More on skills. See also my initial thoughts and revised skill rules.
My skill list is very 4th Edition derived, so run away if that's not your cup of tea. I used 4E as a starting point because it's a short list but pretty much anything you can think of falls under one skill or another. Plus, realism be damned, lumping all the thief skills together and the burly movement skills together and the magical knowledge skills together makes it easy to just be good at your job and still have some points for fun flavor stuff.
You could base all of what your character knows and can do on your class, but I rather like the idea of a commando-type fighter who knows how to hide in shadows or a rogue who knows a bit of the arcane.
I avoid having skills required or limited by class for the same reason. I've never known a thief who didn't want the full suite of thief abilities but if you want to just be a knowledgeable expert of the Van Helsing school that's just dandy. And the skills outside the norm for your archetype are going to be far more interesting than the ones that every fighter (or whatever) chooses by default. Plus, a pick-what-you-will skill list feels a lot simpler than having a unique class kit or feat or prestige class for every type of character you can think of.
Sometimes I want to expand the list I have to make it an even 20 skills - being able to roll a d20 (say) three times for an NPC and knowing what they can do and what they've prioritized learning sounds like a nifty little trick. But really that would just be padding the list for liking round numbers, so I've stuck with these 18.
Acrobatics: Flipping around and walking on narrow ledges and other nimbly ninja tricks. I don't have formal rules for attacks of opportunity but I give characters with lots of Acrobatics more leeway in describing how they avoid the big hulking brutes in their path. More Acrobatics makes it more justifiable to try fancy swashbuckling movie shit, which is never a bad thing.
Arcana: So Spellcraft is the practical manipulation of magic, but Knowledge: Arcana is knowing about magic, I guess? And Concentrate is something else entirely? And Alchemy is maybe its own skill or maybe a specialized subset of Craft? Nuts to that. Arcana is the magic skill. With enough of it you can identify spells or magic items and such - maybe I'll have you roll, but only when not giving information or telling horrible horrible lies would be as interesting or more interesting than the truth. Having a skill for aura reading rather than a spell to cast over and over that says "yup, there's magic here" is wonderful.
Athletics: The other physical action skill. Kind of ambiguous whether this or Acrobatics covers jumping - in real life you jump with your muscles but flying around like a tweaking chipmunk is usually something the halfling wants to do. I like to split the difference and use Acrobatics for gymkata parkour and Athletics for long-distance huuuurrrr leaps. Honestly though if you wanted to really condense the skill list you could fold the Acrobatics stuff in here too - there's some overlap with climbing already, and it's not like adventurers willingly go in the water ever so you don't really need to worry about the swimming application. One skill for all the movement stuff just seems implausibly broad though, so I keep them separate.
Bluff: Lies, damn lies, and misdirection. You can't just say "I bluff him! I rolled a 7!" of course, but higher Bluff lets you get away with more on sheer chutzpah (technical term). Superhuman levels of Bluff probably let you get around mind reading and such, though admittedly it hasn't come up yet.
Craft: 4th Edition didn't have a Craft skill. I thought that was stupid. 3rd Edition had a ton of crafts but you couldn't use it to save money and the rules for crafting times were go-sit-in-a-corner-level BAD MATH, so I cut all that out and made Craft one skill. Obviously Craft: Baking and Craft: Weaving and Craft: Golemancy are all very different (unless you're making a Lattice-Crust Pie Golem, and if so I salute you), but I'm okay with that. No one has a problem with a local knowledge skill covering every city ever, so in my games Craft is the generic skill for making And fixing stuff (and also sometimes sabotaging stuff), and at high levels you can make magic items if you have the tears of a phoenix and the beard of a fish or whatever. If that kills your sense of realism you can pick an area of expertise and everything else is at one or two mastery levels less. Metallurgy's kind of like printmaking, right?
Diplomacy: As with Bluff, Diplomacy should not let players say "I roll Diplomacy!" and have that be their argument. Diplomacy gets rolled because both the incredible result that leaves a whole village inexplicably smitten and the natural 1 that causes a huge international kerfuffle are results I like to see, and if there's a skill associated I can let the dice decide which happens first.
Endurance: The theory was having this skill let you make a marathon runner or the sort of fighter you see in epics where fighting someone to a standstill takes days and people stay awake without food or water all that time by sheer power of badass. Or like the fellowship chasing the uruk-hai across the plains nonstop for a week. But in actual play none of that ever happens, because it's hard as a player to set up situations where your Endurance matters and as a DM if you make it so players need to stay up for a week the one Endurance guy will be like "Okaaay..." and everyone else will have to sit that adventure out. In conclusion: Endurance is bad and I'm a bad person for not realizing it earlier. Moving on.
History: Real-life history is great because it's full of cool stories and characters. Fake history (or "adventure background") is lame because if you want to talk about the what happened in the Aztec-Atlantean-Alien Empire you should be playing the game in that era, or showing what the Empire was all about by just letting their ancient machines come to life and try to kill people. So if I could take away everyone's character sheets and make a few judicious edits I'd rename this Geography and make it the skill for knowing what's all out there in the world in the present. Either way it's a knowledge-type skill, so you're letting a player decide "My character's really smart so I want to be the font of exposition." You shouldn't roll dice for this unless failing to remember something has comical and/or deadly consequences.
Insight: Also known as Sense Motive. I love this skill because when players use it and realize "Hmm this dude's kind of skeezy we better keep an eye on him" they feel like the skill gives hidden life-saving information, and when they don't think to read someone and that person stabs them in the back they blame themselves for letting their guard down, not me for surrounding them with treacherous backstabbing liars. You don't need Insight for this - ask about a schemer and, skilled or not, you'll almost always hear some variation of "He's definitely a bastard but he doesn't seem interested in killing you right now" - but having the skill is a nice comforting security blanket so you can sleep in a world of manipulative pricks.
This is taking longer than I thought so I'm going to play the Harry Potter card and split this last skill post in half. Stay tuned for Skills: Part 4: The Skill List Part 2: Breaking An Unexpected Hollow!
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