Abolishing Teacher/Scholar

[Enig]

Just for the sake of seeing what everyone thinks of this, I'm going to make a suggestion!

Yeah, what the tin says, removing the scholar and teacher feats entirely and letting everyone teach every skill and spell they have available up to a certain limit determined by a combination of charisma and whatever the skill in question's primary stat is (ie. dex for steal, etc).

What's the worst that could happen?

[Gwain]

Make it a combination of intellect, wisdom and charisma, charisma being the least, since some teachers are quite ugly in real life, but still able to teach effectively.

[Athon]

Just for the sake of seeing what everyone thinks of this, I'm going to make a suggestion!

Yeah, what the tin says, removing the scholar and teacher feats entirely and letting everyone teach every skill and spell they have available up to a certain limit determined by a combination of charisma and whatever the skill in question's primary stat is (ie. dex for steal, etc).

What's the worst that could happen?

I entirely agree with you, Enig. I think a possible compromise if the admins don't want to remove it is to allow players to exchange glory for feat refunds on teacher/scholar feats ONLY.

[Selveem]

Really, I agree with this. I don't see why an actual feat is needed for something that people do for each other every day.

I don't even feel there should be a stat requirement, unless we're talking about teaching someone much higher than we currently can.

I think a lot of people would suggest I've got a pretty low charisma score by the way I speak on the forums and the wonderful responses I achieve. Even still, I am really good at teaching people new things. I taught my friend at work everything I knew he hadn't learned about the previous database I worked in. He's now considered the database expert in my absence.

[Eltsac]

Well this goes the same ways than the scholar abolishing I was proposing in another thread so I'm up for it

It only opens for more PC rp to me, rather than NPC training

El

[Bellayana]

I'm all for it, I like the idea of the primary stat idea. Steal for example being dex, someone might not be the smartest (int) but they have a high dex and cha to show they can communicate effectively with the student. Whereas with a spell (int) someone that has a low int wouldn't be able to understand the spell much at all to begin with. So this gets thumbs up from me.

[Briek]

The idea of getting rid of the feats themselves is good, using attribute scores though I don't think that is the way to go about it.
Ability scores represent natural ability in some shape for form but skills are only aided by natural ability not dominated by them.

I say still use skill level, get rid of the feats sure but the level of teaching should be defined by how good someone is at that skill, not how good someone COULD be at that skill based upon the fact that he might be nimble, or strong or smart etc

Maybe you could make intelligence and wisdom a modifier to teaching, but nothing else.

[Isaldur]

Charisma should play a role. While the physical beauty aspect of the stat may not matter, the powerful persona that goes along with high charisma does. You can be the the smartest person in the world on a topic be it wisdom or intelligence related, but that does not mean you can teach with any degree of success.

In my opinion, Charisma should play the greatest role in teaching to more advanced levels of skill.

[Keltorn]

This is a good idea, getting rid of those silly feats. I never once felt like they added anything to the game; all they do is keep players who didn't have several feats to blow from teaching important abilities to other players. If the goal was to increase PC interaction, then I feel like these feats accomplished the opposite.

In my opinion, Charisma should play the greatest role in teaching to more advanced levels of skill.

You took the words right out of my mouth. Intelligence means you have the information and can ensure it is correct, but you need charisma to present it in a way that isn't going to put your students to sleep.

[Briek]

What happens to those people with the feats, get the points back?

[Selveem]

That's generally how that works out, so I'd assume so.

[Brar]

Charisma should play a role. While the physical beauty aspect of the stat may not matter, the powerful persona that goes along with high charisma does. You can be the the smartest person in the world on a topic be it wisdom or intelligence related, but that does not mean you can teach with any degree of success.
In my opinion, Charisma should play the greatest role in teaching to more advanced levels of skill.

On the other hand, being charismatic doesn't mean you can teach either, the professor I learnt the more from where never the most appreciated one (charisma) but the most knowledgable (intelligence) and /or strict (in term of how they make the learning process) (wisdom).

Charsima is the power to influence other and the force of your personality, how you force your ideas on othersand makes them thinks you're right, your "magnetism"...
For me, this have nothing to do with teaching correctly.

Here's the description of charisma regarding DnD rules.

Charisma measures a character's force of personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, ability to lead, and physical attractiveness. This ability represents actual strength of personality, not merely how one is perceived by others in a social setting

This is my personnal experience and opinion of course.. (see Proffesor Snape here... low charisma, yet great teacher)

[Gwain]

Not all classes or guilds though strive for high charisma, bards would, but not everyone is a bard or high in charisma. There are classes that don't require it, what happens when you have the skill at a sufficient level, have a great deal of experience roleplaying and teaching, but low charisma disables you from teaching things sufficiently? I would think a moderate charisma is fair for most teaching, and that skills that require a high charisma to be used effectively should be the only ones that require a high charisma to teach.

