I included rules for skills in my Athanor PDF because I wanted to include a way to customize characters within the rules. But my thoughts lately have been about the fact that maybe I don't want a skill system. After all, what's the point of a class system if not to encapsulate skills and abilities into a specific sort of archetype instead of skills.
Maybe instead of skills, I would focus on giving basic skills to everyone: everyone can ride horses, everyone can detect secret doors 1 in 6, traps 2 in 6, listen at doors 2 in 6, surprise 2 in 6, etc. Based on class and the background characters have written up, I might give a +1 or +2 bonus on die rolls and leave it all to simple die rolls. Voila. Skills in a nutshell.
The downside is that it reduces mechanical definition of characters, making it harder for players to easily define their characters at the start. The upside is that it reduces mechanical definition of characters, making it easier for players to define their characters later down the road.
Maybe combining that with with my earlier ideas of an Arduin-style special abilities table can really do everything I want a skill system to do.
I'm not a big fan of skills myself, they seem to define more what a character can't do, rather than what they can, but your system is fairly basic, so I wouldn't see it as an issue if you chose to leave it in. Anyway, great to see the pdf of this project, I've been looking forward to it very much. Thanks for sharing your creativity and imagination Doug.
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