I still can’t buy the Int thing. Maybe it’s ’cause I went to MIT & Harvard for a while. I’ve met so many folks who were book-learnin’ smart (since wisdom is the common-sense smarts, Int is fairly restricted in its purview) who wouldn’t have been very good at, say, plumbing or dancing, while I’ve met plenty of folks who were brilliant painters or farmers or the like who couldn’t necessarily calculate their way through the dinner check at a restaurant. Int’s relationship to skill is sidelong at best, IMO.

I understand your reasoning behind having attribute modifiers indicate the number of points you can put into a correlated skill at level up, but I wonder if that kind of positive spiral might end up being unbalanced: if a fighter starts with 17 STR (+3), and then bumps to 18 at level 4, that’s an awful lot of points to put into STR-based skills, PLUS his inherent attribute bonus.

Also, I think the reasoning behind skill point bonuses for high INT is an attempt to reflect how smart people are better at things they’ve put effort into. A smart but average strength guy who has worked at (ie., studied) Climbing will probably be just as good as a naturally strong guy who’s of average intelligence.

The Saga Star Wars system you mention sounds interesting, although I still have the same objection to universally using Int to determine how many skills someone can pick up. That’s just a long-time pet peeve of mine, though. I haven’t looked at True20 or Perfect20. So many systems, so few lifetimes!

As far as the bookkeeping, I think that lots of recent releases are better about it. In Saga Star Wars, “Skill points have been eliminated. Characters have a number of trained skills they can pick based on their class and Intelligence bonus. When a character makes a skill check, they roll a d20 and add half their character level + any other bonuses. If they roll for a trained skill they get a +5 bonus to the die roll. Skills themselves have been simplified with such skills as Deception covering the former skills of Bluff, Disguise, and Forgery. The Mechanics skill now encompasses all the Repair skills and Demolitions. Likewise, the new Perception skill combines the Spot, Search, Sense Motive, and Listen skills.” (from Wikipedia)

That system looks like it makes a lot of sense, both in cutting down meaningless paperwork [how often does 1 skill point allocation do something?] and making skill specialization useful enough to take.

True20 and Perfect20 both go along similar routes– decreasing the number of skills and restrictions and decreasing the level by level paperwork.