Hexcrawl [Part 3: Skills]

So I've been thinking about how I want to do skills. I decided to keep a fairly simple system, with a low scalability factor (that is to say; there is no huge difference between a low-level and a high-level character).

I decided I wanted to have a few major skill groups, each further divided by skills. Each level, the characters get a certain number of points to spend within one or more groups, up to a level cap of 1 point per skill every 3 levels (or something). This means that the difference between a 1st level character and a 30th level character is a +10 skill bonus. The higher level character is at a very large advantage, but even then, it's not a given he'll succeed and the other fail. This seems about right to me. Playtesting will bear it out.

The proposed skills groups are:

Movement, which includes every skill necessary to move around. 4th Ed. only has a few of those skills, and I'll probably return to a more 3.x division of skills: Tumble, Climb, Jump, Balance and Swim. Probably no more than those, though.
Active skills are those that require the player to do something. Picking pockets, handling animals, brewing beer are all active skills. This is a large category, and will probably be left largely up to the player to fill.
Social skills are those that play out the relative inlfuence of two people on each other. Intimidate, Lie (better than bluff), Negotiate (better than diplomacy), Haggle, Sense motive and their ilk. Again fairly specific, each describing a way to deal with people.
Knowledge skills are supposed to represent character knowledge of the world around him. This will probably take the form of History, Etiquette, Culture (by civilisation), Language* and some form of Monster knowlegde.
Magic I'm still not decided about. If I do decided to have magic in the form of skills, they'll just be another category, which only wizards have easy access to.

I'm not sure if I really need Active or Social skills, fearing it'll lead to pidgeon-holing the character's roleplaying. However, I want the charming rogue to have a more than equal chance to fast-talk the barkeeper into giving him free beer, for example. However, I want the dull-witted figther to have a small chance of doing the same, too. For now, they're both in the game.
About absent skills: There's no Gather Information, nor is there some kind of Spot or Perception. Gather information, I never liked,as it can both cut an adventure short or bring it to a stop, when a high or low roll upsets the GM's planned rate of information release.
Any form of perception is absent too, this to make players think independently and to find clues on their own. Some form of passive perception might survive, to see wheter or not enemies succeed in sneaking up on the characters. This is, however, unlikely.




*I've always been unsatisfied by the way D&D treats languages. The only languages apart from common are the species languages, which is unrealistic. Thus I will use a different system. Each culture will have its own language, with common being a sort of trade tongue, or pidgin. A language will have fewer possible ranks than a normal skill, but won't be bound by the level-cap. Similarly, I'll introduce different formalised systems of non-verbal communication (I wanted to say writing systems, but that would left out things like sign language, which also is part of it). The two systems will be separately from each other (that is to say, just because you can speak a language doesn't mean you'll be able to read it).

Spoken languages
0 ranks: Speaker isn't able to form a simple sentence.
1 rank: Speaker can form simple sentences, but can't explain complicated ideas. Many mistakes in grammar and pronounciation.
2 ranks: Speaker can speak well, although with an accent and still the occasional mistake. Complicated ideas are not immediately clear, however; some "dumbing-down" is necessary for that.
3 ranks: Speaker can almost pass for a native speaker. Even complicated ideas are no problem, although an accent remains.
4 ranks: Speaker is completely fluent.
5 ranks: Speaker has an usually high graps of the language, can speak very eloquently. This is the level for those who live by the language (orators, politicians, poets).

Formalised signs
0 ranks: Reader isn't able to interpret signs, and maybe doesn't even know they are supposed to convey a message.
1 rank: Reader can recognise origin of signs and can glean some superficial information from it.
2 ranks: Reader can get gist from message but missing details.
3 ranks: Reader can read the language without problem, to the details.