whither 3e's skills?

As the title may suggest, this is a weird companion piece to my earlier examination of the origins of the skill system in D&D 2000. Instead of looking backwards, I am now looking forward from D&D 2000 to how three iterations on it would attempt to lump and categorize the let's say 50ish individual skills they inherit from it and what I can possibly learn from them.

Ready? Too bad.

D20 Modern (2002),

D20 Modern by Bill Slavicsek, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman and Charles Ryan doesn't, in my humble opinion, get enough examination for the ways in which it took the chasis of D&D 2000 in some interesting mechanical directions back when that chasis was relatively fresh. I would not say it does a good job but there's a lot going on in it which is quite interesting to me.

d20 Modern's big contribution to the grouping of D&D 2000's skills, weirdly, is in its feats; D&D 2000 had a feat called Skill Focus (see note 1), which gave a +2 bonus to checks with one chosen skill. The Ivory Tower intended use of this seems to be to shore up a character's bonus with a skill for which they have a poor key ability score. d20 Modern lacks this feat, but adds about 25 new ones, each of which give +2 to checks with each of two specific skills (see note 2). There are a couple reasons to consider this a skill grouping mechanic, including:

• Almost every skill has exactly one feat that gives it one of these bonuses. For some reason, neither Balance nor Concentration does.
• Having distinct feats instead of a single multipurpose feat lets different classes offer different sets of them as bonus feats. If this seems kind of a redundant mechanic with the existence of class skills, hello and welcome to the design of d20 Modern.
• The skill groupings in the next games we will consider mostly keep skills grouped by the same d20 Modern feat in the same grouping.

Iron Heroes (2005)

Turning back, for a time, to fantasy, Mike Mearls's own Iron Heroes also groups its skills, although with important distinctions from the feats in D20 Modern. Here, Skill Focus returns as a single feat (see note 1), but skill groups are now opened by class. If a class has access to a skill group, a character of that class may gain a rank in every skill in that group for one skill point.

This is. An approach to grouping skills. One might expect that a mechanic like this, that lets the same skill point "go farther" for certain skills and classes than for others might replace different classes getting different numbers of skill points but that's not the case, some classes get 4, 6, 8 or for the thief an incredible 12 per level, and different classes still receive access to different skill groups. The thief can invest more points per skill than normal but still, what the hell.

Monte Cook's World of Darkness (2007)

If the choice of games being considered here seems arbitrary, it is I think the fault of this game, because MCWoD clearly takes mechanical inspiration from both D20 Modern and Iron Heroes in its design. Neither is a surprise, this is a D20 System game with a contemporary ish setting and since the cover of Iron Heroes proudly proclaimed "MONTE COOK PRESENTS."

So, MCWoD has two skill grouping mechanics, skill themes and skill focus. The latter is just D&D 2000 class skills by another name, as supernatural variety (vamp, mage, were etc) replaces traditional classes, so let's focus on the former. The list of themes correspond almost (see note 3) exactly to the skill groups in Iron Heroes, with the addition of related modern day skills from d20 Modern. However, skill themes are only actually used at character creation; players choose two and start with a bonus three ranks in each of the listed skills (see note 4), in addition to any ranks gained from their class.

Direct Comparison

There is a lot of agreement between these three categorizations. For example, everyone agrees Hide and Move Silently belong together and that they should just be called "Stealth." That one stuck in 4e and on.

There are a few differences in these schemata, however, and I find them instructive. I'm going to consider MCWoD's categories here to be for all purposes identical to Iron Heroes because (1) MCWoD seems to use the exact skill list of d20 Modern and (2).

