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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4013776" data-attributes="member: 4937">I personally think that cross-class skills actually help prevent cookie cutter characters, rather than the reverse.  It's somewhat counterintuitive, but the problem is that if every class could access every skill, there are some that no one would pass up.  In particular, Bluff )or Diplomacy) and Tumble it would be hard to justify not getting.   The same with Search, Spot and Listen.  By this time, most classes have filled thier quote.   Protecting classes helps protect the classes role in the game.  If we didn't want that, we'd just get rid of classes.Given the pervasiveness of PrC's in the game, and the ability to cross-class, it's hard to claim that any given skill is really unavailable over the long term.  But I have used a somewhat more elegant solution than that.  Each player is allowed to choose one starting advantage (or more if they take disadvantages).  One potential advantage is 'unusual background', which permenently adds three cross-class skills to that classes class skills.  For example, you might start as a fighter with the unusual background, 'Martial Artist', and add Tumble, Balance, and Concentration to your class skills whenever you took a level of fighter.   Or you might play a wizard with the unusual background, 'Gutter Mage', and add Bluff, Sleight of Hand, and Move Silently to your Wizard class skills.  Player's are encouraged to think up interesting backgrounds.  You can also spend your starting feat on an advantage, which works particularly well with humans.See, no problem that a little creativity doesn't fix.  The main thing is that you don't give the player something for nothing.  In taking an 'unusual background', he's giving up some other sort of advantage.  This encourages you to take skills for RP reasons, not (just) because you are just trying to min-max.  And truly good skills, like 'Empathy', 'Dreaming', 'Tactics', 'Use Magic Device', 'Planeswalking' and so forth stay the purvey of thier class.</blockquote>

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