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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Pendragon" data-source="post: 2902046" data-attributes="member: 707">Actually, your comments seem quite relevant. <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=":)" />This is certainly true, and I am by no means suggesting that simply adding a dozen skills to the list of skills on a PC's character sheet would be beneficial to a game.  That gives a player far more places to spend skill points while having the same finite amount of skill points to spend overall.  Hence, screwage.I don't add skills to my campaign simply because they've been listed in a splatbook somewhere.  I add skills because they will be relevant in my campaign, and I do not feel that the core list of skills adequately represents the skill involved.  As I aluded to above, I also give my players a list of "useful skills" prior to character creation, so they can take into account the particular skills that I'll be emphasizing in the game.Basically, I don't feel that adding skills is in and of itself a negative proposition, which is the feeling I surmise some posters in the thread have.  I feel that it's impossible to accurately represent all the various possible skill sets within the list of core skills.  Because of this, if a non-core skill set is an integral part of your game--Knowedge (Anatomy) in my case--then the game benefits from adding in that skill, rather than attempting to shoehorn it into something else that may not fit.Naturally, the DM needs to take measures to prevent the players from feeling they need to max out all the core skills, plus any new skills you've created, and thus get caught in a skill point crunch.  Some DMs solve this problem by simply awarding more skill points all around.  Myself, I do so by providing the players with a list of "emphasis skills" so they know what kinds of checks to expect, and are thus able to spend their skill points more wisely.It might be arguably sensible to actually remove the rarely-used skills from the game in the same manner I add them, thus preventing players from spending skill points on skills I won't be using much at all.  However, since those skills are listed in the PB, I figure removing them would be more hassle than it's worth.  Somewhere, a player would forget I'd removed it and wind up with 13 ranks in it at 10th-level, then learn his error and have to re-calculate all his skill points...  Nah, more trouble than it's worth.Well, not necessarily "campaign focus" but certainly "campaign relevant."  I don't spend time analyzing the core skill list and figuring out things I don't think fit in, then adding those to my game.  I design a campaign and it occurs to me that a certain skill that would be particularly useful is missing from the core set, and therefore add it.  There are no doubt many skills not (IMO) adequately represented in the core set, but if they aren't going to come up in my game, then I certainly wouldn't add them to my game.  Indeed, I don't add them to my game unless I know (or discover) that they are going to have a signficant presence.  For skills that show up maybe once or twice in the entire campaign, I just pick the closest skill and call for that, hand-waving it away.  But for a more substantial presence, I prefer to add the skill, rather than continually handwave a skill that I don't feel fits the task.</blockquote>

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