Skills should not be superpowers in D&D

[hogarth]

I've seen discussions in various threads about how the skill system should work in D&D, so I'll add my two cents: Skills should not give you superpowers; superpowers should be class abilities.

I mentioned the idea briefly in a previous thread, but I think it's worth expanding on. Once you get past the idea that skills are supposed to make you awesome, or even worse, that skills should be mandatory for you to be awesome, most of the challenges with the D&D skill system simply melt away.

Why do we need a skill system in the first place? Well, in a D&D adventure, people are inevitably going to want to jump over a pit, or climb a wall, or swim a river, or sneak past some guards, and the GM needs to be able to determine whether the attempt succeeds or fails. Having consistent guidelines for those tasks is a good thing; otherwise, you might as well be playing Mother May I or Magical Tea Party (not that anything's wrong with that).

So where does the problem come up? I can think of a few complaints with the 3.5E system:

• Some skills are better than others and are even semi-mandatory (eg. 20 ranks in Spot is useful, but 20 ranks in Use Rope is useless).
• Some skills become obsolete (eg. Climb is less useful than Spider Climb, and they're both less useful than Fly).
• The difference in skill modifiers between a non-specialist and a specialist is potentially huge so the idea of "level appropriate" skill DCs is a farce (eg. For a 1st level character, a Diplomacy modifier could range between -2 and +20 on a d20 roll).

To their credit, the designers of 4E attempted to address all of those issues, to one degree or another. They consolidated skills, eliminating some of the more useless ones. They eliminated or weakened most non-combat spells. They tried to narrow the gap between a non-specialist and a specialist. So what's the problem?

• People like casting Spider Climb and Fly and spells like that.
• There's still a large gap between a specialised character and a non-specialised character.
• They changed the static DC system to a DC system that scales by level, so now a particular DC is meaningless. What DC is it to climb a normal stone wall? What does a Climb DC of 20 mean? Who knows?
• They added a skill challenge system that doesn't work very well.
• The 4E system has so many flaws in general that even their well-meaning ideas seem bad by association.

So what's a good solution? My suggestion would be this: Use static DCs and accept that skill checks above a certain difficulty are impossible without spells or class features, and abandon the idea that lots of skill points is an exciting class feature. I have no problem with the idea that only a rogue (or equivalent) can climb a greasy pole during or a hurricane; to be more exact, I have no problem with that idea in the same game where only a rogue (or equivalent) can learn to sneak attack an opponent. 3.5E is already partway there; no matter how many skill ranks you have in Hide, you still can't hide in plain sight without the right class feature.

[UmaroVI]

I would actually go further, and meld "active" skills with either classes or ability scores. I'm OK with just folding "climb wall" and "jump pit" into strength (or maybe make climb strength or dex but whatever), and folding stuff like "hide" into classes like Rogue and Ranger. Then make the skills you get to choose skills that are ACTUALLY optional, not ones that are either dumb because magic can outdo them with no drawbacks or are necessary for your class to work.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well the primary issue is just what are skills supposed to be.

• 1st ed AD&D answered that with "class features of the thief"
• (early) 2nd ed answered that with "minor flavor abilities that might be part of a character's background." Occasionally they give tiny combat bonuses (see Juggling's catch on a nat 20), but mostly stuff was attribute checks and class abilities
• I have no idea how Skills and Powers 2nd ed answered that. I'm open to someone explaining that there was anything at all worth paying attention to in S&P
• 3rd ed answered that with loose "things anyone can do, but the rogue can do best". This answer has a lot of people thinking that Skills were supposed to be a meaningful class feature. This answer also had people maybe thinking that skills which cost the same should be equally useful. And those taken to the logical extreme end up with "skills should totally be superpowers on par with spells"
• 4th ed answered that with "numbers you roll is in a ill-designed dice game that we cannot be bothered to run a single computer program to see the odds for" This answer taken to the logical extreme is the sort of "let's hide the magical tea party rather than being honest about it" that Mearls has been flailing about on his design management blogs recently. And in this sort of setup, skills are whatever the MC wants and the system doesn't matter - so there's zero point designing for it.

