As long as your changing up skill rules

[Zed]

Why be stuck on the trope that intelligence gets you more skills?

I never understood why you'd excel (through skill points) at jumping or hiding more by being super brilliantly intelligent then by the source ability (gives flat bonus).

Why not make class skill slots x + ability based skill slots y?

You can very x and y based on the core class. For example: Rogue might have 4 or 5 in both and have no limits on which ability bases used, while wizard might have 2 or 3 in class and be restricted to 4-6 Int base skills.

You could make 'y' equal the ability score modifier. This would allow for things like fighters with social skills (from cha) or sneaky stealthy wizards (from dex).

I tried a version of this with skill points once. Each level you could chose gain skill points from any one ability score and spend them in any skill based on that score. Sure it inflated skill rankings and Con was kinda silly to use unless you wanted to max out concentration that level... but its was kinda fun. (At first level you got skill points from all positive ability mods + 4x base class skill number).

Just my silly house rule from back in the day... I'll go back to lurking. Probably too drastic for some orthodox 3.5 believers. ;)

~Z

[Archade]

I wouldn't go so far as to do that, as it's a huge step away from 3.5. But what about a feat, "Wise In The Ways of the World"? You could say that skill points are based on Wisdom, instead of Intelligence?

[Kirth Gersen]

Yeah, like, you ever meet a super-genius, and all he can do is particle physics? But then here's a handyman who can't spell his own name, but he can fix the plumbing and build a house and shoot and skin a deer and make moonshine... you get the picture. Then again, if he's REALLY dumb, he'll also probably be really bad at all those things... dunno.

[lynora]

We do a house rule where instead of base skill points + intelligence, you get your base skill points (which can be applied to whatever) and then your ability modifier divided in half rounded down (sounds so much more complicated than it is) of each ability score, but the skill that is used for must be tied to that ability. If you have a sufficiently low negative modifier you lose base skill points.
Example: Str 18, Dex 12, Con 10, Int 14, Wis 6, Cha 12
You would get two skill points tied to a strength based skill (+4 divided by 2), none for Dex or Con, one for Int, lose a general skill point for low Wis (-2 mod divided by 2 is -1), and none for Cha.
I've never come up with a way to explain it on paper that doesn't look clunky, but once you've done it a couple of times it's really very easy.
This was our response to the annoyance of "Why does how smart I am have to do with how well I can Climb/Jump/Tumble?"

[Pneumonica]

How smart you are has nothing to do with how good you are of an Acrobat, or how good you are at Climbing. It has everything to do with how quickly you learn, and in this way the +Int for Skill Points makes total sense. I'm all for keeping it.

[Michael F]

Pneumonica wrote:

How smart you are has nothing to do with how good you are of an Acrobat, or how good you are at Climbing. It has everything to do with how quickly you learn, and in this way the +Int for Skill Points makes total sense. I'm all for keeping it.

I agree. Intelligence doesn't mean "good at the hard stuff in school".

It can be both "book learning" and "body learning".

Some people are better at picking up one typo over the other, but that's more complicated than D&D needs to be.

Maybe the rocket scientist who can't dance or match his socks only has a 10 INT. But he took levels in the rocket scientist prestige class (which requires levels in grad student...)

I don't think you would be able to find many people in the real world who are both drooling idiots as well as super-talented at a large number of diverse skills.

Maybe the folks with lots of skills that you think are a bit dim have a low wisdom and make bad life choices.

Look at professional athletes. Not all of them are super-articulate when you see them on TV, and some of them may have low wisdom scores and wind up in the tabloids. But most of the really successful ones are really bright.