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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3266529" data-attributes="member: 4937">Oh, I don't disagree that they can be rolled into one.  Any two skills can be rolled together.  Heck, we could roll all the skills into one skill called 'skillful' and have it resolve every non-combat challenge.  My point is that there is a cost that comes with increasing or decreasing the number of skills, and I think you need to choose how many skills exist carefully.  In the case of decreasing the number of skills the cost is that you are making it less valuable to have many skill points.  Decreasing the number of skills is a big boon to fighters or clerics, but is not a boon at all to rogues or wizards.  When you roll together two skills as important as Knowledge: Arcana and Spellcraft, you are reducing the number of useful skills in the game and anyone with skill points can be skillful in a greater percentage of all the challenges in the game.  You can easily see this in the case of the hypothetical 'skillful' skill above.  With only one skill in the game, alots of skill points are meaningless and intelligence can be a dump stat for almost anyone.   Not necessarily.  A professional treasure seeker (say a Rogue) might well benefit from Knowledge (Arcana) but have no real use for Spellcraft.  There are all sorts of characters in fantasy that have a great deal of knowledge of supernatural things, but no real ability to use spells.And that is my point entirely.  Reducing the number of skills might not accomplish the goal you seem to think it will.Well, this is the opposite danger.  If you have too many skills, then no one character can be truly skillful, and if the DM used all of them then there is a good chance no character could pass the challenge.  As a result, the tendancy is for some skills to become disused by concensus.  My suggestion is that you only fold skills together if one of them is never used.  I would avoid folding together skills which are already useful and commonly used.I would also say that I think D20 has about the right number of skills.  Just so that you understand that there is a cost to folding together Listen and Spot, Hide and Move Silently, and so forth.  I agree.</blockquote>

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