Elaborating on the 3e setup, the current 3.Tome answer is "Skills are sometimes flavor abilities, sometimes must-be-this-tall checks sometimes character-defining abilities sometimes parts of combos that unlock superpowers. Skills are also all of those at the same damn time".

You can use stuff like Diplomacy with Charm spells and/or Tome skill feats to get actual super-powers of influence and peacemaking, or stuff like Hide plus HiPS plus sniping rules with Reduce Person on a halfling assassin to gain super-powers of being nigh-untargettable and yet you also have stuff like Climb ranks existing in a game with Fly and the Heal skill feat existing in a game with Cure spells.

Personally, I'm most drawn towards the setup where skills are parts of combos that unlock superpowers at mid and high levels.

But there's really nothing wrong with the answer that "skills are just must-be-this-tall checks"

[RobbyPants]

[*]I have no idea how Skills and Powers 2nd ed answered that. I'm open to someone explaining that there was anything at all worth paying attention to in S&P

I don't remember S&P doing much to change the NWP system at all. Basically, you got Character Points to spend on racial abilities, class abilities, weapon proficiencies, and NWP, all from separate pools (for the most part). IIRC, the book was pretty much entirely devoted to increased customization of PCs.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

If skills don't advance arbitrarily high, they should probably not be included in character development to arbitrarily levels of height.

[Ice9]

I think skills could benefit from being split two or three ways. At the very least, there should be a split between background skills (that are mostly for flavor with occasional uses) and active skills (that are used frequently and play an important role in the game).

I could even see three categories:
* Background - These don't cost "real" character resources, and they probably won't come up too often in gameplay. Having or not having these is the limit of granularity.
* Side - These are actually useful, but they don't scale - you just have them or don't. They're always useful at low-levels, but might eventually become just flavor.
* Primary - The good stuff, it scales, does awesome things, and stays on the RNG.

[Swordslinger]

[*]They changed the static DC system to a DC system that scales by level, so now a particular DC is meaningless. What DC is it to climb a normal stone wall? What does a Climb DC of 20 mean? Who knows?

It leads to a bigger question: What's a "normal" stone wall? You'll have just as many arguments about that if you try to set a DC for it.

Climb checks are way varied. There are trees that are very easy to climb and trees that are very difficult to climb. Climbing is about the existence of footholds and handholds, the slipperiness of the surface, and so on.

4E had it right where they stopped worrying about these so called "normal" tasks and just had the DC suit the adventure.

[shadzar]

Why do we need a skill system in the first place? Well, in a D&D adventure, people are inevitably going to want to jump over a pit, or climb a wall, or swim a river, or sneak past some guards, and the GM needs to be able to determine whether the attempt succeeds or fails. Having consistent guidelines for those tasks is a good thing; otherwise, you might as well be playing Mother May I or Magical Tea Party (not that anything's wrong with that).

I agree that skills shouldnt be superpowers, but disagree with the above and probably what followed it.

The simplest way to remove the problem os skills becoming something akin to a super power, is to remove the skills.

The DM DOES have guidelines, but doesnt need to know for every blade of grass, rock and tree, what something should be. 2nd edition got a bit stupid in the rules, and this was one of the places, and 3rd etc carried on that idiot tradition.

Everyone can jump, climb, etc... These feats of mobility are not something a PC cannot do, so they are all assumed. Also things like my favorite example of why a skill-system should NOT exist, fire-building. These other things need not be present, gained in some fashion as you level, etc. They really arent something the game nor real world focuses on in the player perspective. If you need a super fire-starter, then you hire one as they are specialized just for that task, like a local guide in a town. The PCs have much more to be worried about than to worried about all these little things. Anyone can start a fire.

