I wasn't thinking of background giving skills in any formal sense. Those would be much less formalized e.g. someone with a Courtier background might know stuff about how some local politics work but it wouldn't be codofied into a "skill".
That's pretty much what I meant when I was saying background/culture/class skills.
Instead, what I'd like to see is the "life skills" (swimming, boating, riding, etc.) and class-specific skills (pick pockets, tracking, legend lore, etc.) and that's it for skills, period. Everything else - knowledge, memory, athletics, balance, etc. - goes to simple roll-under-stat and have done with it; except "social skills" (intimidate, persuasion, etc.) just wander off into a fire and die there.
Well, I doubt this is going to go to roll-under; most people prefer the roll-above.
But the problem with the "life skills" is that there are
so many possibilities, and many of them are not actually universal. Swimming and boating are basic life skills if you live near water (not useful for your desert-born PC). Riding is a basic life skill if you live in a place where mounts are common and affordable (not useful for your mountain-born PC, or your dead-broke peasant PC). This is why I would go for a Culture skill instead.
In our games we've had the "life skills" idea for some time, with proficiency for each rolled on an open-ended d10 during char-gen. They rarely if ever come up as hard mechanics during play; instead they're used as a general reference e.g. if the party is on a boat, who might have a clue what to do with it vs who should just cling to the mast and try not to fall off. They can also help with characterization and role-play e.g. if my riding skill is 1/10 then no way in hell am I getting on top of that 4-legged monstrosity; I'll walk, thank you very much.
Yeah, I just don't think most people are all that happy with their character being made by random rolls. Most people don't even like rolling for stats these days.
In my own games, we just let the PCs decide if their characters have a clue. A person who has proficiency in Water Vehicles obviously
knows how to use a boat and can do so well, but someone who has said that their character grew up near the ocean can say that sure, they know enough about boats to at least use the Help action with the person who actually has the proficiency. Mind, the players at my table rarely try to game the system and often enjoy saying that their PCs are actually incompetant at something.
For many things this works (and roll-under is by far the most elegant).
Nah, it's just what you're used to so it's become natural to you. I've played both roll-under (AD&D, GURPS, CoC) and roll-above (just about everything else), and neither is more elegant than the other. It's just that roll-above is invariably faster and easier, which is really useful most of the time. If you want
elegance, you want something that allows for degrees of success and failure--succeed or fail by X amount in addition to regular and critical successes and failures. This
could be done in a D&D-alike. Level Up uses the idea for their exploration challenges. It might also help with that martial/caster divide. If you have fail, near miss, success, great success, then a fighter or other warrior might be able to inflict minimal damage or have some other effect on a near miss while a rogue or caster wouldn't. You still get that enhanced narrative, because missing by 1 or 2 isn't the same as missing by 5 or 10.
My vote would be to drop skills entirely, other than "life skills" and skills that are hard-tied to one's class.
I wouldn't mind that either, with the skills also being tied to background and culture as well as class. It's easy all around and only requires a brief bullet list in each background/culture/class that explains what the skill is used for.