Shoulders-of-giants and all that: Read The Alexandrian for why 3rd Edition was brilliant, Hack & Slash for the rebuttal (and why great conceptual design doesn't always work in actual play), and Rod of Lordly Might for an entirely reasonable compromise/summation.
Here's where we've been:
1st Edition didn't have skills, except it kind of totally did. Thieves had their thieving percentages. Elves and dwarves had secret knowledge and crazy perception abilities that only worked sometimes, which sounds a lot like a skill system to me. Strength modified how well you could open stuck doors (and later, "bend bars / lift gates", with typical endearing/absurd specificity), Wisdom modified surprise chances, Dexterity modified initiative, and everyone had the same chance to find secret doors. Unless you just found the secret door by saying "I tap on the panels, do any feel hollow?" and working out the mechanism to open it by poking around the torch sconces or whatever. That worked in some modules, but others were of the "yep, secret door, 1 in 6 chance of finding, marked with a little S on the map" school. A mix of hard and fast rules and ad hoc rulings right from the get-go. And just like when the magic-user said "I'm putting on the chain mail" and the DM kind of stammered "Um you can't do that it's not allowed", the rules didn't really have anything to say about trying things under someone else's purview.
2nd Edition had non-weapon proficiencies, which let you decide which skills you knew but without a mechanism for learning more over the course of play or, really, figuring out what exactly those skills did. It also let thieves choose which thief abilities to improve, down to the percentage point chance of success. Because that's fun? I dunno man it was the eighties everyone was on cocaine.
I won't compete with the Alexandrian describing 3rd Edition's charms, but I will add two anecdotes from personal experience:
-To DM at GenCon you have to actually learn the rules-as-written for skills. The climb/balance/tumble rules are downright Lovecraftian. The more you know about them the less you understand, and the more you want to run away in horror.
-Ever had a situation where the thief (or whatever, but come on, it's the thief) could roll a natural 1 and still run past the guards unseen while doing backflips in her unmentionables, while the fighter couldn't sneak past a sleeping ogre in a zone of magical silence with marshmallows tied to his feet? I think that happens in every 3rd Edition campaign ever, starting around level 2.
-Pathfinder added the Fly skill. Someone somewhere thought that was a good idea. This person was paid money. What? No, I'm extremely bitter, can't you tell?
4th Edition streamlined the skill list while removing the ability to improve a skill except through magic or level advancement (at a slow, uniform rate). It also wedded skills to a "Skill Challenge" minigame. I think the designers' hearts were in the right place for skill challenges. Encouraging creativity by letting any skill contribute to success with the right description... sounds admirable. But it's so much worse than that. What are the skill difficulties? How many successes are needed? What are the consequences of failure? Skill challenges are a way of giving exact, unwavering answers to all those questions with math, while completely ignoring the actual circumstances of play and stifling the creativity it was meant to foster. Also, the math is terrible - not hard to understand, just wrong.
So that's what's gone on before. Here's what I'd want, cherry picking elements from each:
-Let anyone try anything. No "sorry but unless you're a thief you can't do that".
-Allow for character customization. Not every ranger should be alike.
-Give room for progression. Both by level, so players feel like they're getting better as they level up, and by training or DM fiat, so when the players spend a few months in a psychic yeti dojo playing the Final Countdown they can come out with a real improvement.
-Keep it simple, for the DM to run and for players to interpret. No giant tables of modifiers. No wondering what exactly a +14 bonus means in the real world. This goes for character creation too.
-Minimal rolling, and when the dice come out, make them matter.
-Degrees of success and failure. Easy to go too far the other way with this and need ten different results for every roll, but ideally there would be some mechanical difference between "you grabbed the ledge at the last second and are dangling from one hand" and "you somersaulted through the exploding window with nary a scratch, then got up and straightened your tie."
Next time: putting all that into practice.
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