Now people will mention tracking and such, but really this is something all persons should be able to do to some degree also, since hunting is something everyone had to do, or trapping, since there is no Walmart to go buy your groceries at.

Common sense should override the need for rules on many of these things. In the FEW instances where they can higheten play, then working with the DM is the best way to go about it, cause everyone from Gary Gygax to Mike Mearls, agrees that the books wont be able to tell you everything they should, as the best person to decide these things at the game is the current DM of YOUR game.

D&D was aided by conventions in growth, and in doing so needed a way to play at conventions. Most convention games were in a tournament format that had someone win. Frank Mentzer did his best to approximate thi within D&D, but we all should know by now, that D&D is not a game with a winner and everyone else losers. Frank did what he had to to for the sake of game growth, define some things more clearly for everyone to be able to use the same rules for fairness at tournaments. Those things were liked by SOME, so they got added in the form of NWPS then skills and feats.

D&D jsut still doesnt work in a tournament format, and as Kuntz recently said as well did Mearls, the DM needs to have more control over these things, than trying to define everything the way the designer of the game sees it, because YOUR DM is the only one that can make the game work for you.

Glad Mearls finally listened to my words and is thinking about some thing, even if not doing things in that direction he agrees the game should move in regards to his articles.

The main things any "skill" needs to do is be available IF someone comes up with it, for EVERYONE to then start using, PCs and DM, and everyone given a chance to use it when appropriate, and have reasonable chances depending on the situation.

Every skill cannot be written down as new ones are thought of daily by players. Nor can every circumstances be thought up such as some DC list with slippery, frozen, etc conditions.

Prewritten adventures CAN know all the circumstances because they were written for it and CAN define some sort of possible DC to guide the DM, otherwise, there is little but the DMs own decisions when they write their own, such as the designers of prewritten adventures dont follow the books guides all the time.

Skills and feats and such need to go away from D&D just as quickly as half-orcs being the product of rape.

[CCarter]

[*]I have no idea how Skills and Powers 2nd ed answered that. I'm open to someone explaining that there was anything at all worth paying attention to in S&P

I don't remember S&P doing much to change the NWP system at all. Basically, you got Character Points to spend on racial abilities, class abilities, weapon proficiencies, and NWP, all from separate pools (for the most part). IIRC, the book was pretty much entirely devoted to increased customization of PCs.

Skills & Powers NWPs were exactly the same as 2Es regular list of NWPs - same list with the same effects and with costs not much different, though you could buy more of them by selling off class features.

The major difference was that instead of being a modified ability check that didn't increase with level, the values started smaller and scaled up with level as you put more CPs into them (3-5 CPs/level, 1 CP = +1 to the value you needed to roll under for the skill). Halfway to the 3E system (though we can probably also blame Rolemaster).

[shadzar]

S&P pretty much made the number of NWPs more or less if you wanted, depending on where you spent your CPs, and you could get more for taking disavantages, buy racial features, traits, etc with CP, so you basically didnt have to pick something you didnt want, but could spend the CPs more where you wanted without having to wonder IF you ever were going to get to use some NWP you picked jsut because you had it, or language that you swapped for the NWP.

[A Man In Black]

I'm a big proponent of skills going to superpowered levels in 3e, but it's hardly necessary for a D&D-like game.

You just can't expect "skills" to be a primary schtick of a character type, when other character types get actual superpowers, though. It's the same swording-versus-spells dilemma that gets argued up and down everywhere here, only (unlike with sworders) there's an obvious way to give skillusers relevant superpowers.

Expanding on what RiotGearEpsilon said, if skills are capped at what is realistic, then they should stop advancing at that point. If they stop advancing at that point, you're going to have to deal with the fact that some portion of the skill-using classes' power is now decaying in relevance.

