"I hate the new (5e) charm person because
There's so much wrong with that statement, but I'm going to focus on the first bit.*It renders several skills meaningless.
*It destroys creativity by being an easy out.
*It can utterly demolish the DM's storyline and render a challenge meaningless."
Because skills ultimately aren't rendered useless by spells. They're rendered useless by the fact they don't do anything in the first place. Nothing. They just are useless. Not the 3.0 ones they got rid of, but all of them. That was, I presume, the point of skills in d20: a way to differentiate your otherwise identical characters without changing how the game plays out.
Let's go over a few. Or, what the hell, let's go over all of the 3.5 skills, there's not that many.
- Appraise: You carry everything home and sell it for half market value. Knowing what things are worth has zero game impact.
- Balance: It's a surprise save vs a couple of low level spells, which should be Ref saves anyway. Otherwise, it's worth less than 10gp of rope, hook, and spikes. If the DM does give you something to "balance" on at a critical moment, it fucks your combat ability and separates you from the party, so you don't do it anyway.
- Bluff: It allows you one sneak attack, at the cost of two standard actions, or with a feat as one full round action. No one ever takes that deal. Otherwise you get to pretend to be something you're not, for a moment, if you also have disguise and forgery and the DM wants you to succeed. Because have you seen the DCs? If the DM likes what you said it's randomly -5 to 15, which is totally random for people with or without the skill. If the DM hates what you said it's 21 to 40, and you will always fail no matter what. Magic Tea Party is at least honest about it.
- Climb: A knotted rope off a hook is DC 0, and throwing a grapple is take-20 and so always works. Otherwise like balance, a rare surprise saving throw, but completely pointless and will kill you for being creative with it.
- Concentration: Caster tax on skill points. Never fails past level 5, has a level 1 trap feat attached, may as well be a casterlevel check, only with DCs that work.
- Craft: Just, no.
- Decipher Script: Literally does nothing. Maybe the DM will throw you a clue via this skill, but that's unlikely out here in the real world.
- Diplomacy: This skill wins D&D. As such, no one allows it to do anything, because no one wants to win D&D with a single skill check.
- Disable Device: Hit it with your axe. I'm not even kidding. Disabling spells? Have you seen the DCs? The fact that to find those spells automatically sets them off?
- Disguise: Opposed by Spot, which monsters all have in spades. Your chances of doing anything useful with it after passing twenty critters is zero. Old stories about walking around Drow city in disguise work with MTP, but cannot work here.
- Escape Artist: Like the DM isn't going to give you a way to escape anyway.
- Forgery: You present your warrant to the dragon, he breathes on it. OK, in a town mission, by 6th or 7th level you can have all the documents you need to win D&D with. Again, no one wants to win D&D like that, and the DM will just add an opponent with Forgery to nail you anyway. Maybe if you never really use it?
- Gather Information: If you don't have this skill, you will still get the same information somehow, because you need to have it to finish the adventure. At best it's begging the DM to support your character concept better with Magic Tea Party.
- Handle Animal: Skill tax on Druids and Rangers that everyone ignores. It's actually a move-action attack for low-level grunts and all spellcasters too, but no one does that either, mostly because animals are crazy expensive at low level and dead anyway at high level. You can train a nice mount if the DM gives you a year or five of downtime: as if.
- Heal: This is actually made useless by spells. The most iconic spells in the game behind Fireball and Lightning Bolt. If we can imagine a game without healing magic, this skill is far too weak to play D&D with. Some vague use at very low levels against poison and disease, if anyone cared about poison and disease.
- Hide: Everything has massive Spot ranks, and as you have to make dozens of checks to get anywhere or do anything while hidden it fails. It's completely overwhelmed not by spells but by amazing game effects like doors, corners, barrels, small bushes, and tables. Furniture is better than this. By far.
- Intimidate: The normal use is to make someone hate you. The alternate use is to give up all your attacks to maybe give someone -2 to hit for one attack of theirs, which is otherwise known as Aid Another. Doing either of these things hurts your character.
