Mechanic for swapping out skills?

[WarKitty]

Is there any good mechanic for swapping out class skills, prereqs for prestige classes, etc.? I'm thinking especially of the various prestige classes that were obviously designed for a specific base class to enter them. I know I can just homebrew it but I think my DM would be more amenable if there was a written system I could present to him.

[Halaster]

I don't think there is. PrC requirements vary wildly and, as far as I can tell have little relation to how powerful the PrC really is, so they're pretty arbitrary. I don't think your DM will have a problem with swapping out X ranks in one skill for X ranks in another, as skills all cost the same.

The greater trouble is refluffing the PrC to match. A horizon walker with knowledge (arcana) instead of knowledge (geography) makes precious little sense, as would a duelist using, say, climb in place of tumble.

What swap did you have in mind?

[Cog]

The Cityscape web enhancement has a few limited options for this: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20070228a. A number of racial substitution levels and some of the Unearthed Arcana variants play with skills too.

[Snake-Aes]

Alternatively, you can go and ask your dm. Tweaking a class is fairly normal.

[WarKitty]

I don't think there is. PrC requirements vary wildly and, as far as I can tell have little relation to how powerful the PrC really is, so they're pretty arbitrary. I don't think your DM will have a problem with swapping out X ranks in one skill for X ranks in another, as skills all cost the same.

The greater trouble is refluffing the PrC to match. A horizon walker with knowledge (arcana) instead of knowledge (geography) makes precious little sense, as would a duelist using, say, climb in place of tumble.

What swap did you have in mind?

I was looking at ways to combine bard/cleric for one of the dual casting classes. Either swapping out theurge's skills for something a little more bard-friendly, or reworking one of the bard/druid classes that for some inexplicable reason had something like "wild empathy class ability" or "wild shape ability" as a prereq despite it being pretty unnecessary to benefit from the class.