Either that or I severely devalued my charisma.

[Selveem]

This to me just reminds me of those silly drives to encourage people to pump points into Charisma. Your classic fighter will NOT have 14 Charisma. If he does, he either got a nice heap of good rolls or he's pretty much a crappy character. If that fighter is a Dwarf, forget it.

I don't really care much for the imposed builds just to be useful outside of fighting just so that your use WHILE fighting sucks horribly. To me, I see it more of a "GREAT! You've got 16 Charisma. You'll be a highly decorated officer who has never seen real combat. I hope you have political aspirations, because otherwise you're pretty useless." type situation.

If it's so very impossible for low Charisma characters to teach other people, then please explain to me how Dwarves are known as the best smiths in all the realms? Because, really, their normal Charisma bonus is a -1 modifier. If we expected people to have at least _12_ Charisma just to teach any form of skill, then the Dwarves as a whole would never have succeeded this far as a race.

[Llanthyr]

Why not make it such that teachers can teach a skill as long as they are 2 levels above in their skill level? I don't need to have a phd in advanced mathematics to teach a 7 year old kid maths.

[Enig]

Heya, folks!

The idea, as I imagined it, was to split up your ability to teach on the basis of your charisma,and the primary stat associated with the skill, but charisma is pretty unpopular, it would seem. I suppose in retrospect that I should have explained myself better but I had no intention of including a penalty for characters with lower-average charisma, only a bonus for those with above average charisma (say, 12+ or so). Something along the lines of:

MaxTrainableSkillLevel= 2*(PrimaryStatModifier)+1*(CharismaModifier) - So a fighter who has, say, 20 strength and 14 charisma, would be able to teach up to around the same level that most mobs currently teach. If that fighter instead had 20 strength and 20 charisma, he'd be able to teach better than most mobs, which sounds like a win-win situation to me!

Also, Selveem: Dude, chill. Under the proposed system it's an optional bonus but even if it was required it wouldn't exactly be the death knell of anyone wanting to teach anything. Now that stats are all out in the open let me just say that the average character with no ECL has *29* points to spend, and your average character with 2 ECL has 28, which gives you enough to invest in 18 strength, 18 dexterity, and 18 constitution and still be able to sink 4-5 points into charisma if you so choose. Dwarves do get -2 charisma, but they also get +2 con. Guess what?! Those points you could have put into constitution as a human, but no longer have to, on account of your bonus? You can put them into charisma! Nice, eh?

[Briek]

On the plus side that would give Charisma a little more purpose, as paladin I had to dump a lot of stat points into Charisma and at the moment it doesn't really do anything.

[Brar]

I really like this system Enig, it sounds quite nice

[Keltorn]

I don't really care much for the imposed builds just to be useful outside of fighting just so that your use WHILE fighting sucks horribly. To me, I see it more of a "GREAT! You've got 16 Charisma. You'll be a highly decorated officer who has never seen real combat. I hope you have political aspirations, because otherwise you're pretty useless." type situation.

I can see what Selveem's getting at. After all, what kind of character puts all his stat points into abilities that are useless to his chosen profession?

They do, exist, of course. People don't get to choose their ability scores in real life; they get what they're born with. For those people, it's more about choosing the class that fits your ability scores, but sometimes it doesn't work out. Maybe there's no good fit for those scores, maybe you're expected to take over the family business despite not being good at it, etc. I remember someone designing a wizard with a low intelligence score once. He couldn't cast any decent spells, but he was trying so hard to follow in his father's footsteps... Anyway, we have a term for those people, actually. We call them NPCs. You know, Non-Player Characters? As in they're not the same as the characters made by players? We call those Player Characters.

While people certainly can go and make characters that are good at doing everything but their jobs, it just isn't the way games like this are played. Players are supposed to be great heroes who save the world from an impossibly large threat, not sit around a fountain sipping tea and gossiping about who's sleeping with who. However, requiring half-a-dozen feats simply to help other players learn skills can have that kind of effect on characters. Either they're heroes who spent their feats on something worthwhile, or they're forever stunted in their combat skills and are better off just staying out of the fighting.

Is that sort of what you were thinking, Selveem?

---

And Enig, you mean Level Adjustment, not ECL, right? ECL means Effective Character Level (That is, the sum of your Hit Dice plus Level Adjustment). I seriously doubt a level two character could have eighteens for three of his stats.

[Selveem]

Players are supposed to be great heroes who save the world from an impossibly large threat, not sit around a fountain sipping tea and gossiping about who's sleeping with who.

Whoah, whoah, whoah! Back off the tea-drinkers, dawg. Tea and coffee spawn heroes. It's a proven genetic enhancement. That's why asians had Ninjas and Samurai and the US got stuck with Cowboys.

Is that sort of what you were thinking, Selveem?

Exactly, aside from your tea-dissing.