- Jump: It's a fancy way of saying people in heavy armour can't jump. Plate and Shield is like -13, so they can't even jump as far as they can step. If your Fighter puts all his skill points here, at Epic levels he will be able to jump across thirty foot gaps, unless he's wearing any armour. That does sort of work, it's just that nobody cares. 8' high? So short ladders are Epic now?
- Knowledge: Begging the DM to tell your character the stuff you already know.
- Listen: All the monsters have this to kill your Move Silently skill. You can, eventually, listen at doors with it, but everything relevant will hear you first.
- Move Silently: Forget about it, they can still hear you.
- Open Lock: Break door with axe.
- Perform: Roll high enough and the DM is supposed to send Angels from the heavens to make babies with you. Really though, it's just a skill tax on Bards.
- Profession: Again, no.
- Ride: This is what stops 1st level characters riding the horse they can't afford to buy. At 2nd level everything automatically works. At higher levels it would have let you ride weaker animals in combat, only they've already died. Marginally useful for classes with level appropriate mounts who don't get a class feature that ignores these checks. So ... no one.
- Search: takes two minutes per square and works without any ranks. Lets mid-level Rogues find the magic trap that already killed them.
- Sense Motive: Like a Paladin's Detect Evil, it tells you if the demon you're talking to means you any harm, only this one takes a full minute of careful eye-balling. Guys? The demon always means you harm. Always.
- Sleight of Hand: WAIT! THIS SKILL WORKS! Unless anyone's watching. Sort of a "stupid tricks you can play on people without Spot". A bit like Hide, only it will probably never come up in a game.
- Spellcraft: the other Spellcaster tax. Mostly functional because there's no retries and it's mostly happening in combat. If you can ignore how many dice rolls it adds to every minor event in the game if used as written, it's basically functional, though mostly annoyingly pointless.
- Spot: It's the secret fourth saving throw category, which many 20th level Characters have at +0. Without this, you basically have a "kick me" sign on your back, but you won't notice it, so, meh. Every monster has this, most PCs don't.
- Survival: Does anyone play the overland game? Not if no one has survival they don't. If they do, why would you want it all in a single skill anyway, rather than a bunch of different saves and skills and class abilities, like any serious part of the game?
- Swim: You drown. All water is a trap. Staying afloat for a few seconds in "stormy" water is an Epic ability, apparently, and even God Himself can't swim in any sort of armour. It's brutally realistic that people drown when pulled under water, but this skill doesn't change that, at all.
- Tumble: saves you moving 10' further by costing you 10' of movement at extra risk. In tight confines, you normally can't move either. Careful maxing this out to try and make it reliable, all the other skills do so much less than nothing that this skill which still basically does nothing is often nerfed when it succeeds regularly.
- UMD: WAIT! THIS SKILL WORKS TOO! Unless you want to use it in combat at low to mid levels. It's basically a rule that says Rogues can use wands at high level. Oh, and you're actually supposed to roll a d20 dozens of times to try and wear items reserved for other classes, because that's fun.
- Use Rope: This saves you taking-20 when using the hook that bypasses all the physical skills. Amazingly obscure fact of 3e, untrained people with Dex < 10 cannot tie knots.
So, it's what everyone knows. The only real sneaky skill is UMD, but only at high levels, all casters take Spellcraft and Concentration because they're basic (if pointlessly fussy) class functions disguised as skills, and grunts have no skills. Everyone buys themselves a Spot save if they can, because why not, Listen too if they expect to be functionally blind often.
But, for reals, people are still complaining about spells overpowering that 26 pages of nothing, and that's what gave us 4e's pile-of-nothing class powers. Skills are secretly only there to give your characters a backstory, like NWPs were, like Special Skills were before that, not to be used in the game.
You know why the 3.5 Jump spell doesn't work? Because the 3.0 version made someone feel small in the pants after they took the time to spend skill points on Jump. Clearly, the game would be better for everyone if the system did not exist, because we could have one slightly less useless first level spell, while freeing up 26 pages for something usable, like a cheaper book.
