My DM's House Rules on skills

[Diomeneus]

personally I love these. They allow a character a few more skills points to vary himself with by making several similar skills into one (also removes the need for similarly named feats).

NEW SKILLS (remove the two it combines)

Acrobatic - balance and tumble
Athletic - Jump and Swim
Disable Device - Open lock and Disable device
Observation - Spot and Listen
Stealth - Hide and move silently

it also makes taking skill focus in one of these fields more useful as it will be used much more often than it used to be.

 

[Claudius Gaius]

Nothing wrong with varying the skill list - but combined skills should be noted as in-class for everyone who has one or more of them in-class.

Secondarily, it may tend to indirectly penalize characters who don't have the combined skills as in-class skills: they'll get less in porportion for their own skill points. It might be best to make sure that every class has access to their own combined skills - but that's just a quick thought.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Nothing wrong with varying the skill list - but combined skills should be noted as in-class for everyone who has one or more of them in-class.

Secondarily, it may tend to indirectly penalize characters who don't have the combined skills as in-class skills: they'll get less in porportion for their own skill points. It might be best to make sure that every class has access to their own combined skills - but that's just a quick thought.

In this case, I think this would only apply to spellcasters. Maybe merging Knowledge (Arcana) and Spellcraft or Spellcraft and Decipher Script might be nice.

 

[Claudius Gaius]

I think the Knowledge/Arcana and Spellcraft would work best. How their knowledge base differs has never really been that clear. Is knowledge of spells and spellcasting not a part of knowing about magical things?

 

[DreamChaser]

personally I love these. They allow a character a few more skills points to vary himself with by making several similar skills into one (also removes the need for similarly named feats).

NEW SKILLS (remove the two it combines)

Acrobatic - balance and tumble
Athletic - Jump and Swim
Disable Device - Open lock and Disable device
Observation - Spot and Listen
Stealth - Hide and move silently

it also makes taking skill focus in one of these fields more useful as it will be used much more often than it used to be.

Huh...so rogues just went from 8+ skill points per level to 12+ skill points per level....rangers went up by 4 also. when you combine skills, you either need to reduce the number of SP or realize that you are making skill based characters more powerful (perhaps substantially).

Personally, I don't think it works in 3e. It reduces critical granularity (some creatures should have a better listen than spot: bats for example) and takes skills that were largely popular / useful / powerful and makes them more so.

Some would say that the former is a false issue because you can always give the bat a +4 bonus to Observation checks make to hear things but then I would point out that what this does is essentially make listen a separate skill again.

One elegant thing about the skill system is that it has (for the most part) a one skill = one action sort of thing going on (Survival is a prime exception...one that has always stood out to me as odd). Combining skills derails this aspect as well.

DC

 

[Claudius Gaius]

Yes, this is advantageous for skill-based characters - but since his GM is doing it anyway, the characters might as well take advantage or it - and try to get equal benefits for the characters with more limited skill sets.

It doesn't increase the number of skill points, it simply makes some better skills available - and the skills aren't all equal anyway. I've been in quite a lot of games where some skills - almost always spot and listen, sometimes diplomacy and gather information (often a single character can handle those for everyone, but at least one GM assigned large penalties if you weren't a part of the relevant social group) - were called for so often that you'd have had to be insane not to max them out and get enhancing items, while other skills - often swim, forgery, and knowledge/nobility and royalty - virtually never came up.

It might be a good thing to test: keep a record of how often each skill is actually checked for a while, divide by number of characters to which that skill is relevant, check the totals after a month or so, and adjust costs to make each skill point worth the same amount. Appraise was only checked 6 times while spot was checked 120 times? Perhaps a single skill point in Appraise should be worth a +5 up to the usual (level+3 limit) - Ergo at L9 3 points would be worth a +12, and you wouldn't need to invest more to keep Appraise maxed out until you hit level 13.

There's nothing sacred about the skill list. Some GM wants half as many skills? To add another dozen? To let characters from half a dozen different worlds each use their own lists? To drastically expand what each skill is good for? As long as they're having fun with it, so be it.

 

[DreamChaser]

Of course, any change within a given campaign is fine and up to the DM and players

If you believe (as I do) that the reason that fighters and rogues are balanced with each other is because fighters gain more feats and rogues more skills then making a rogue's skills more versatile upsets this balance.

If this is an intended or accepted side effect, cool beans.

I have found that most who combine skills often do it without previously considering the interclass ramifications. Just because all classes get skills doesn't mean that all classes are equally affected by changes to the skill system.

DC

 

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

I tried combining various skills (ex: spot+listen=perception). Ultimately, I think too much was lost from the game.

I'm seriously considering going back to the by-the-book 3.5 rules for skills and skill points.