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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9777788" data-attributes="member: 7006">As an avid "Variant Ability Score" DM since the beginning of 5E14... more often than not a lot of the weaknesses that many people seem to have with the skill system I've been able to ameliorate by opening up when they could be used.  Like you mentioned above with the potential use of a Charisma (Religion) check for the specific incident involving the assassin and the priest... when one allows for every ability score to potentially be paired with every skill, ones that have less standard use gain more.  This is particular true with the four "lore" skills-- Arcana, History, Nature and Religion.  These can get paired to any of the six scores when necessary to allow for a more open usage.  In fact, for every campaign I run I invariably add new skills that are "lore" or "knowledge" types of which the particular campaign might find importance.  Some of these have included:Commerce (for urban campaigns when buying/selling, haggling and appraisal are important)Warfare (for militaristic campaigns)Seafaring (for naval campaigns)Mechanics (for when engineering, tinkering, and lock and trap picking are important)Politics (for more noble-centric campaigns)I have also done what you have mentioned regarding the three social skills and amended them on occasion as well.  For my ancient Greek Theros campaign... one where philosophical debate was an important part of the game... I changed Persuasion to Rhetoric and made it all about argument and discussion and when trying to convince someone with debate, and Intimidation became Presence like you mentioned, when it was using your stature and force of personality to win someone over.  So more often than not, Rhetoric checks were not even Charisma checks but often would be used with Intelligence for when logic and reason were more influential in trying to bring someone to their side.  And Deception?  I still use it when a PC tries to deceive or lie to someone verbally... but I also will attach it to Dexterity and use that as a replacement for Sleight of Hand.  SoH has always been the red-headed stepchild of Rogue skills since more often than not PCs acquire so much money so quickly that the need to pickpocket people goes away fairly quickly.  So by removing it completely from the game I get rid of a less-used skill, and I can give Deception a bit more oomph by letting PCs make Dexterity (Deception) checks for pickpocketing or hiding something on your person, in addition to the traditional Charisma (Deception) when lying.And on the topic of skill removal, I have also removed other skills completely from the game in various campaigns due to lack of use, and attributed those actions instead to other ability score / skill pairings to make them more important.  Performance is gone because Persuasion and musical instrument proficiency easily take its place.  I merge Medicine and Survival together because they both involve the knowledge of what a humanoid body is and can do-- what it can eat and drink, what things can cause it harm, what do their bodies look like when it comes to tracks and prints.  And finally I remove Acrobatics from the game and instead just ask for Dexterity (Athletics) checks when it comes to maintaining balance or diving out of the way of things.  Doing all of these make each of the remaining skills have more uses and thus more importance.  (It is also why I've always been a proponent of moving all checks of finding inanimate objects like traps and secret doors over to Investigation and off of Perception, which makes Investigation more useful and Perception less so-- which it desperately needed.)The only real issue I end up having with my system is that D&D Beyond still refuses to allow a user to rename skills and add in new skills that will appear in the skill list in alphabetical order.  If I could just get that for my players to use... I'd be a truly happy camper.</blockquote>

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