Also the spells Flight and (possibly) Invisibility. Which are class features of 1.5 of the four archetypes. Which means that your version requires a 1 rank per level (Perception) and a Wizard.
Which really just illustrates how magic, as written, makes skills totally pointless, and negates the concept of skill-based classes. Further turning INT into the dump stat for non-Wizards and those that don't need it for feat prerequisites.
Among other problems with the game as written, yes.
So, now I'm curious how you solve this problem. How do you keep Int from being a dump stat?
That's a question that I'm not fully prepared to answer in someone else's thread, but that is the heart of the problem.
A full answer has several components: by limiting the ability of magic to replace skills, by giving more skills an in combat role, by giving more reason to be invested in intelligence (better intelligence based feats, beater intelligence based skills), and most of all by making skills better able to compete with magic at high levels.
Let me focus on the latter one, because its the only one that is topic relevant. I've alluded to some of the changes required ('epic uses of the skill become available before epic levels'), but the other thing that is required beyond just making skills more powerful is to add more skills which are desirable. Oddly, if you look at the skill design in 3.X, what you discover is that the designers were more worried about skills stepping on the toes of spellcasters, than they were about spell use stepping on the toes of skill users. This is the one area of problems with 1E/2E where the designers didn't seem to overcompensate and instead seemed to do mostly nothing.
Just consolidating skills simply reduces the number of skills you want and in and of itself doesn't help much. Skills still remain relatively unattractive - nice to have if you got them, but not something to sacrifice something else to obtain. What you really want is more skill choices so that being skillful is really cool.
To give you an idea what that is like, consider a skill like Tactics.
A fighter examing his skill list sees something like Tactics and he thinks to himself, "Hmmm..."
"I can form a shield wall with the cleric and we both not only improve our AC, but get evasion. That sounds cool."
"You mean to to tell me that if I'm standing behind a pillar or a boulder or other suitable cover I can qualify for Improved Evasion? Wow."
"I can use this to buff the Initiative score of everyone in the party? That's insane!?!?!"
"So, I can use this skill to save vs. being surprised? Really, you're kidding, right?"
"I can use this to get the DM to tell me whether that nasty looking Frost Giant has Combat Reflexes so I'll know whether its safe to charge, or whether the Bugbear I'm fighting is using a Reckless fighting stance so that I'll know when to drop the hammer on Power Attack? That could be really helpful."
"You mean I can 'Aid Other' in combat from 30' away AS A FREE ACTION? Who designed this broken skill. With a high enough bonus its like having unlimited minor spellcasting ability in every combat?"
Would you consider sacrificing a bit for that? (And that's just part of what you can do with it.) Maybe. Would it be worth playing a high int fighter to maximize Tactical use? Maybe not enough to justify an 18 Int over an 18 Str, but certainly it could be worth something.
And then he looks down and he sees, "Leadership", and it's nearly as cool. And then he looks and sees he has "Running" as a class skill, and he's like, "You mean I can potentially fast move like a Barbarian?" And on top of that there are basic atheletic skills like Climb, Jump, Ride, Swim, and Porter that you might not need max ranks in but that are worth having a few points each in to let you overcome ordinary challenges, and there are some cross-class skills like Spot, Listen, Sense Motive and Balance that are generally useful and worth figuring out some way to bump up (either by taking a feat to add them to your class skill list, or cross-classing if you have the points, or multiclassing into a 'skill' class to dip in the skills). And on top of that there are alot of really cool skills that aren't normally associated with Fighter but which could be darn useful.
And in short, you try to make the concept of playing a skillful fighter sounds attractive enough that you might want to do it. At the very least, you can think about doing 1 less point of damage to pick up max ranks in Tactics, or one less h.p. per level to pick up max ranks in Leadership or Running. And you do it by trying to let fighters do all the sort of things that you would expect fighters to be trained at doing - running, carrying things, acting intelligently on a battlefield, being a leadership presence in combat.
Expanded skill lists simply discourage players from investing in skills at all, since they can't have a meaningful number of them and so see no point in wasting time or effort trying, in my observation.
Because 3.X and to even greater degree 4e looks at skills entirely wrong. They focus on skills as something that you do in response to a DM created challenge ('The floor is slippery, make a balance check' or 'There are some runes here, make a 'Decipher Script' check....) to the extent that in 4e they have something called a 'Skill Challenge' as a core mechanic: "Hey guys, we are having a Skill Challenge. Time to make those otherwise useless skills you have useful!"
That's totally the wrong way to look at skills, and if you head down that path you end up where Chaosium 'Call of Cthulhu' got itself where you have this huge skill list but realistically only a tiny number of them actually show up and when a rare one shows up as a skill challenge you are screwed. Only, it's worse because at least in CoC, the XP system supported everyone learning everything through experience.
Instead, skills should let you
do something and the more skills you have the more things you can realistically
do. In that case, it doesn't matter that you can't do everything, the fact is that more skillful you are the more you can do. It's would be like complaining that spells are useful because no one can reasonably know all of them. No, of course not, that would be silly. However, knowing more spells is obviously better than knowing fewer because you can do things with them. The same should apply to skills.
There are very few skills that are really where I would like them to be in terms of power level in 3.X.
So, in short, I think you can consolidate the skill list in some places, but unless you open it back up with more options you aren't getting anywhere useful.
The main reason I see to consolidate the skill list is that if you expand it alot, you need to bump the number of skill points per level to allow you to take the cool new stuff and some of the old stuff and that also runs the risk of turning Int into a dump stat ("I'll take the cool new stuff and dump the old stuff as before."). That part I'd like more play testing on, because I'm undecided over addressing this with consolidation, by not increasing skill points but doubling the skill points earned by an int bonus, or whether its fine to just bump skill points up by 1-2 per class level without consolidation.