[hogarth]

Elaborating on the 3e setup, the current 3.Tome answer is "Skills are sometimes flavor abilities, sometimes must-be-this-tall checks sometimes character-defining abilities sometimes parts of combos that unlock superpowers. Skills are also all of those at the same damn time".

Without knowing much about how the Tome system is supposed to work, it's not clear to me how that's supposed to fix any of the problems I listed above. Doesn't that mean that powerful classes with a lot of skill points (like wizards) get extra stuff that they don't need?

Expanding on what RiotGearEpsilon said, if skills are capped at what is realistic, then they should stop advancing at that point.

Yes, I'm sympathetic with what 4E did (or tried to do) -- you can master a particular skill early and then any additional skill development is horizontal, not vertical.

If they stop advancing at that point, you're going to have to deal with the fact that some portion of the skill-using classes' power is now decaying in relevance.

Yes, although I'd suggest that there's not a single version of D&D at all (aside from home-brew stuff like the Tome) where skills are particularly relevant at high levels. My thought is that skilled classes should get useful class features instead (like Greater Invisibility for rogues or Mass Charm for bards, for instance).

[Swordslinger]

You just can't expect "skills" to be a primary schtick of a character type, when other character types get actual superpowers, though. It's the same swording-versus-spells dilemma that gets argued up and down everywhere here, only (unlike with sworders) there's an obvious way to give skillusers relevant superpowers.

That's true, and also a good reason why there shouldn't be skill based characters. Skills should be side stuff.

[Stubbazubba]

You just have to take the different tiers of the game independently; if skills, in a theoretical better system, cap out at a reasonable-for-mortals level, then at lower levels skills can be a schtick, so long as at higher levels they are replaced with something greater. Low-level non-skill characters would have limited skill range but some weak superpowers, making them rely on the skill monkey for things until everyone is past the level that those are necessary, at which point the skill monkey has transitioned into a new schtick that somehow fulfills the same or similar role.

For instance, if high skills unlocked access to super-power-like feats, the same way combat feats require a higher BAB, then a character who has invested a lot of resources into making skills higher would get access to a wider variety of super-power abilities upon entering mid-high levels, while those without such versatility will be great at their limited role, and then get better at their one thing, but really don't horizontally branch out. This would, obviously, require a substantial revision of the Wizard spell list and making many of those spells into spell-like abilities that can be used by those with high or maxed out skills.

[Bihlbo]

This topic has been on my mind as well. I'm still not sure what I think about it.

For instance, if you're looking at running a fight with some critters in a cave, the Climb skill comes into play in combat. Some of the players can't get to the critters because their Climb modifier is -1, while others who have maxed it out have a modifier of +18 and find it super easy.

Let's say you simplified it to the following:
Spend (something) to get the Climb "feature" - you now climb at your base speed / 2. Take this again to increase your climbing speed by this same amount.

If you don't have the Climb "feature", roll 1d20, add your Str, subtract your ACP, then divide by 2. That's how many feat you climb in a round. Roll a 1 and you lose your grip or something. The DM can add bonuses or penalties to your roll as he or she deems appropriate.

This means that in combat your rogue and barbarian probably aren't slowed down at all in getting to the critter, while the wizard and cleric are going to lose a few rounds catching up, but it's not nearly as impossible as the normal rules make it.

The downside is that sometimes you want interesting things to happen in the world that aren't this cut-and-dry, and actually come down to varying degrees of success, even for people who are quite good at something. Using this system, for instance, olympic-level atheletes are all equally good at everything. You couldn't have a pair of monks race up a cliff, climbing and tumbling from rock to overhang, in a somewhat exciting comparison of skill and luck. You'd just calculate the distance and that's how long it takes for both to make it to the top. Simple, fast, and totally boring.

