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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7886240" data-attributes="member: 4937">It depends on the GM.3e is my favored edition, but it does have some problems and can benefit from house rules.But the biggest issue as to whether skills are meaningful is whether the DM actively works to make them meaningful.If you have 40' x 50' room that is flat and largely featureless, and all your combats occur in that room or ones similar to it, then yeah balance, jump, climb, swim and to a certain extent even tumble might all be meaningless skills. The same can be said of basically all the skills, though the exact situations required for them to be useful, it's up to the DM to provide for and empower that. Fundamentally it comes down to whether the DM wants them to be meaningful and is willing to see skill usage gain major advantages, solve problems, and so forth.One important thing you have to do as a DM if you expect skills to be meaningful is routinely provide low DC challenges. That is to say, you need to routinely assume that there are situations with DC 5, DC 10, and DC 15 that come up, where passing the check gives you some small benefit. If you don't, then the only time that skill usage might come up is contested skills, which leads to the impression in some groups that 'spot/listen' (or perception) are the only useful skills. There are things you have to watch for if you really want to make skills important in your game.  Certain spells will need to be rewritten.   Magic items which enhance skill are by default based on the assumption that skill isn't that important, and if you make skill important you will break that assumption resulting in skill items being undercosted.   Depending on what you do with the skill list, whether trimming it down or expanding it, you may need to tweak how many skill points certain classes get.   For example, my skill list is slightly longer than the standard, so Rogues get 13 skill points per level base (Fighters get 5, and most full casters get 3).  (Despite this, Intelligence is STILL the preferred highest stat for most Rogues in my game, and I've rarely seen a player dump stat Intelligence regardless of the class he's playing.)  Personally, if I was going to tweak the system further, I'd probably adopt the cross class skills system from pathfinder which makes going into a cross class much less punishing while still making class archetypes important, and makes it less important which class you take at 1st level.</blockquote>

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