whence 3E's skills

The third edition Player's Handbook lists more than forty skills in which its adventurers can have ranks. Although prior editions of the game had skill systems (AD&D's Nonweapon Proficiencies and BECMI's General Skills), the 3rd edition skill system breaks with them in two ways:

• It is no longer an optional part of the game, but instead arguably the most-used non-combat mechanic in 3E D&D.
• The skill system does not use (modified-)ability-score-roll-under, as NWP and General Skills do, but a d20 + bonuses vs target number mechanic, similar to the newly-rationalized d20 + bonuses vs armor class mechanic used in combat.

I'm not going to spill any (digital) ink addressing those points. If you have strong opinions about them, good for you. Rather, I'm going to address the question: where did 3E's list of skills come from?

Despite not being privvy to the designers' thoughts, it seems like this question is actually largely answerable; I collated a list of General Skills from the Rules Cyclopedia against a list of NWPs from the core AD&D books. To begin with, 13 of 3E's skills have clear parallels in both lists.

Another 7 have an AD&D parallel but not a BECMI one, two have a BECMI parallel only and only 3 or 4 have no parallels at all, being entirely new.

That leaves 16 skills to account for. However, I've been hiding a trick up my sleeve: thief skills. Likely the primary motivation for the skill system in general is the extremely rigid skillset of the pre-3E thief class which has been addressed in pretty variable ways with pretty variable levels of success. The NWP and General Skill lists both go out of their ways not to include generally-available skills that make the thief's abilities redundant, but they both step on the thief's toes anyway. 3E takes the opposite approach, and explicitly opens up (most) thief skills for other non-rogues but giving rogues a bounty of skill points to play around with.

Anyway, direct ports of thief skills account for another 10 skills, and two new skills collapse a larger number of wilderness-related skills.

For their grand finale, WotC will accomplish the entire remainder of their skill system in 4 skills: Craft, Knowledge, Profession and Performance (although performance is somewhat different since one is "capable of one form of performance per rank," while the various specialties of Craft, Knowledge and Profession were all treated as separate skills) Craft, Knowledge and Profession were all skills with multiple specialties in BECMI, although all three were INT skills and WotC chose to move Profession to WIS, for reasons that are unclear to me. 3E's Knowledge also combines the two confusable BECMI skills Knowledge and Science.

To be honest, establishing these buckets does strike me as a rather lazy way of handling the preposterous variety of possible skills. A rule a friend of mine gave to me when designing skill systems is that, if you include more than 20 skills, you should simply let players write down whatever skill they like. 3E gestured in this direction, with a paragraph about how characters from different backgrounds might refer to the same skill by different names and a character sheet where skills are given as blank lines (as opposed to 3.5+, where the identities of the skills are printed directly on the sheet).

And even with its four general buckets, 3E fails to capture lots and lots of skills from earlier, less restrained systems.

• The following skills existed in both BECMI and AD&D but were cut in 3E:
  • BECMI "Mimickry" and AD&D "Animal Noise"
  • 
    
  • "Danger Sense" in both
  • "Endurance" in both
  • BECMI "Gambling" and AD&D "Gaming"
  • "Mountaineering" in both (specifically called out as being the skill of using climbing equipment to traverse mountains [so as not to infringe on thieves' perogative to Climb Walls], climing equipment in 3E instead provides a bonus on Climb checks).
  • BECMI "Snares" and AD&D "Set Snares" (possibly covered by Wilderness Lore, but trapping is not specifically mentioned in the rules).
• The following skills existed in BECMI only:
  • Acrobatics
  • Alertness
  • Alternate Magics
  • Artillery
  • Bargaining
  • Blind Shooting
  • Bravery
  • Caving
  • Ceremony
  • Cheating
  • Food Tasting
  • Labor
  • Leadership
  • Magical Engineering
  • Mapping
  • Military Tactics
  • Muscle
  • Quick Draw
  • Signaling
  • Veterinary Healing
  • Wrestling
• The following skills existed in AD&D only:
  • Begging
  • Blind-fighting
  • Charioteering
  • Close-quarter Fighting
  • Crowd Working
  • Drinking
  • Eating
  • Etiquette
  • Fortune Telling
  • Looting
  • Natural Fighting
  • Reading/Writing
  • Running
  • Street Fighting
  • Street Sense
  • Trailing

Some of these (looking at you, "Food Tasting") were clearly removed with good reason, others (like "Mountaineering") got folded into existing systems, and some are arguably present in the Craft/Knowledge/Perform buckets. However, something of the delightful variety of these orphaned skills gets lost in the comprehensiveness of the d20 list.

If it were me (it's not like I'm currently working on a hack based on some of the ideas in 3E or anything), here are some of the things I'd take away from this exercise of sourcing the 3E skill list:

• The D&D skill list skews thief-y for historical reasons. It might be good to reexamine some of the assumptions there; for example, pretty much anyone can learn to pick a pre-modern lock with the right tools, so is this even the right sort of thing to be rolling a skill check for?
• 3E did not do a good job with wilderness skills. "Knowing which way is north" and "everything else in the wilderness" is a terrible split. Wilderness skills should probably be more specific to environments (remember "Mountaineering"?).
• No edition of D&D, in my opinion, has done a good job with literacy. Historically, literacy has often meant "literacy in a dead/literary language," and literacy in the vernacular was a maze of nonstandard spellings and usages because the kinds of stable, standardized languages we moderns are accustomed to are largely the product of (often brutal) nation-building efforts. Anyway Decipher Script needs more love is what I'm saying.
• I'm probably going to try to pare down the list significantly, to just the sorts of things that adventurers would actually need to roll for. Things that shouldn't be rolled for, won't be skills as much as I can resist it. If someone really wants to be an expert in some non-adventuring skill, I'd just let them write it down and put ranks in it, rather than having a "craft" or "knowledge" bucket.
• 3E basically introduced perception skills, which in my view is a design trap. I don't intend to include those.
• Presonally, I'm going to unify weapons skills with general adventuring skills. All of these are things you can have ranks in, and they all use the same mechanic (d20 roll under active rating + ranks). This may not be your flavor, but I'm pretty sure it's mine and since I've played more skill-centric systems it's been hard to return to the bifurcated world of D&D variants.