I get a lot more out of systems that treat everything like skills. For instance, why wouldn't you just consider "Base attack bonus" to be a skill? (Edit: Don't answer this, it's hypothetical for the purposes of contemplation.) Gain a rank every level if you want, or don't. Gain bonuses with specific weapons if you like. Exalted (IDK, maybe other WW games that I can't bear to try) does a great job with this. I can try to ride a horse, and might get 1 or 2 successes. My friend might get 1-12 successes though, so his chance of getting 1 is pretty good. Now replace all that "ride a horse" nonsense with "stab you in the face with a stick". Still a great way to randomize things.

I'm less inclined to want superpowers in the game than I am to want everything to be based on a roll with modifiers based on character build/concept. Why treat skills any different than attacks? For that matter, why treat spells any differently?[/i]

[UmaroVI]

OK, so my personal take on how a skill system should work is that you need to break skills into 3 categories:

1) "Class feature" skills. This is things like "Stab Fucker" "Cast Spell" "Hide in Shadows" etc that are inherent parts of your classes. These need to cost more to have and actually be meaningful and shit. D&D does this with some of them but not others. The idea is stuff goes here if some characters simply cannot afford to not have it - like you can't make a fighter without BAB or a wizard without Spellcasting.

2) "Nifty Trick" skills - these are things that are cool and possibly useful to be able to do, but not vital to performing a role. Things like climbing better/faster than a normal dude, knowledge (how to stab various monsters in the face), Use Rope, et cetera go here.

3) "Background" skills - things that only matter if the GM brings them up. Playing chess, knowledge (philosophy), et cetera.

Now, obviously, which skills go where will vary a bit from game to game. In a l5r game maybe Knowledge (Philosophy) should be in category 2 because having a good grounding in it might help you win arguments.

[Stubbazubba]

I agree with you, Bihlbo, but there are some arguments against point buy systems like that. Frank or someone will be here in a moment to tell you that it's because point buy systems make it nearly impossible for the DM to know what a level-appropriate encounter is. A DC X wall is a moderate challenge for someone who has focused on climbing their entire career, but impossible for someone who has never invested progression resources into it. The DM would have to find the average skill modifier of the party and base it off of that, which may or may not be practical. It also makes giving guidelines and tables for everything in the DMG very difficult. Everything would have to be based off of the 'average party score' in X skill.

In short, point buy like that creates a divergence in PC aptitude which makes encounters very difficult to balance. Frankly, though, class features and feats in D&D do a similar thing, rendering unified progression mechanics like BAB meaningless.

[JonSetanta]

I have an idea recently that skills should have a small range of success that is static, much like D&D 1 and 2 (AD&D)

25% success
50% success
75% success
Near-automatic success (roll anyway for critical miss or critical success)

These would remain as they are when used against inanimate targets and situations, but when opposed by other beings the target gets their own skill roll.

Scope of accomplishment would increase exponentially (magically?) with further abilities rather than increasing skill ranks.

[Bihlbo]

I agree with you, Bihlbo, but there are some arguments against point buy systems like that.

Yeah, I didn't mean to make it sound like I was advocating point-buy. I merely wanted to point out that fighting against a monster's AC isn't much different than fighting against a swamp's DC. I think other systems that do handle this as pretty much equivalent get it right, but I do recognize that D&D doesn't work well with total point-buy creation.

So why don't skills follow a similar railroaded progression like BAB does? It could work such that all skill modifiers advance at a rate of 1/2 levels, or 1/1 level if it's trained. Yeah, that would look a little more like 4e, I know, but it also means every character gets access to the skill's super power eventually. Also, by the time you're level 15 you don't have to worry about skills like Climb or Appraise outside of extreme situations because the lowest result in your group while taking 10 is a 17. That makes the game faster and less stupid. I really can't get my head around the idea that someone can melt a hole in the side of a dragon with an extremely advanced magic spell, but somehow got that far without learning a little something about how to not kick noisy rocks as they move or how to drop down from a wall without breaking a leg.

