[.11] Herbal Lore

Pantzike

Pantzike

Expert
A couple notes on Herbal Lore.

First: In looking at the Character builder Herbal Lore is not listed as a Stealth Skill. Is this an oversight?

Read Magic, and First Aid/Healing Arts the prereq skills for Scroll Making and Create Potions are both listed as a Scholarly skill. Since Herbal Lore is only a prereq for a further Stealth skill I think it should be included in that section.


Second: Should it do more? What I mean to say is. Currently, since Educated will allow the identification of Alchemy, all Herbal Lore does is speed up that identification time to 30 seconds. It also may allow the identification of poisoned foods... however this may be included in educated, I wasn't quite clear on that.

Looking at the other "gateway skills": Read Magic alone allows the casting of all level 1-4 scrolls (half the scroll levels available). First Aid / Healing Arts allows for several IG actions and identifications. Both of these boons are in addition to the faster ID of the respective production items.

My suggestion is to move the ability to apply coatings to weapons / items to Herbal Lore. Leave the use of Gas Globes at Alch 3 where it traditionally lives.

Thank you for your consideration.

Edit: Corrected Read Magic description. It was late, whoops.
 
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A couple of clarifications: Read Magic allows the casting of any scroll of level 1 trough 4, not their identification, though it does reduce the time required to identify Scrolls from 60 seconds to 30, and Herbal Lore can be used to identify if food or drink has any Poison in it, as a carry over use from 1.3 that was not moved to the Educated skill.

On a personal note, I don't think it needs to be changed from a Trades and Crafts skill to a Stealth skill, and I also disagree that simply being able to identify a Poison is sufficient to safely apply it to a weapon or mix it into food or drink, but neither of your suggestions is without merit.

Putting prerequisites (besides Educated) for Production skills into the same category as those skills makes sense, and Herbal Lore is the only skill that breaks this convention; however, rather than make Herbal Lore a Stealth skill, I think instead the identification time reduction it offers should be moved to Alchemy 1, along with the ability to detect Poison in food or drink, which would make it similar to Create Trap 1 absorbing the ability to set and disarm traps and pick locks currently provided by Legerdemain.

I don't have very strong feelings one way or the other, so I'm fine with either the current 2.0 implementation or your suggestions.
 
Thanks for the catch and the clarification.

The other use of Herbal Lore currently is a build sink that must be paid before Alchemy can be purchased, which does not increase the cost of later purchases of Alchemy. I'm all for removing the Herbal Lore skill but it would make the powerful Alch 3 skill that much less expensive. A possible solution being to both remove the skill and increase the requirement for thrown alchemy to 4 ranks instead of 3. This could keep everything costing about the same without having Herbal Lore as an outlier skill which does not do much.

Just a few thoughts on what appears to be a vestigial skill to the system.
 
I see your point, but Create Trap 3 is in a similar spot as Alchemy 3: it allows the setting of any kind of trap, as well as allows you to throw Trap Globes. Traps are generally less utilized by PCs (and depending on which chapter you're in, you may not see many traps used by Plot), but there is no prerequisite at all to Create Trap, not even Educated; Alchemy 3 is powerful, but lacks some versatility outside of Blast Globes, as many creature types are entirely immune to Poison, and depending on the chapter and the ratio of vulnerable to immune creatures you're facing, can swing between being the best tool to have and being almost entirely useless.

I think this swing balances out the otherwise powerful effects it provides, and in chapters with a lot of trap usage and decent balance of monsters vulnerable to Poison, Create Trap and Alchemy can be about on par with each other. It's not really necessary to keep Herbal Lore as a prerequisite if you're willing to move reduced identification time and the ability to detect Poison in food to Alchemy 1 the same way the ability to pick locks and set/disarm traps was moved to Create Trap 1, provided an effort is made to make them both feel useful.
 
While I agree with Sage, I also think HL should be a Stealth skill (and Hardy be made a Martial skill).
 
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