So, I've heard a lot of people say both good and bad things about the d20 skill point system. Some say it's needlessly complex and makes it difficult for low levels to specialize while others say that the alternative (skill training) is oversimplified and doesn't make sense.

SKILL POINTS
At every level you gain X number of skill points to rank up your skills. Distribute your skill points as you see fit with your only limit being your level.

PROS

-Customization:

CONS:

-Complexity: Some people find this to be too complicated and tracking skill points and skill ranks to be a hair-puller.

-Futile Distribution: Sometimes 1 rank in everything is truly useless.

SKILL TRAINING
Rather than deal with skill points and ranks, you merely select a handful of skills from a list and gain a flat bonus to those skills.

PROS

-Quickplay: The skills are quick and easy to keep track of.

CONS:

-Lack of Customization: See above.

-Autogrowth: Everything grows with level. If skills grow with level, it makes no sense for the barbarian to have +5 Spellcraft or the Wizard to have +5 Climb just because they're a higher level. But a game without autogrowth in skills faces the problem of rising skill DCs and the problem of skills ever being used in combat.

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What are all of your thoughts on this? Ideas for improvement on the skill systems?

 Well you got to ask yourself each time you run a campaign "are skills important?" in that game. If yes go with option 1 if no go with option 2. I have been  in games where even the same group used different options depending on the campaigns tone. I personally favor the SKILL TRAINING option, but I tend to run//play more 'Kick in the Door' style d20 games that revolve around dungeon crawls.

That's a good point. But how do you address the issue of autogrowth?

Wizard with +10 Athletics or Barbarian with +10 Spellcraft?

With no training whatsoever, they just autogrow to keep up with DCs?

If you disable autogrowth for skills, it changes the whole nature of the game and makes balancing DCs very difficult.

If you keep autogrowth, the skills become insensible and ridiculous.

 Honestly, I never ran a game long enough to hit that wall. The only Auto Growth system I had was in 'Yet Another Fantasy RPG' where your skill was the characters level. If trained you got a +5 bonus to the skill. D&D 4th ed. used a similar system. But the skills you could have were based on your class. Each class had a list of skills they could choose from. In the games I ran my group never got past the 10th level. We always wind up switching to another game or system then switch again, until we come back round.

In reply to Arkrim (msg # 3):

I don't think that it's fair to say "Wizard with +10 Athletics or Barbarian with +10 Spellcraft? With no training whatsoever"

A Wizard that has leveled up enough to possess that +10 in Athletics has probably been on plenty of adventures and climbed lots of stuff in those years.  Similarly, a Barbarian that's high enough level to have the +10 in Spellcraft has simply experienced lots of magic in his travels and has picked up some things along the way.

So while I do favor customization (I'm a number cruncher), I can very much understand a plausible rationale for autogrowth based on experience that's happening in the background over the course of a lifetime/campaign.

Customization has also the Con of increased Munchkin-ism:  no Wizard will ever 'waste' points to improve Athletics, for instance.  So I view autogrowth as basically forcing experienced characters to be a little more well-rounded.  That could be good or bad, depends on that for which your game aims.
This message was last edited by the player at 09:56, Sat 26 Apr 2014.

In reply to mofo99 (msg # 5):

Yes, you just re-explained the PRO of BALANCE for AUTOGROWTH and the CON is LACK of customization (and of course angry d20 fans screaming at the designers that 4E sucks and doesn't make sense). I'd rather avoid that fate completely if I can.

I thought about perhaps having the game use scaling DCs. Where it wasn't always fail/success but rather, more success based on how high of a DC you achieved. That way, autogrowth wouldn't be needed. But I haven't plotted out anything in more detail or found any other useful suggestions/fixes to it. And a well-balanced dungeon crawl would have a variety of skills needed as well as combat. Rewards would be based on success levels and quest achievement would be dependent upon a certain level of success. Something like that.

Note you are sticking with full greyscale vs. black and white progression.

You could have more tiers.  For instance...
You currently suggest just having trained an untrained.   How about trained, familiar, difficult and unknown.

Most skills start at difficult.  Your class or profession provides you a list of skills to be considered familiar.   You normally pick a subset to be trained in.