What seems more attractive to me is tagging a skill as "trained" and it keeps following the 1/1 progression, or if not trained it's on the 1/2 progression. That breaks down completely if you ever multiclass (virtually all characters do, don't they?). So maybe you give everyone 1 rank in all skills every even-numbered level, cut the skill points per level for every class in half, and impose a limitation that you can't exceed a certain rank based on your level and the class you just took.

I don't think I'm really addressing the OP's main point, but this would address the vast difference between a specialist and a non-specialist. Also, I don't think there's any reason why DCs should scale by level (contested rolls already sorta do, but that's setting a DC dynamically). If you're level 4 you should have trouble with a 30-foot long jump, controlling a mount in battle, or finding a secret door. If you're level 18, you shouldn't, no matter who you are. The game is different at that level, and it's laughable to suggest that you can have an interesting game session made up of DC 20-40 skill tests anymore.

In fact, in my experince by the time PCs hit 15 the only people who ever roll skills are the ones with the +20 modifiers. If you haven't wasted skill points on cross-class skills and neglected to specialize, you have a fairly narrow focus of expertise that is so highly-refined that everyone else's modifier is literally incapable of competing with yours in every way. So every challenge involving skills is either impossible for the group, or auto-win anyway, with virtually no middle ground. I'm in favor of doing away with the impossible situations, and increasing the auto-win ones as PCs level up.

[Stubbazubba]

I had that exact same idea; assign everything a progression and change the way multiclassing works, and after asking around this forum and others, people were generally of the opinion that it would still diverge too much as you progressed higher. You'd be better off giving fighter types a flat bonus to attack and damage, rogues to sneaking, etc., etc.

[tussock]

Skills should not give you superpowers; superpowers should be class abilities.

Skills should be class abilities, shared across all classes where it makes sense to do so. Oh, wait, they are.

Once you get past the idea that skills are supposed to make you awesome, or even worse, that skills should be mandatory for you to be awesome, most of the challenges with the D&D skill system simply melt away.

Once you stop rolling for the pointless crap that automatically succeeds, there's very little left to the 3e skill system at all. You take 10 at 1st level to make DC 15, or take 20 to make DC 25. Almost nothing is harder than that anyway.

That's bad. Then you get a +20 item at 5th level and never roll for even the stuff you do roll. Not that it matters, because most of the things you were rolling for still don't work usefully even when you automatically succeed. Like tumble, where it's usually smarter to just take the AoO, movement being expensive; or there's something that's not human nearby and so Hide doesn't work at all, or the room is just lit and that's that.

Why do we need a skill system in the first place? Well, in a D&D adventure, people are inevitably going to want to jump over a pit,

Light armour can jump 1/2 move and land splat, -5' in heavy armour. +5' with the jump skill and/or freakish strength. (+5' at 6th, 11th, 16th). Those are about 1' increments for high jumps (plus your own height). You can land running 5' less than that, but have a 25% chance of falling even then in combat unless you take another -5'.

That's jump, only you spend build points and calculate bonuses and roll dice and add numbers and eventually get the same answer: "yes you can".

or climb a wall, or swim a river, or sneak past some guards,

None of things should be at all restricted by needing to buy them. Characters should climb ropes, let down by a Rogue who has a 95% chance to safely climb anything at 100' in a minute at 1st level. Scramble up a half move to a ledge? "Yes you can", it's barely more use than jumping.

Ditto for the river, someone strips down and swims it (as the others guard with bow and spell) dragging a rope with which to tow heavier gear and the others in turn. No rolls, just "who goes first". Use subdual damage in rough conditions.

And wouldn't it be nice if 3e or 4e allowed anyone to sneak past anything. Like if the Rogue could just make himself invisible by hiding in faint shadows, or move in perfect silence when the guard is distracted. But no, the designers gave us spot and listen, and all the monsters too, so it just doesn't work (only real people still buy it, because they want it to work).

and the GM needs to be able to determine whether the attempt succeeds or fails.

