keep success rates within expected progressions. Penalties do not stack with other penalties, but are not capped. Only the largest available competence bonus and penalty apply on any particular roll.
• Circumstance modifiers are a miscellaneous +/-2 modifier that the DM may apply as necessary. They should be reserved for special cases where the existing condition modifiers do not adequately cover the situation.

The competence bonus limit is a substantial change, and one worth understanding. A simple example of the non-stacking implications can be found among feats. While skill focus and the various skill feats that boost two skills by +2 are still in the game and still work normally, these feats no longer stack. If you want to be very skilled in one thing, you should take skill focus in it. If you want to be rather skilled in multiple things, you should take the feat that offers a +2 bonus to each of those things. You should never take both for the same skill or take feats to boost skills that you gain racial bonuses on, because they do not stack and that's a big waste of your rather limited feats.

There are many racial features, class features, feats, gear abilities, or spell benefits that do not fit into the strict new bonus structure. They may offer bonuses to skills that no longer exist, bonuses that are too large, or grant an ability that doesn't make any sense. These generally require some conversion on your part before they can be used properly. While it is impossible to cover every conversion case for every published item, the most common are detailed in the next sections and should provide a good reference for any that aren't covered.

Converting Racial, Class, and Feat Bonuses

Every bonus or ability that does not fit into the Tome of Prowess bonus structure must be updated independently. If there are two racial abilities, class features, or feats that grant skill bonuses going in, there should be two after conversion as well. While it may be tempting to merge some abilities before converting, doing so will reduce their effectiveness and is not recommended.

Every skill conversions can generally be performed as indicated in the skill updates section later in this chapter. The following table provides suggestions on how to convert bonuses and abilities.

*Only one re-roll may be used per skill check, regardless of the number available. A character may also declare a re-roll and elect to "take 10", if they could do so otherwise.

Converting Gear Bonuses

Masterwork skill items don't really fit with the spirit of the new skills. In the SRD system, they grant bonuses to a very focused skill and are rather narrow in use. Here each skill grants several abilities and it is difficult to justify a single tool granting bonuses to all of them. We also don't need minor number boosts like this anymore and they conflict with the revised racial benefits. As a result, masterwork skill items have been removed from this work and do not exist.

Like masterwork skill items, the SRD magical skill items have also been replaced. There is still a place for magical skill items, however, they just need to work within this altered system and not allow people who use them to gain extraordinary benefits or perform well above the expected mark for their level. These items need to be useful for characters who don't substantially invest in a particular skill, and this can be done by giving ranks with the items instead of bonuses. They also need to provide some utility to characters who have already invested heavily in a skill, and this can be done with competence bonuses, "take X" abilities and variations, or re-rolls.

Conversion to these items is a simple matter of replacement, or of allowing the character to select new gear with the appropriate cost. Example skill items that offer benefits to those who have the skill, as well as those who don't, appear in the Running a Skilled Game section.

Converting Spell Bonuses

With the revised skills here, there is no place for spells that provide temporary ranks in a skill, or that provide a static bonus to a skill. While there is actually room for spells that function as temporary skill items, you probably shouldn't do that for thematic reasons, as well as to avoid putting every tool in the game in spellcasters' pockets. To avoid the magic vs. skill thematic issues, value concerns, and omnitasking possibilities, we have just removed spells that directly affect your skill modifier from the game or rewritten them into a spell that just does something appropriate for its spell level.

Conversion of spells to this system involves equal parts spell replacement and bonus adjustment. Updated and removed spells appear in the Running a Skilled Game section.

Dealing with Attribute Bonuses

The above topics cover the most common direct skill bonuses and at least offer suggestions on dealing with the more unusual cases. But they don't talk about indirect bonuses at all, like the bonuses you get from the attributes that you will be increasing as you level. Between +6 enhancement bonuses from items and +5 inherent bonuses from wishes or books and +5 more from simple levels, you can get an extra +8 bonus on an attribute modifier (or more) fairly easily in some games. And in other games, you never see even half of that. This isn't as large a modifier as you used to get from skill boost items, but suffers all the same problems of deciding whether to expect it in the base DC or not.

Unfortunately, because of large variances in when these stat jumps hit and by how much they grow, this isn't really something we can plan around. And removing these stat jumps from the game entirely isn't a particularly workable solution for a large number of play styles. The best that can be done is to point out that we do not assume any large attribute boosts in our base DCs, because we don't want attribute boosters to be necessary to get reasonable use out of your skills at higher levels. Since that still leaves holes out there for some play styles, we have included several suggested solutions to the potential problem for use in your own games.

Option - Scale DCs

If you expect large attribute boosts and want to keep the skill abilities balanced such that characters are not overly successful with them when they acquire them, you can just scale up the DCs. In general, you should add 1 to every non-opposed DC for every 2 ranks greater than 4 are required to access the ability. You may need to adjust this rate if there are large jumps at level 9 or 10 (when players can chain-bind for wishes and boost all of their attributes by +5 at once), though the fact that there are fewer abilities gained after this point means you will probably be fine if you do not. As was mentioned before, there's a lot of variance in trying to account for these.

Option - Cap Attributes

If you don't want to scale the DCs but you also don't want to worry about players using higher level skill abilities more reliably than expected, you can simply put a cap on their attributes or the attribute bonuses that can be applied to skills. We recommend setting the limit at 20 + their racial attribute modifier for each attribute, and just using whatever that modifier is if you're going to cap skill adjustments and not attributes entirely. For races in the SRD, this gives a maximum range of 18 to 22 on attributes, or a +4 to +6 bonus. That gives players some room for growth, but since these numbers are within expected ranges they will work with the skill ability DCs over all levels of the game. It also pushes players to grow multiple attributes, as the combination of attribute boosters and attribute ceilings causes diminishing returns for continued attribute investment after a point.

Option - Do Nothing

If your games don't involve large, universal attribute boosts or you don't care if higher level attribute focused characters get better results more reliably on their shiny new high level abilities than they did when they got their lower level skill abilities, then you don't need to do anything at all. The DCs listed in the skills chapter should serve you just fine; you probably won't see major divergence from the expected success rates until higher levels anyway.