Purely for a starting point, let's say we were retrofitting pathfinder with this system.  Skills you chose at first level become your trained skills.  Those that are not trained but would have been considered class skills, get treated as familiar.  Everything else, except fly becomes difficult.  (Exceptions: linguistics for barbarian becomes unknown, or maybe some other shifts to unknown).

Trained skills treated like level+3, familiar treated as 1/2 level, and difficult treated as 1/4 level.  Unknown treated like 0

Feats could be used to make skills bump categories.  Original skills bought if begun as difficult get bumped to familiar instead of trained.

All that adds some complexity back but might be simpler than point but each level.  Granted, I'd probably stick to point buy generally for my own style, as I like the variance it provides.

In reply to LoreGuard (msg # 7):

I've actually explored this idea elsewhere and forgot! I called it STREAMLINE d20 in another thread here, but I had only 3 tiers instead of 4: Trained, Class, Cross-class.

But it's a great idea and a great compromise! I can't believe I forgot this.
This message was last edited by the GM at 17:19, Sun 27 Apr 2014.

Has anyone had any ideas to expand on skills or alternate ways of doing skills OTHER than "skill points" or "bonus + level = skills"?

I like 5e's Proficiency bonus.

What do you like about it?

Or more specifically, why DON'T you hate something that is so black-and-white binary it might as well be chess instead of D&D?

For starters, I'm ok with chess. Chess is not binary, but I'll accept your premise because Proficiency is (you either have proficiency bonus or not). What do I like about it? Simplicity. That seems to have been the goal with the reductions in skill. One thing I could do without is that there's no variation in wages for professionals or crafters. They just do what they do. That's it.

Skill points as is are very fussy. with this proficiency or not system, all the fuss is gone.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:47, Sun 07 Dec 2014.

If you don't like binary proficiency, you can always use the base proficiency (changing the first two levels to +0, and 3-4 to +1) for a "familiar" skill (anything not cross class or "trained only"), Maybe half level for a Cross Class (anything not a class skill), and full level for class skills.
This message was last edited by the player at 17:03, Sun 07 Dec 2014.

On a d20 scale +2 to +6 is pennies. So that proficiency bonus is really a joke to those who like to play epic adventurers instead of incompetent yokels who found a dungeon.

Telling me that someone with +5 is an olympian athlete while someone with +0 is an average adult human is horrendous.

+5 vs. +0 is a difference of only about 25%. So an olympian will beat a regular human at acrobatics 75% of the time, but that's 25% of the time a normal person defeats an olympian. And the barbarian is going to lose an arm-wrestling match to a peasant 25% of the time? And how does one create a "true master" of a skill if the game has nothing beyond advantage and a +2-6 based on level?

1) Huge scaling issue. My level 20 fighter is pretty much still a complete chump stat-wise, just like my level 1 fighter.

2) It causes you to miss out on so many aspects of a character. I can't make a "master of disguise" or "master of fear" because once they have proficiency and advantage, that's that. They're tapped. It's over. That street performer over there is just as good at disguise as the spy.

These are problems to me. How would you overcome them? (other than just ignoring them or pretending they don't exist)
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:12, Sun 07 Dec 2014.

I answered that already in post 13. The part where I designated greater variety by also bringing back class and cross class skills. I'm not talking about using the whole proficiency system, just the numbers. And by the way, there are things that let you double and add more to proficiency bonus as well, but since they're irrelevant because I only meant to suggest using the numbers, I won't get into them either.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:53, Sun 07 Dec 2014.

^ You seem to have trouble with this part.

Your previous post implied chopping up the already too small bonus into smaller bonuses (cross class and class), which doesn't address the issue AT ALL. So no, you didn't. You just ignored the question, which is not the same as answering it.

The +2 to +6 scale IS the problem. It's too small for a d20 game. The obvious answer is to increase the numbers, but at what scale is debatable.

If you split it up AFTER that, then you may have something useful to work with, but not before.

But if you just do nonproficient, proficient (cross-class) and proficient (class), that's still only 3 tiers of scale.

And a street performer expected to be good at disguises would certainly have it as a class skill if their class were "street performer" and yet would the master of disguise spy still be on par with such a character rather than superior in nature? So there needs to be a different distinction.
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:05, Sun 07 Dec 2014.

Wrong. My post exactly stated using your level or half your level for class and cross class respectively.