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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5027232" data-attributes="member: 82106">OK, right. So you don't run into a lot of the more intractable problems doing it this way and I agree it is probably the best approach. You still can run into the "why doesn't my sub-skill apply here" issue, but that one isn't a show stopper. The only really serious issue to now consider is what the costs are of these sub-skills. The Skill Focus feat currently gives a blanket +3 on a whole trained skill for the cost of a feat. You could remove this feat, but if you keep it then it rather sets the baseline for how good a sub-skill needs to be (or how cheap to acquire). If it costs a feat for a +2 then obviously people will just pick Skill Focus, though they might theoretically ALSO then take the sub-skill that would seem to be a LOT of resources to invest in a single fairly narrow bonus. I doubt too many players would bother with that, though maybe a player obsessed with being the ultimate pick pocket might stack all that up. So chances are these sub-skills have to be considerably cheaper than a feat. While I've often thought about the possibility of this mechanic the cost issue has always pretty much stumped me. Feats are too granular to deal with it and there is no other mechanism in the core system you could use. What I've settled on is just allowing players to specify areas where they could get a +2 in their background. So the character that grew up surviving on the street picking pockets can invoke a +2 on thievery checks to pick pockets. There is one final little bit of 4e ugliness though that you have to consider. Skill check bonus divergence. The skill system works reasonably well when all the characters have modest bonuses for their level (or they all have the same extremely high or low ones). It tends to get problematic the more the bonuses spread between party members. You'll see this issue a lot with combat uses of skills, like escaping a grab. Characters trained in Athletics/Acrobatics and with a high ability score can just laugh off grab attempts. Characters that aren't so trained and have little use for high STR/DEX find grabs impossible to escape from. Anything that adds more sources of skill check bonuses makes this problem worse.</blockquote>

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