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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6122187" data-attributes="member: 4937">You have mutually exclusive desires.1) To make skills relevant in combat, you have to have a combat system that allows for concrete actions.  If combat is purely abstract, then skills don't obviously relate to the attack/damage sequence.  If combat however contains manuevers or stunts, then skills obviously relate to the chance of success in such manuevers.   A simple example is how in 3e the escape artist skill can substitute for your 'attack skill' when defending against a grapple manuever.   You can expand on that concept - balance defends against trip for example.   Sense motive defends against 'feint', conversely 'bluff' or maybe 'disguise' can be used to initiate a 'feint'.  The more robust your manuever/stunt system, the more obvious touch points it will have.   Think about the sort of manuevers that a skill might let you perform, then create the manuever as a standard option.  Think about the sort of skillful things you could do for which their exists no skill - leadership, tactics, etc. - then think about what you want to do with that in combat.  Alternately, you can bundle this together - balance, tumble, jump, climb, etc. - might all get bundled into an 'atheletic' skill, which takes all their stuff.   However, this is necessarily going to lead to more dice rolling per turn.  It also tends to force exceptions of the sort, "+5 on atheletics checks to jump", if you want granularity.For me the real test of a skill is whether you can use it actively.  If you can propose to do something skillfully, the skill has value.   If its just something you can use only when the DM puts a hoop in front of you and says, "Can you jump through this?", then it probably doesn't have much value.2) It sounds to me like you are saying non-combat mundane skills - craft, perform, use rope, appraise, professional skills if you have them and possibly knowledge - are of low worth and so shouldn't compete with high worth combat related skills.  One possibility is simply to say that everyone gets 16 skill points to put into craft and perform from the start, and maybe 1 additional point per level, and therefore is basically well rounded without spending any critical resources.  They can always spend critical resources if they want on the more mundane skills, but by siloing off a few extra that have to be spent that way you don't have to worry about it.   Alternately, you can go the 4e route of just assuming everyone is basically compotent at everything, but if you do that then probably they are gauranteed to be trivial.   The fundamental contridiction here is the underlying assumption that the skills are trivial and of little worth.  By starting from that you are almost gauranteeing that they will be trivial and of little worth and it never matters if you have them or not.   So why bother?3) If skills matter, then you always have the microgame experience.  The danger in creating an exclusive microgame experience is that you'll make skills more or less passive and meaningless.  They only matter when inside the microgame, and only for the hoops that the DM puts in front of you.  And everyone is basically compotent to begin with, so it doesn't matter if they are compotent in a particular area and besides in the framework skills are fungible.  The trick is playing the sort of game where skills matter and obtain useful resources.4) I'm not sure what this means.  But my suggestion would be to think about skills in the context of spells.  Spells are reliable packets of narrative force.  You state your proposal - "I'm casting fireball" and you get a reliable result.   You don't need to be in a special microgame to use your spells.   The DM isn't normally going to just say no.   If skills are to be meaningful, they have to meaningfully compete with spells on the metagame level.   They have to provide generally reliable packets of narrative force for a given skill level, and they have to scale up into the 'superhuman' fairly quickly after ordinary skill usage - by DC 30 for example - because spells do do that.   The implication of this is each skills write up should look something like a short spell list - packets of narrative force.  The difference is you are, at least for the limits of what you can do, gambling success/failure rather than spending limited resources.</blockquote>

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