Best Skills

[anest1s]

Well depending on what I want every skill can be useful.

One-point skills:

• Decipher Script: If you have +4 int, you add one rank here and you are ok forever
• Forgery: With +4 int +1 rank and take 20 you won't need more.
• Jump: 1 rank says you won't land on your face.
• Knowledge (all): You can roll knowledge checks,if you have 1 rank...so with a decent int you are better taking off as many knowledges as possible.

Skills you can have half:

• Escape Artist: You probably need only enough to be able to escape from grapples
• Heal: You only need enough to be able to get a 15 easily...using it to heal poisons also rocks.
• Open Lock: Great, except you can take 20 or grab a wand of knock or something, with UMD after the first levels.
• Sleight Of Hand: Good for skill tricks...

Important Skills:

You should know what happens around you...

• Spot: (max ranks on this or listen, or half here and half to listen should be enough)
• Listen: see above
• Gather Information: Great if you use it-but you can almost always get info with other ways too.
• Sense Motive: Great if your DM uses it-but usually not so great
• Search: Well...you have to find treasure sometimes.

Influencing the attitudes

• Bluff: You may need to lie sometimes
• Diplomacy: by the rules you will have many friends, if your DM has some kind of common sense you can ask to roll Diplomacy to persuade someone to do something strange- especially if you roll a 30
• Handle Animal: Rust Monster and Dinosaur mounts
• Intimidate: Or else.

For the Wizard

• Concentration
• Spellcraft

For the Rogue

• Tumble: Don't even think not taking it
• Disable Device: So you get to see the treasure first
• Disguise: Only if you fully invest of it, and if your DM won't have you roll bluff to disguise your voice too.
• Hide:Sure
• Move Silently:Sure
• Use Magic Device: There are ppl who don't get this. They are called Barbarians.

Other

• Survival: LOL you can track everything on hard ground...''Hey look, a human 7ft tall with a heavy mustache passed over this stone bridge 3 days ago..." .You only need the track feat. Or you will have to live just being able to predict the weather, to gather food for all the party, etc etc
• Ride: Rocks...when outdoors.

So yeah. I have a hard time choosing skills.

 

[kitcik]

Those guys said it all, so let me go in another direction.

A lot of splatbooks have alternate uses for skills, especially with high DCs.

I like OA's extended use of Tumble for a melee character.

You can stand up from prone as a free action.

With a DC 40 check (think Skin of Nimbleness) you can make a 10' step instead of a 5' step - awesome!

 

[Ahnehnois]

UMD is much more commonly seen in games where the PC start at a later level. The minimum DC for using the UMD skill is 20, so you will practically never use it at low levels. But 20 is also the fixed DC for wand activation, which is pretty much a guaranteed success by the mid teens.

If your character starts at level one and only makes it to 10, UMD is a wasted investment. But if you start at 15 and want to get free access to a major class feature by only spending 1 rank/level, UMD is by far the most powerful skill in the game.

Actually, my experience is that UMD is usually taken at lower levels by characters who want wands of CLW if the party is short on healing. As this is typically an out-of-combat use, players are content to retry and hope they don't get a 1.

Conversely, high-level characters won't touch wands, staves or scrolls of any offensive spell because the DC and caster level for those items is crippling. That means UMD is only useful for teleportation, divination etc., which players can just purchase from NPCs with their nigh-unlimited gold anyway.