Quote:
Originally Posted by Harald387
Or unless your character (and your group) have need of that focus of 'outdoor skills' without adding the extra brains for skills that character largely lacks anyway. Yes, you can get more bang for your buck by increasing IQ - but "pure IQ" is something that rarely sees rolls. So then you also need to invest in skills that use that IQ: for the Barbarian, that mostly means adding off-template Social Skills (a poor choice due to the obligatory Social Stigma) or Knowledge Skills (where ANY Barbarian will be behind most novice Mages or Clerics).
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A Scout gets a +2 boost from Outdoorsman 2 to the following five mandatory skills: Camouflage, Navigation, Mimicry (Bird-calls), Survival, Tracking. The optional skill Weather Sense also benefits.
If a Scout were allowed to swap Outdoorsman for IQ +1, they'd get a +1 boost instead to the following mandatory ten skills: Camouflage, Cartography, Gesture, Mimicry (Bird Calls), Navigation, Observation, Shadowing, Survival, Tracking, Traps. Also any of these optional skills: Armory, First Aid, Prospecting, Seamanship, Search, Weather Sense.
At least for Scouts, it doesn't take off-template investment to make IQ pay off. Nevertheless, I think it's fine for Scouts to be tied to the Outdoorsman idiom: it's fine to have inefficient investments. My only complaint is that so many of the Outdoorsman skills are inexplicably off-template for Scouts: Disguise (Animals), Fishing, Mimicry (Animal Sounds), and Naturalist are 100% idiomatic for scouts in my opinion. Of course it's easy to add them as optional skills to the template, which also gives Scouts more of a reason not to just invest all 8 optional points in Bow instead.