Houserule Skills (3.5)

[Falrin]

Decipher script ticked me off. It really did. It’s fluff. It’s a dud. And it can screw you over when you fail a check.
Why? Why those needless skills? Those endless rolls?
And thus I set my goals: Simplify the skill list in a shorter and more useful one.
I know people might think forgery is an absolute necessity as a role-playing device and just thinking about dropping it is an abomination upon mankind. I respectfully disagree.

So here it is;

General Skills

Alertness (Spot/Listen)
Athletics (Jump/Swim/Climb)
Agility (Balance/Tumble)
Concentration
Negotiation (Sense Motive/Diplomacy)
Sleight of Hand (Use Rope/Escape Artist)
Spellcraft
Stealth (Move Silent/Hide)
Streetwise (Gather Info/Intimidate)
Survival
Trickery (Bluff/Disguise)
Use Magic Device


Background Skills

Craft
Tinkering
Weapon smith
Armor smith
Alchemy
Bowmaking
Trapmaking
…

Knowledge
Medicine (Heal)
Arcana
Religion
Nature
Planes
World
Local
…

Profession
Peasent
Goldsmith
Architect
Carpenter
...

Earned skillpoints will follow a mandatory distribution patern between these two categories.
Ex. 4 General SP/2 Background SP


As Class Feature:

Certain old skills will become class features, tied to one of the remaining skills.

Disable Device (Craft tinkering)
Open Lock (Craft Tinkering)
Handle Animal (Know nature)
Ride (Atletics)
Perform
Search (Alertness)
Track (Survival)

Ex. Fighter gets Ride as a Class Feature. From now on his ’Athletics’ skill will also include ’Ride’.

Class skills will be distributed as true to the original as possible. As this would produce a wall of text, I'll might get back on this.
The major problem will be balancing the SP/LvL to this new list. I forsee more use of the cc-skills as they’ve become much more usefull.

Your thoughts?

[deuxhero]

Just use the pathfinder skill system (Pathfinder has an SRD at someplace I can't recall the URL of) with use rope (oddly absentin the combined skills) put in survival. With the grappling rules it's about the best thing about the system that hasn't been borked via errata.

[Temotei]

This has been done a lot, except for the class features part. That's new to me. Still, shortening the list of skills makes classes with a high number of skills per level able to get almost every skill, especially with a high Intelligence score. You'd have to lower the amount of skills per level.

[Narmy]

Or do as the one guy said and use the Pathfinder skill system.