We had a player create a Human Ranger with the Half Elf Feat.
The player decided to create a character that selected a skill other than what they found on their signature skill list.
They chose Acrobatics, Athletics, Nature, Stealth, Survival, and Thievery.
Obviously Thievery is not a signature skill for them.
From what I understand, it is perfectly legitimate for them to have this skill though, they just cannot advance higher than Expert in it.
This also allows them to be able to take the Feats of Pickpocket, Subtle Theft, and Wary Disarmament, but they are excluded from Quick Unlock, Spell Thievery and Legendary Thief.
If I've interpreted this right, a Thief is no longer really needed for many of the things Thieves would traditionally be used for (disarming traps overall).
It does mean that they cannot do the legendary things a Thief could accomplish though.
Thinking more on this, and expanding it, it seems for many of the skills if you want to become more of a Jack of all skills, there isn't a ton that you lose out on by simply being an Expert instead of Master for most of them and the things you gain may be far more beneficial than simply focusing on signature skills.
This is just a thought though, anyone see this idea in actual practice?
I personally never saw a problem with one character having a modifier much higher than the rest. The Rogue is supposed to be the one disarming traps. I honestly don't see why the fighter would be offended that he doesn't get to roll at something that isn't his job.
The only problem, I think was when some characters just get better at everything than others (like wizards being able to solve every obstacle).
I do think that there should be a skill feat that lets a class add a skill as a signature feat. The almighty Perception is no longer a skill and for any other skill, I'd say that burning a precious feat is enough of a penalty for not having it on your class list.
And I would like to add my voice to what seems to be the common trend of people thinking that there is too little difference between the levels of proficiency. But admittedly, that's just number-crunching, which is what these playtests are for.
Just really getting into the meat of the book and dry run testing as a GM, but I definitely feel like the GM is supposed to use proficiency gating as the control for specialists.
Because when you craft you can have expert, master and legendary versions of items, I assume the intent was that those items automatically gated the level of specialist that would be able to deal with them / use them. So a Fighter can become trained in thievery and can open mundane locks (trained level crafts) with increasing ease as they level, but would never be able open a better crafted lock (expert, master, legendary) where the rogue who pushed thievery up would.