Rules for swimming and climbing do not have to be restricted in who can use them. It's a tree, you climb it. It's a sheer wall, you don't. Randomly activated superpowers overcome such limitations. Select these with skill points.

"May I?"
"No."
:checks check:
"OK then, yes."

"May I?"
"No."
:casts spell:
"OK then, yes."

See how that works?

To their credit, the designers of 4E ...

Decided skills should be a giant game of "mother, may I?", with 50 pages of widely spaced text busily pretending otherwise. The whole system is well summarised as "roll a 10+ to do anything, must get X of Y, where X and Y are whatever you happen to roll before we all get bored and let you win, and please tell a nice story for us while rolling".

[hogarth]

Skills should be class abilities, shared across all classes where it makes sense to do so. Oh, wait, they are.

I think most people understand that "class abilities" in this context excludes abilities that every single class has access to.

As for the rest of your comments, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Are you seriously suggesting that skills should work like "Mother May I", while wasting 50 pages pretending it's not?

[Josh_Kablack]

Elaborating on the 3e setup, the current 3.Tome answer is "Skills are sometimes flavor abilities, sometimes must-be-this-tall checks sometimes character-defining abilities sometimes parts of combos that unlock superpowers. Skills are also all of those at the same damn time".

Without knowing much about how the Tome system is supposed to work, it's not clear to me how that's supposed to fix any of the problems I listed above. Doesn't that mean that powerful classes with a lot of skill points (like wizards) get extra stuff that they don't need?.

It doesn't and surprisingly not so much.

The Tome angle was to try to push skills more towards superpowers. It's actually kind of the opposite of a "fix" in that it ends up being slipshod. While more skill points help characters in this system, generally skill points by themselves are not enough to open up superpower style abilities within Tome - you need to combine with Tome Skill feats, Tome Armors, class abilities and or spells to get the crazy stuff.

[tussock]

Are you seriously suggesting that skills should work like "Mother May I", while wasting 50 pages pretending it's not?

I'm suggesting that the stuff on my character sheet should take narrative control away from the DM when I have to take the time to roll dice or spend spells on it. So it's all "mother may I" right up until the answer is no, then I change that answer to a yes with some skill dice or spell slots and we carry on.

Like, you're in town, going to see the local lord.
DM says "there's a guard on the door".
PC: "We go in."
DM: "No, he's being a dick about formal requests and such."
PC: Makes diplomacy check, "OK, but he lets us in anyway."
DM: "So you're in, ...."

And important NPCs and their advisors can have some counter-skills and saving throws to stop the PCs breaking the world in half with it, and your "skill challenge" is getting the local lord's chief advisor on side so they stop cock-blocking all your requests.

[Aryxbez]

First off, I do believe Skills should be Super Powers, provided can make it work within the RNG, or whatever, have stuff like Jump upgrade into "Jump Good" or essentially flight Hulk/Inuyasha style. Although do see the problem in that, since "everyone" has skills, this means that even the pesky casters would have these superpowers as wel... However I'm liking the idea of what Bihlbo suggesting, with BAB like progressions for skills. Reminds me of brief idea, of how Successor Project by Caedrus, had mentioned to keep skill bonuses on the RNG, to make them similar enough to attack rolls, so they could be used place of one another with special powers, or well can attack a similar DC that works within the system.

Also, I'd hope by now under such a revamped skill system, that we'd have condensed skills, already, don't have Climb or swim, but Athletics, no balance/Tumble, but Acrobatics (with Jump in there as a dex based option?), Perception, and no useless skill crap like "Use Rope" (seriously? although "epic uses" were more like ones should cut DC in half for or whatever). I did like how Tome handled Profession, basically being a "1 rank" skill, that could maybe be "2 ranks" to be a Master of that profession.

Which Ice9's suggestion of the three categories, I'm not seeing a difference between "side" and "background" skills, sounds like could just fit profession skill in both of those. Any example skills to those proposed categories?