Skill Reduction

I remember the first time I realized that more skills wasn't necessarily better. I was looking at a Rolemaster expansion that adding 'skiing' as a skill. I realized that no one would ever take this because there were so many other skills that were more important and despite the number of skills growing the number of skill points did not. Defining skiing as a skill simply made it so people couldn't ski.

So both 3.75 and 4.0 D&D have reduced the number of skills. I want to quickly recap what they did and maybe make a few comments about what they did.

3.75
1) Combine Jump, Tumble, and Balance into a new skill Acrobatics
2) Combine Concentration and Spellcraft
3) Combine Forgery, Dechiper Script, and Speak Languages into a new skill Linguistics
4) Combine Gather Information with Diplomacy
5) Combine Hide and Move Silently into a new skill Stealth
6) Combine Listen, Spot, and Search into a new skill Perception
7) Combine Open Lock and Disable Device
8) Remove Rope Use

4.0
1) Combine Tumble, Balance, Escape Artist into a new skill Acrobatics
2) Combine Climb, Jump, Swim into a new skill Athletics
3) Combine Listen, Spot, and Search into a new skill Perception
4) Combine Hide and Move Silently into a new skill Stealth
5) Combine Disable Device, Open Lock, and Sleight of Hand into a new skill Thievery
6) Added Endurance
7) Turn Gather Information into Streetwise
8) Turn Sense Motive into Insight
9) Turn Knowledges into 4 Fixed Skills: Arcana, Religion, Dungeoneering, Nature and merge in Survival and Handle Animal
10) Remove Appraise, Concentration, Craft, Decipher Script, Disguise, Forgery, Perform, Profession, Spellcraft, Use Magic Device, Use Rope
11) Speak Languages and Ride moved into Feat mechanics

So the two systems share some changes. Both consolidate skills into Stealth and Perception. Both turned Open Locks and Disable Device into a single skill. But fourth edition went much farther. Part of this is because they removed many game mechanics like disrupting a spell or using a magical device that you normally wouldn't be able to use. They also got rid of the 'open' skills like Knowledge and Profession. These skills had a specific component i.e. Knowledge Engineering or Profession Blacksmith. This makes them a little harder to handle because written adventures can't really take these into account well. They are more for open-ended games where a character wants to be good at something. But for something like a defined skill challenge these don't fit in. For example, you are trying to get some information from a blacksmith and a character wants to use their Profession Blacksmithing to form a bond with the blacksmith. This is perfectly reasonable, but it is difficult to write the skill challenge or even balance the skill challenege unless you know what skills a character possesses. Having open-ended skills is an entry point for chaos!

So are open-ended skills bad? I don't really think so. I think they add flavor, but they should always be neat little additions instead of game required skills. In D&D Knowledge (Arcana), Knowledge (Religion), Knowledge (Planes), and so on became standards. I don't think there should be standard skills like these. These skills should be moved into full-fledged skills like in fourth edition. But this doesn't mean you shouldn't have the open-ended skills also. Instead of having Craft, Profession, Knowledge, and Perform I would just have a single skill called Extra and then the player could have the skill be anything like Blacksmith, Story Teller, or Sailor. These skills could be rolled in special situations and could be used as assisting skills for other tasks. For example a Blacksmithing roll might give you +2 open your roll for knowledge about iron golems.