jgsugden
Legend
I'm with you on the feels here ... it gave me the icks. However, skill represents things you can learn ... and you can train endurance. It also severs some concepts from Athletics which covers too much ground in some ways. I had to be sold on it, but I think it works.
Something else to consider as an option while we're talking skills: I have 5 to 10 'specialization' abilities for each skill. When you gain proficiency or expertise you get to select one. For athletics we have:
- Swimmer - your swim speed increases by 5'
- Climber - your climb speed increases by 5'
- Leaper - treat your strength score as 4 higher when jumping.
- Hurdler - Ignore the first 5' of difficult terrain you enter each turn.
- Scamper - Your movement speed is not decreased when crawling.
- Grip of Iron - Add 2 to d20 contests involving grappling or maintaining a grip.
- Kicker - You may make unarmed attacks with your legs (requiring no hands). These attacks deal 1d4.
- Biophysics - You have expertise in knowledge checks that relate to humanoid physiology.
- Hurler - Add 10 to the ranges of thrown weapons.
This gives each PC a little more uniqueness and a fun specialization. I printed these out as a deck of cards and suggest to players that they select one at random for each skill proficiency.
Alas, most of the intelligence skills just give a small bonus for particular topics.
