D&D 5E Paring the skill list

[Kobold Stew]

Not a threadjack at all, [MENTION=92511]steeldragons[/MENTION] ! Thanks for sharing your list. Your combat sense skill perhaps is doig what I want Knowledge: warfare to be doing -- interesting. I think your list is further away from the playtest than I wanted to go -- I'm thinking (aloud) about how it will play in playtest (what I'll want to do, and what I'll want my players to try), and eventually about the feedback I'll give. Re-writing the list wholesale is more ambitious!

I'm curious about your suggested skills: for almost any time it's rolled, I could make the case for either stat you list being relevant -- are you thinking that the players would just choose? How to discern between Int+combat sense and Wis+ combat sense?

Thanks for sharing!

 

[the Jester]

I'm pretty sure the reason Perception got split back up is feedback from all of us- Perception is by far the best skill if it's in as a single skill. I'm totally for leaving it split up.

I'm also totally for keeping Heraldry in. I'm fine with overlapping knowledge areas, as long as they are only partially overlapping and are relatively distinct. History and Heraldry are a good example, so long as Heraldry does stuff History doesn't and vice-versa.

 

[drothgery]

I'm pretty sure the reason Perception got split back up is feedback from all of us- Perception is by far the best skill if it's in as a single skill. I'm totally for leaving it split up.

Except that leads to the four-dice mambo of hide vs spot and move silently vs listen when someone's trying to be sneaky, and that's really frigging annoying.

 

[Kobold Stew]

I'm pretty sure the reason Perception got split back up is feedback from all of us- Perception is by far the best skill if it's in as a single skill. I'm totally for leaving it split up.

See I find this interesting -- I understand the intellectual appeal of heightened senses, but in practical terms (as noted in post 17 of this thread) I feel it's always just a matter of playing catch-up to the elf. Letting all elves have *both* skills *for free* means that the skill becomes trivial, as long as there's an elf in the party (and I agree with Defcon that you don't want too much overlap in PC's skillsets), and it is a skill-suck for the non-elf pc who wants acute senses.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm with [MENTION=7006]DEFCON 1[/MENTION]

If you want a consolidated skill list, why not just drop skills altogether and go with raw ability score checks?

There needs to be some extra clarity on the scope of each skill (is a PC expected to roll for this once per encounter? per day? per session? per level?), just so they can be comparable in power, so that we don't end up picking something super-narrow that rarely comes up just because we weren't thinking broad enough.

Like, Swim. A swim check is a pretty infrequent kind of thing to make in a lot of games (assuming most games don't take place on the high seas), you could go several levels between Swim checks.

But, Spot. A Spot check is gonna happen almost every encounter, and is especially useful whenever anything tries to hide from you.

Right now, someone who picks Spot is going to get a lot more mileage out of their skill than someone who picks up Swim.

Does that mean Swim needs to be expanded so that it covers more? Or does that mean Spot needs to be broken up so that it comes up less? At what point is it a meaningful character option? "Keen eyesight" is pretty clearly an archetypal feature of a lot of characters in fantasy, but "Swims well?" Usually that distinction is more binary than that (You fall in the water, can you swim? Yes/No)

I've always been a bit partial to secondary skills a la 2e/1e myself...all of them pretty broad, but still providing some meaningful character distinction. "Swims well" doesn't tell you much about a character, but "Profession: David Hasselhoff" gives you a lot to work with. "Keen eyesight" is relevant, but more limiting might be "Profession: Meditative Monk" might mean that you can be perceptive...if you're able to center yourself, and might compare to "Profession: Woodsdude" where you can definitely notice something wrong in the forest, but in a dungeon you might not be that clever.

At any rate, the skills absolutely need to be comparable in scale, regardless of what scale that is.

 

[the Jester]

Except that leads to the four-dice mambo of hide vs spot and move silently vs listen when someone's trying to be sneaky, and that's really frigging annoying.

Ehh, I'm fine with a single Sneak skill.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I'm about ready to say we should drop the idea of perception as a skill altogether. Let elves and rangers get a small bonus to wisdom checks to detect things.

 

[Sunseeker]

And I think the game is better off by having a host of skills that are like that. They are much more exciting to me in trying to figure out reasons why they might apply to a situation.

I agree, I think most skills should draw from at least 3 ability scores, and the player should have to choose one of the options as their primary source for that skill, while the DM would be able to require different ones when the situations call for it.

I'm with @DEFCON 1

If you want a consolidated skill list, why not just drop skills altogether and go with raw ability score checks?

Honestly I do this a lot already in my games, and wouldn't be opposed to it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Honestly I do this a lot already in my games, and wouldn't be opposed to it.

I'd be a bit gobsmacked if "ignore the skill system entirely" wasn't an option. I wouldn't be too shocked to see it as the default!

 

[Sunseeker]

I'd be a bit gobsmacked if "ignore the skill system entirely" wasn't an option. I wouldn't be too shocked to see it as the default!

I like skills, but they make a better guideline in most cases(which is why I like 4E's "general" skill set) than a hard-fast system.