Pathfinder 1E Condensing the skills list

[Starfox]

Without going into detail about the discussion here, I just wanted to post my skill list from my homebrew:

Charm - This is Diplomacy, bluff, and sense motive. With added feats it can become disguise and sleight of hand.
Create - This is craft and disable device
Dodge - This is the universal physical defense skill
Impress - Intimidate and leadership
Know - Lore of all kinds, including medicine with feats
Maneuver - The ability to move in a tactical environment
Melee - BAB with melee weapons and magic
Shoot - BAB with ranged weapons and magic
Spot - Perception
Travel - Ability to move and survive in a larger environment, including vehicle and riding skills

10 skills, and these are used to power every aspect of the game - all spells are add-ons to these skills. After years of play, I've found that these are all I need. I think DnD could do with much less than they have. Translating these to DnD gives us 7 skills - Melle, Shoot, and Dodge are represented trough combat mechanics in DnD.

 

[Greg K]

10 skills, and these are used to power every aspect of the game - all spells are add-ons to these skills. After years of play, I've found that these are all I need. I think DnD could do with much less than they have. Translating these to DnD gives us 7 skills - Melle, Shoot, and Dodge are represented trough combat mechanics in DnD.

If this works for you and your group that is cool. For my friends and I, this would be too few.

 

[Stone Dog]

I am a big fan of Fantasy Craft skills, along with their classes and feats.

Acrobatics (Dex), Athletics (Str), Blend (cha, social stealth), crafting, disguise, haggle (wis), Impress (cha), Intimidate (cha), Investigate (wis), Medicine (Int), Notice(Wis) Prestidigitation (Dex, Should be slight of hand or disable device imo), Resolve (Con), Ride, Search, Sense Motive, Sneak, Survival and Tactics (Int).

I really like Notice and Search being separate from a single perception skill. One based on wisdom for raw alertness and awareness and one based on Int for deductive determination of where something could be hidden. Prestidigitation might have gone a little far combining manual dexterity skills, but whatever. I can handle Perception as a major skill in Pathfinder I can handle Prestidigitation in Fantasy Craft.

 

[Matthias]

The only Skills I haven't seen much use for are Escape Artist and Knowledge (geography) as the former works nicely as a Dex check and the latter overlaps with Knowledge (local) more often than not. Knowledge (geography) often just becomes Knowledge (local) when you're in an unfamiliar land.

Escape Artist is only useless in campaigns where GMs or players don't consider prisoner-taking a practical alternative to simply killing the opponent. If a clever GM manages to take every PC alive, you can bet everyone will high-five the one player who figured it couldn't hurt to dump a few ranks into Escape Artist.

As for Knowledge/geography, I consider it integral to orienteering and complementary to Survival. Knowledge/geography tells you where everything is, and Survival tells you how to get there. Or to put it another way, K/geo and Survival are your map and compass, respectively.

 

[adembroski]

Am I the only person who thinks the continual condensation of the skill list is actually a bad thing?

 

[Curmudgeonly]

Am I the only person who thinks the continual condensation of the skill list is actually a bad thing?

Nope, a large number of skills is better imo, as it promotes diversity and specialization. I disliked that Spot, Search and Listen were all lumped into one skill i.e. Perception.

 

[Loonook]

Honestly I like some of your ideas, and I'll throw out my thoughts here.

Well, here's our list of skill in Pathfinder:

Acrobatics Fly Ride
Appraise Handle Animal Sense Motive
Bluff Heal Sleight of Hand
Climb Intimidate Spellcraft
Craft Knowledge (all) Stealth
Diplomacy Linguistics Survival
Disable Device Perception Swim
Disguise Perform
Use Magic Device Escape Artist Profession

Now let us take the ones that aren't changing at all:

Acrobatics
Disable Device
Disguise
Escape Artist
Fly
Handle Animal
Heal
Intimidate
Perception
Perform
Profession
Sense Motive
Sleight of Hand
Stealth
Survival

I like these. They work for me, and I like where they are.

Now combinations:

Appraise gets placed with appropriate Craft skill.
Athletics combines Climb and Swim.
Combine Diplomacy and Bluff as (Some name) [This one I'm not sure about, need to crunch more].

Now here are the tricky ones:

Linguistics: Language Mastery. Rather than each point giving you a brand new language it gives you fluency. At the beginning of the game you gain fluency points at the same rate as you would gain normal languages. Now your Wizard speaks a smattering of several languages, or is very eloquent in one and can ask where the latrine is in the other. Would need to hammer out specific fluency levels, but the rest of Linguistics remains the same.

Knowledge (Local) becomes tiered. For every four ranks you gain a new location to count as Local. Checks are made at a -2 penalty in any area where you do not have the location under your list.

Knowledge (Arcana) and Knowledge (Religion) split Spellcraft for Arcane and Divine Magic respectively.

Use Magic Device splits into Use Arcane and Use Divine Device. The two versions are Class Skills for the classes with Knowledge (Arcana) and Knowledge (Religion) respectively, but the Rogue gets both as class skills.

Ehh, that's the plan at least.

