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Message: <blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 7584804" data-attributes="member: 12377">Here's another way to look at this whole issue. During game play, some skills see a LOT more use than others.I rarely see Animal Handling checks in play. They happen, sure, but not that often. Ditto for Performance, Medicine, maybe Nature. Conversely, <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ing PERCEPTION is rolled like every 5 minutes. Skills like Athletics and Arcana and Persuasion fall somewhere in the middle. Then there are oddballs like Stealth, which can be tremendously useful for certain characters and seldom used by others.Obviously, this varies somewhat by table and DMing style. Some DMs put a lot of effort into finding uses for all skills. But I don't think it's a stretch to say that in general the current skills are not really balanced. I'm not saying that this is a problem -- I personally find the skill list "balanced enough" that it's not worth house-ruling.But,  [MENTION=23718]twofalls[/MENTION], if you are going to expand the skill list in some way, this is something you should keep in mind. Splitting up a skill like Acrobatics into Climbing, Swimming, Running and Jumping sounds good, but now each of those skills is much less attractive than the consolidated Athletics. And even though I rag on Perception as overpowered, I agree with  [MENTION=3400]billd91[/MENTION] that you shouldn't split it up, because it becomes too confusing which one to use. (The fact that it is rolled frequently makes simplicity really important.)One potential solution here is to have skills cost different amount of "points." So maybe you have Nature proficiency cost 1 point, Climbing costs 2 points, Acrobatics costs 4 points, and Perception costs 8 points, or something like that. Give everybody 4 points per skill they used to have -- so 8 points for backgrounds, 8 points for most classes but 12 for bards/rangers and 16 for rogues, 8 bonus points for half-elves, etc. This way players who pick a really great skill like Perception have to pay for it, while the low cost would allow players to pick up tons of "flavorful" but minor skills like Nature, Animal Handling, Planar Lore, Riding, Ancient History, Modern History, etc. A related idea is to have skills and fractional skills. So maybe you can buy Athletics for 6 points, or you can buy Athletics/Climbing for 2 points, Athletics/Swimming for 2 points, Athletics/Jumping for 1 point, and Athletics/Running for 1 point. If you want to get really fancy, you could do something like GURPS's "skill defaults," and say that if you are proficient in Athletics/Climbing, you can add half your proficiency bonus to Athletics/Jumping or Athletics/Running. Older editions of Shadowrun used to have a really cool "skill defaults" chart that was like a flowchart and resembled an integrated circuit, which I always thought was a really nice way to put a touch of cyberpunk aesthetic right into the rules system.I'm just brainstorming here. My point is that the skills aren't balanced right, and you don't want to exacerbate that problem by introducing a ton of minor skills that are more-unique but less-powerful.</blockquote>

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