D&D General Do you prefer more or less Skills?

How many Skills?

  • A lot!

    Votes: 31 36.5%
  • A few!

    Votes: 54 63.5%

Slit518

Adventurer
Do you prefer the game to have a huge amount of Skills or a small amount of Skills?

An example of a few Skills would be combining Jump; Swim; Climb into Athletics.

An example of a lot of Skills would be dividing Athletics into Jumping; Swimming; Climbing; Running, etc.

If a game has more Skills for your character to learn, such as Fishing; Hunting; Farming; Animal Husbandry, etc, does that effect your interest in the game?
 

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I'd rather have fewer skills. So many times I wanted more skills on a character, and often wanted non-class skills (dependent on the edition), such as taking Perception as a 4e fighter. Bodyguards need to see and evaluate threats, after all!

The number of skills has generally declined from 3e onward while the number of "skill slots" haven't, although there's no longer bonus skills for having high Intelligence. Generally this had made it easier for characters to get wanted (or needed) skills.
 

overgeeked

B/X Known World
I voted a few, but it's technically none. I'd prefer they make it simple. Race, class, and background give you advantage on any checks that would reasonably fall under the assumed training of those categories. Maybe add in a culture category as they're splitting race from culture. Drop specific skills and proficiencies entirely.
 

I would like 5e to have something around 2 or 3 more skills than it currently has. But not really any more than that. So probably more along the lines of few skills. And I could see merging Athletics and Acrobatics, along with merging many Intelligence skills into a single "Lore" skill for non-magical stuff and "Arcana" or "Dweomer-craft" for magical stuff. (If I were making an OSR-like 5e adaptation, I would do something like that, along with maybe even merging Stealth and Sleight of Hand into "Thievery" - or maybe even folding them together with Deception into "Trickery"!)

All that's to say my inclination is towards fewer skills.
 



Staffan

Legend
In general, fewer, although I think 5e may have gone a little too far. I like Level Up's addition of "Culture" for knowing about what various peoples are like, for example. I think a good rule of thumb is that you don't want to split up a relatively simple activity into multiple different skills. If you're trying to avoid being noticed, it's better to have a single Stealth skill rather than separate Hide and Move Silently, both because it's really rare that you'd do one without the other, and because Stealth can also cover other senses. If you're trying to get by in the wilderness, it's better with a single Survival skill than also having Hunting, Fishing, Make Shelter, Make fire, Foraging, and so on. Hunting and Fishing being different might be realistic, but it's not really fun.

It also depends on what sort of game it is. A class-based game can manage with fewer skills than a skill-based game, because a lot of the things that would be skills can instead be baked into class stuff (like fighting ability or spellcasting). But in general I like fewer skills, but with abilities that either enhance particular uses of skills, or allow you to use skills in novel ways (e.g. Pathfinder 2's skill feats).

As an example of an entirely skill-based game that I think has a pretty good skill list for a modern-ish game (60s), I'd use Troubleshooters with its list of 28 skills. These include some things that in D&D are ability scores or adjacent to them, like Agility, Strength, or Willpower. You also have some things that aren't really learned but still work the same way, like Credit or Contacts. In addition to these 28 skills, there's also a set of binary abilities that you can use for more differentiation – both the race car driver and the pilot has good Vehicles skills, but one has the Born Behind the Wheel ability and the other has Pilot (and maybe even Fighter Pilot).
 

Ixal

Hero
More skills as having few skills completely devalues any form on non-combat gameplay as characters are automatically experts in a lot of fields, possibly even in nearly everything.
Great if you want simple hack&slash games, but the system will never be able to adequately do anything else.
 
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guachi

Hero
I agree with some of the above posters who say that even more skills could be consolidated, such as Athletics and Acrobatics, as well as consolidation of some of the knowledge skills. On the other hand, I'd like a knowledge skill such as Streetwise that existed in the WEG SW RPG. I'd like a skill that enabled a Rogue to find the best hive of scum and villainy.
 

Fenris-77

Small God of the Dozens
Supporter
I prefer fewer and broader skills. Why? Because I think that's a great place for players to explore their characters, one little bit at a time as they come up with a piece of fiction to rationalize skill X in situation Y.
 

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