Anyway, here are the differences:

• While other Craft specialties are covered by the Builder feat in d20 Modern, Craft (Visual Art) and (Writing) under the Creative feat which covers Performance. This division is also reflected in the availability of these skills from starting occupations and class skill lists. On the other hand, MCWoD does not group the specialties of the Craft skill at all.
• d20 Modern has no feat for Balance or Concentration, but both are grouped with others in MCWoD. My personal theory is that Concentration was omitted because of the absence of spellcasting for the core classes and Balance really needed to be folded into either Climb or Tumble but that would have violated the pattern of "+2 to checks with two distinct skills."
• Search and Sense Motive grouped with Listen and Spot in MCWoD but not in d20 Modern. This is interesting to me because Search is indeed a different task than Listen/Spot, however the designers chose to pair Search with, of all things, Forgery (see note 5).
• Sleight of Hand grouped with thief/performance skills in MCWoD rather than with Escape Artist in d20 Modern (which MCWoD instead groups with Balance and Tumble).
• d20 Modern groups Jump and Tumble, where MCWoD groups the former with the other Strength-based skills of Climb and Swim and Tumble with the Dexterity-based Balance and Escape Artist. Honestly my problem with that is that the skills MCWoD groups are already grouped by their key abilities. In My Humble O, d20 Modern has the right of it here, as Jump and Tumble are essentially just the Strength and Dexterity based uses of the same kind of training.

What now, honestly. I think I do have some ideas on how to take these ideas forward. Before I get to those, however, read my notes if you haven't already.

Notes

1. In D&D 2000, Skill Focus simply gives +2 to one chosen skill. This seems to be underpowered by the game's own standards, so D&D 2003 bumps this to +3, and Pathfinder bumps it further to +3, raised to +6 when the character has ten or more ranks in the skill. Iron Heroes matches Pathfinder in this.
2. Previously, I wrote that, "I was struck by how many fiddly mechanical choices there are, in the forms of talents and feats and skills and advanced classes, and how little most of that stuff matters. Most abilities boil down to a small modifier on certain saving throws or skills checks." While they are indeed not terribly interesting in themselves I do feel that I missed some of the interesting design going on here, and I am sorry I wrote so dismissively of it.
3. The only place where MCWoD actually disagrees in groupings with Iron Heroes is that Iron Heroes considers Use Rope to be a "Wilderness Lore" skill and MCWoD considers it "Military," for some reason and that literally just does not matter even a little bit
4. MCWoD effectively uses its skill themes to present an alternate solution to the problem of, "a Rog 1/Ftr 1 gets 26 base skill points but a Ftr 1/Rog 1 gets 10," which Pathfinder solved by simply giving +3 to any class skill you have a rank in. I like MCWoD's approach better, since it means it takes more investment to train up a skill midway through your adventuring career, but it's also frankly buck-wild that MCWoD addresses this problem at all because unless I'm mistaken there is no multi-classing in this game, so it may be unintuitive but it isn't an actual problem.
5. Forgery is such a weird skill and its weirdness really comes out when one tries these grouping approaches. It's so situational that it's hard to justify investing in, but the general solution has been to mix it in with more useful skills which means that the characters that don't otherwise have any business knowing about Forgery have ranks in it or a bonus to it.

Putting it All Together

Pare the list down significantly. Everyone agrees there's too much overlap. True20 brings it down to about 25 skills which is for me much better than the 50 or so in the base game, and yet still granular enough for groupings to apply. I would keep Craft and Knowledge as buckets of applied and theoretical specialized knowledge, and probably fold the Performance specialties into Craft.

In addition to class, characters would select one or two backgrounds (probably aiming to be more like d20 Modern's starting occupations than MCWoD's skill themes) that give them ranks three ranks in each of a set of skills. The maximum ranks in a skill would be set at 4 + two thirds level, rounded down; this is to encourage characters to branch out or spend skill points on feats every third level or so, rather than picking a handful at character creation and sticking with them for the rest of their career.

Give a consistent number, probably 2 or 3, of skill points per level regardless of class. One point buys a rank each in two different class skills or any one other skill (here you may perceive the shadow of Iron Heroes) and two points buys a general or class-specific feat.

Focus, rather than being a skill-specific feat, would be a mechanic to be applied to particular kinds of rolls representing expertise. Having focus on a roll means that you add half again your ranks in an applicable skill to the roll. This is inspired by the Pathfinder version of Skill Focus, which scales with invested ranks, but a lot more gradual.