Skills: Things you can do. What have you learned?

We have have skills.  From when we are very young we learn some of the most basic.  We spend our life fine tuning, improving, or learning new skills.

• As a baby, We learn how to stand, walk, and run.
• As young child, we go to school to learn basic skills like reading, writing, math, and history.
• As a young adult, we specialize in certain skills.  Some of us are better at math and science.  Others excel at english and history.  As the Olympics start soon, atheletes all over the world demonstrate their best.
• We even add extra formal skills that such as music mastery (singing, playing an instrument) or learning a foreign language (spanish, french, dead languages like latin).
• What about informal skills?  With the start of summer, is burger flipping a skill?  Well, we got better at it with practice.  Is it compatible with pancake flipping?  Pancakes are usually flatter & wider than burgers (different center of gravity).  If you have done both, they use similar skills, but uniquely different.
• In college, most of us need to get Bachelor's & Master's degrees to get employed.  These 'qualifiy' us to take tests (prove our level of expertise) to apply for jobs.
• Due to natural survival, we forget skills we don't use often.

Where does that leave us?

• Is a list of every possible skill satisfactory?  Uh, nope.
• Do players care to list every skill that we possess?   Our job resumes only hold the last few years of significant job experience.  Creating characters should have the same requirements.
• I think most systems have failed to keep a balance between social, professional, and personal skills.  Rogues have tons of social skills, but are very limited in combat skills.  Fighters are great for combat skills, but fail to have basic skills like coordinating a group of warriors.  Rangers should be great at pack and raiding, but these skills are missing from most systems.  Arcane casters are limited to just casting.  Do you not think they don't use diplomacy or good at searching through information quickly?

I think as character development goes, there should be enough thought & design into skills as there is in combat.  Even better, build a more skill based resolution system instead of a traditional violent (you vs them) mentality.

Over the next month I will cover Backround & Profession next.  Thanks for reading.