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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3952159" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, in my rambling way I was saying that I'm not sure you achieved this goal.  Partly, because you often consolidated together multiple 'useful skills' into a single uber-skill, while often leaving untouched less 'useful' skills.  Spot and listen became 'perception'.  Appraise and search became 'inspection'.  Move silently and hide became 'stealth'.  Climb, jump and swim became bundled into 'athleticism'.  These aren't skills noone was taking.  And in the most serious cases, balance and escape artist got bundled in with an existing uber-skill tumble, and Knowledge(nature), Knowledge(geography), Knowledge(the planes) got bundled in with another existing uber-skill to become 'survival', and three existing uber-skills spellcraft, knowledge (arcane), and Use Magic Device (!!!) got bundled into a single super-uber skill.That last one is really problimatic because UMD is basically 3.5's only non-mundane skill.  It's the one you can least afford to bundle into other skills for balance reasons.  In a skillless system, UMD would become a class feature.On the opposite end of the spectrum, you've still got things like 'Knowledge(History)' and 'Knowledge(Religion)' which are decent skills and depending on the DM very helpful, but are really passive and depend on the DM wanting to give you something for the skill.  (In that way, they are potentially less useful than forgery, since at least forgery can be used in an active way.)I think your revision is best when it does things like Legerdemain.  Open Lock, Sleight of Hand, and Use Rope are marginal skills most of the time, so if you put them all together under a single manual dexterity skill, you have some justification.  But I'm not really convinced that you've improved the system significantly merely by making the list shorter.  You have to reduce the overlaps and cover the holes in the existing system.  For the most part, you seem to have retained them with no big improvement in game balance and marginal improvement in playability.</blockquote>

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