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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5952182" data-attributes="member: 54877">I don't much care for either unbounded skill lists or widely expansive &quot;traits as skills&quot; system--although I admit my dislike is as much aesthetic as the utility of the design.&nbsp; D&amp;D is particularly thorny on this question, because a clean design for skills is going to run into the problem of why weapon use, spell casting, etc. are not &quot;skills,&quot; but they never will be in D&amp;D.&nbsp;Building off of pemerton's suggestion, where I'd start is to use the Background itself as an open-ended skill, but also have the Background give gives from a finite, clean, roughly equal list of specific skills (preferably a bit more wide than 4E but more coherent than 3E).&nbsp;The Background skill is one you can use when you can justify it (i.e. requires DM approval, but is wide-ranging).&nbsp; The specific skills are ones you can always use when it makes sense (e.g. Perception).&nbsp; Background including traits and skills even provides a way to balance this out, if some sets of skills happen to be perceived as more useful than others.&nbsp; Give the deficient backgrounds better traits and/or acknowledge that some Backgrounds as skills have a wider reach.&nbsp;Alternately, do something like the above, but have a mix of finite skills and open-ended skills given by each background (which also works as a skill).&nbsp; The finite skills are the ones that easy to pin down and balance (e.g. Perception).&nbsp; &nbsp;Determine the list of the finite skills during the playtest, using the &quot;college sidewalk technique&quot; that I've mentioned before.&nbsp; An architect left all the sidewalks out when he built the new addition to the university.&nbsp; The authorities objected.&nbsp; The architect said, &quot;Wait a year.&quot;&nbsp; Then when he saw where the students walked, he built the sidewalks there.&nbsp; Never needed a &quot;keep of the grass&quot; sign. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5952182, member: 54877"] I don't much care for either unbounded skill lists or widely expansive "traits as skills" system--although I admit my dislike is as much aesthetic as the utility of the design. D&D is particularly thorny on this question, because a clean design for skills is going to run into the problem of why weapon use, spell casting, etc. are not "skills," but they never will be in D&D. Building off of pemerton's suggestion, where I'd start is to use the Background itself as an open-ended skill, but also have the Background give gives from a finite, clean, roughly equal list of specific skills (preferably a bit more wide than 4E but more coherent than 3E). The Background skill is one you can use when you can justify it (i.e. requires DM approval, but is wide-ranging). The specific skills are ones you can always use when it makes sense (e.g. Perception). Background including traits and skills even provides a way to balance this out, if some sets of skills happen to be perceived as more useful than others. Give the deficient backgrounds better traits and/or acknowledge that some Backgrounds as skills have a wider reach. Alternately, do something like the above, but have a mix of finite skills and open-ended skills given by each background (which also works as a skill). The finite skills are the ones that easy to pin down and balance (e.g. Perception). Determine the list of the finite skills during the playtest, using the "college sidewalk technique" that I've mentioned before. An architect left all the sidewalks out when he built the new addition to the university. The authorities objected. The architect said, "Wait a year." Then when he saw where the students walked, he built the sidewalks there. Never needed a "keep of the grass" sign. :D [/QUOTE]

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