No offense, but I think that's a bad idea. If skills granted advantage, then skilled players would have no reason to try and get circumstances in their favor since advantage doesn't stack.
I agree, going that route would make advantage structural to a lot of checks. I'd rather want advantage to be occasional, not frequent, thus limit the amount of constant (i.e. not situational) sources of advantage, which we already have quite a few...
Have proficiency bonus dictate your AC if you're in armor, while the armor itself will grant additional benefits, but not AC bonus.
Not sure, it would be quite a huge departure from one of the traditional elements of D&D. Let's see what they come up with.
This part puzzles me. So if you have a skill, you get your proficiency bonus to those checks. If you have proficiency in something, like blacksmith tools, you likewise get your proficiency bonus to those checks. So... why have proficiency as something that's different than a skill? What is the functional difference between being trained in blacksmithing as a skill and being proficient with blacksmith tools? In either case, you're getting a +2 to +6 with checks related to that craft. Am I missing something, or is there really no difference? It seems to me like they just don't want certain things to be skills for some reason, like crafting and opening locks. But why?
One thing I think they should do is have two different kind of skills. General skills would be the kind of things that are extremely useful for adventuring, like perception, acrobatics, and so on. Background skills would cover things like professions, crafts, performance and lore. By separating background skills from other skills, it lets you have a virtually limitless set of flavor skills that can be easily expanded upon without breaking the game. Also, background skills could be acquired in different ways than general skills are, since they don't have much effect on game balance the way general skills do. And let's face it, things like crafts and specific lore skills were never the equal of things like perception. It's silly to make players pay as much for something like folklore as they do for stealth.
I share the puzzling... in many ways, proficiencies and skills can be the same.
But I disagree on the latter part. I really wouldn't want to silo backgrounds skills vs adventuring skills. Some players are simply not interested in background skills. I am, on the other hand, sometimes interested depending on the character concept, and when I take a background skill I want that to matter; however, this doesn't necessarily mean they have to matter during adventuring, they might matter
between adventuring or to
prepare for adventuring. Maybe a skill in blacksmithing can be useful to strengthen the durability of your equipment, while a skill in alchemy or herbalism can be used between adventuring to create items that you then use during adventuring.
Rather than being worried on skill X being less useful than skill Y (which is inevitable to some extent, no matter how you silo them), I want
freedom in choosing whether my PC leans towards quickly-usable skills such as Athletics or background skills such as professions.
I totally hate siloing, it forces every PC of mine to comply to whatever arrangement the designers have settle with. Instead, if they put all tools proficiencies, weapon proficiencies, skills and languages together
and let the player choose, then character design is really more free.
And then just work on making each of them useful enough during the game: obviously, in a fast-paced game with the PCs permanently on hostile ground, profession skills and languages aren't going to have significant use, but let the DM handle that. If I'm running a game like that, it's up to me to inform the players not to pick professions because they aren't worth it.
To me, the issue is do we want to model expertise as offering greater consistency, greater capability, or both. There's also the issue of setting up DC tables that capture the differing scales of both skill checks and attribute checks.
One possible solution is that a character untrained in a skill is automatically disadvantaged for the roll, which having the skill training then negates (and can be further advantaged by circumstance.) It reinforces the utility of skill training while allowing the high-stat character to occasionally have flashes where their raw ability gives them a capability the less talented character could not achieve.
Yeah, it is an issue, and not easy to solve... Disadvantage for not being proficient however is IMHO much better than advantage for being proficient, it serves as a warning "don't use this on a regular basis" but still lets you try.
Both capability and consistency would be good, advantage alone (besides being too common if used for proficiency) does not add capability. Flat bonus adds both, but the effect on consistency is small. I am not sure I want to have a Take10 rule for consistency, it was quite ok in 3e but led to frequent controversies.
Once again, the problem is that using the d20 on skills is too swingy because the range between 1 and 20 is too large. The d20 is OK for everything else, but maybe not skills.
