Skill feats

The Change:

Skill feats: When you gain a skill feat, you can either:

• take a skill feat as normal

• Choose a narrow type of action with the skill that you (generally) can treat the result as a 10+ skill modifier, such as Demoralize for Intimidate, Gather information for Diplomacy, etc. Think of this as targeted assurance, instead of applying to a whole skill, it applies a stronger effect to a sub-set of a skill. As your proficiency increases, the scope of what is acceptable grows. These are recorded as Specialization (Action)

• Choose a skill, and choose a type of action you can now attempt with it, As your proficiency grows, the acceptable scale of this grows. The general guidelines are:

  • Trained: You are capable and while your abilities are above the average person, they are fully understandable. You can predict tomorrows weather with high accuracy (Survival), you can sense nearby spirits (Occultism), or you can read patterns in crowds to determine a targets movements through them (Society).
  • Expert: your abilities are well above most, and to the untrained seem nearly magical. You can get some form of rapport with creatures that are mindless (Diplomacy), You can accurately rebuild an object from seeing only mere fragments of its remains (Crafting), Your skill in plant care is so great you can tend a flourishing garden in the heart of deepest desert (Nature).
  • Master: Your capabilities are starting to break mortal bounds, your songs can bring madness or soothe the heart of a demon (Performance), Your treatments can pull someone who died within the last round back to life (Medicine), your physical prowess is so great, that you can intercept and stop a boulder thrown by a giant (Athletics).
  • Legendary: Outright supernatural levels of ability, your capabilities defy logic and confound top scholars. You can hide with no cover in broad daylight (Stealth), you can slip through mere cracks in doorways (Acrobatics), your knowledge of the divine is so great, you can cut the wind from an archangels wings with the right prayer (Religion)

  These are recorded as Feat (Title) (Skill), such as Feat (Sprit Sense) (Occultisim)

Reasoning:

The existing skill feat system is dumb, skill feats make the system feel overly restrictive in what you are capable of (A feat to intimate several people at once during a conversation? Really?), people often have issues choosing skill feats when there are many options, and many to all seem too situational to be useful. This should add more options and give a more fantasy "heroic" feel.