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[Starfox]

A short skill list is not a goal in itself, but of course a longer skill list means you have to hand out more skill points. I prefer the lower complexity of a shorter list with enabler feats - much easier to make and read character descriptions if there are 10 skills than if there are 40, especially of some of those 40 are so strongly themed you'd rarely have one without 1-3 others - say if you split up trap disposal into 3 different skills, all of which are needed to perform the basic function.

In other words, I prefer a skill list divided by adventurer concept. Going back to trap disposal, that can be split into several sections - finding traps, removing traps, building traps, setting traps, the tactical knowledge to realize what is a good bottleneck to put traps in, and so on. But a character trained in one of these would be unlikely to not know all the others. Oh sure, there are craftsmen who built traps and have no idea how to find them, but those are not adventurer types - and I want my rules geared towards whose who will actually use it - meaning adventurers.

 

[Nigh Invulnerable]

But that means every skill should have a specialization.
And if you're putting ranks into specializations anyway... why condense the skill list?

The Cortex skills/specialization works because it does have some divided skills. There might be "Athletics" split into swimming or climbing but there is also a "Ride" skill divided by animal or a Melee Weapon skill divided into swords and clubs. It's not just the skill system but integral to the combat system.

This was my exact thought upon reading this as well. Why condense the list and then have specialties to invest more points in? Seems a bit redundant.

On the topic of the skill list, I like a broader list for my games, as it encourages players to pick specialties and perhaps some flavor skill ranks as well. Sure, fighters don't have a ton of skill points, but a human fighter with 10 Int who picks fighter as his favored class is still getting 4 skill points a level. Using the Pathfinder "trained=+3 on checks with this skill" means you can spend 1 point and get a minor bonus with a skill for a bit of characterization. My brother pointed out that a second level rogue would be smart to just spend all their new skill points on the other class skills they didn't start with because then they'd have +4 in 20 skills instead of +5 in 10. This is a little power gamery for my taste, but he has a point. Nothing stops a character from spending one point in a class skill to get a nice little bonus in it.

 

[Matthias]

I guess that skills which are truly complementary ought to be merged together. By complementary, I mean two (or more) skills which inseparably go together within a given adventuring niche (such as thievery) and which most characters occupying that niche (such as rogues) will want to pump up said skills at the same rate because it would be a significant disadvantage for them *not* to do so. Hide and Move Silently are an iconic example of this.

For any two skills that could be merged, would it harm the character to max out in one and not the other if that is part of their "shtick"? For Craft and Appraise I would say no. Appraise will get you a lot more in terms of benefits, while Craft is almost a throwaway skill unless your GM likes to break your stuff or keeps you away from civilization for months at a time. Climb and Swim? Not really inseparable either, unless you are a pirate. Ride and Fly? Definitely not inseparable, and Fly doesn't even matter without a means of flight. Bluff and Disguise? If your chosen profession is spy you might depend on the two simultaneously, but you can generally get along with a high Bluff if that's your thing, without also needing to commit identity theft.



From D&D 3.0 to D&D 3.5 and then to Pathfinder, some consolidation of skills was interesting, helpful, and even efficient, but I would recommend against trying consolidation as some whizbang great idea that will surely make skills make more sense somehow, or for no other purpose than just to simplify the skill system for simplification's sake. There needs to be a better reason to merge two skills other than "they go together thematically for some characters." 3E's Alchemy was really a Craft skill in disguise, so it needed to be put right. Hide/Move Silently was a split that, while it mimicked the division between Listen and Spot and looked good on paper, was unnecessary and hurt rogues by soaking up more skill points when they didn't have to. The whole idea of "exclusive skills" scremed "I need to be a class feature instead!" And Intuit Direction, Innuendo, and Read Lips were such specialized tasks that they were a waste of ranks and it would take a GM/DM to have a cruelty streak to want to make it necessary to be good in one of these skills as a plot twist, knowing no one in the party would ever spend the points on them. Concentration technically wasn't "merged" per se, but it was a skill that was either useless if you weren't a caster, or was absolutely vital if you were one--so it got converted into a sort-of-but-not-really class ability that every caster could max out in all the time.


I don't really like that Perception is almost a must-have skill for every character in the game, but if we still had Spot, Listen, and Search as separate skills in Pathfinder, we would probably still be seeing every character who cared about noticing things pumping them up at roughly the same rate. Indirectly, the division between Spot, Search, and Listen could represent a higher cost for being good at noticing things, because you would have to pump them all up at extra expense to be really all-around good at perception, but then you could try to save a few skill points/ranks and just specialize in one over the other two--but I don't know how often such a strategy was used with thiefy/sneaky characters in D&D 3.X.


IMO, skills which are "really good to have" or which represent certain iconic behaviors in fantasy gaming ought to have extra emphasis by being broken down into specialties. This is one reason why we shouldn't have a single, all-encompassing Knowledge skill, or a single "physical movement" skill instead of Acrobatics, Climb, and Swim (four if you include Fly), or a single social manipulation skill instead of Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate. There's also a needful split between Spellcraft, Knowledge (arcana), and Use Magic Device. Toying around with Things Not Meant For You (tm) is what UMD is all about and it would be a loss to the game's flavor to mash that up with the other two 'magical arts' skills, whereas Knowledge: arcana represents more general information about the mysteries of the unnatural world, and Spellcraft is about spellcasting and magic items.