The least used skill

Dark Heresy's skull to "Blather" has never once been used.
The ability waste peoples time with bullshit is pretty useless in a world where everyone is unreasonably vindictive.

Forgery.

Enough said.

Social.

Followed by hygiene, cooking, cleaning, etc.

Behold, the most obscure skill.

Forgery

>Intimidation
Despite being the cruelest and most destructive shadowrunners imaginable, we have never once tried to intimidate anyone. Either they listen to our face, or they die some time in the near future.

Cyberpunk 2020's skill list is just absolute dogshit in general.

Use rope. Almost everyone forgets about this skill.

Silk worm raising. Sengoku.

Use Rope was ruled out to be "not related to traditional games" because it commonly comes up in ERP.

Swim.
Everyone is fully and completely aware of how dangerous water is and doesn't go in unless they have a swim speed.
Got used like once and then everyone avoided it.

do you actually give players a reason to?
If it doesnt restore somewhat of an amount of health instantly, or near instantly, there's little reason to use it in comparison to healing magic, unless the party is really short on spell slots.

If you want players to use it more, be heavier on the description of wounds they recieve, not getting full heals from hit dice, stat penalties for huge wounds or stuff like that.

>in magic settings
Healer can run out of spell slots in most things or healing pools and the medicine skill can be used to stabilise dying characters until such finite resources recharge
>in scifi settings
similar to magic, nanomachines and other super healing drugs are usually a finite resource and medicine can be used to stabilise

Outside of that example, you can use it to diagnose how bad an injury is, or you could stabilise an enemy you need alive without healing them to fighting condition.

really the problem with medicine skills is that they're typically very weak and very slow, whereas other avenues of healing tend to be instant and immediately eclipse them
>played a force user in swd20 with medicine skill and literally only used it to diagnose injuries and diseases (often post-mortem on corpses we found), because my force healing was twice as good from the word 'go'

Depends on the system.

Was going to say this. I brought it up the other day after the DM said make a nature check and he said "that's a thing?"

Really we just used it to make suicide jokes. Damn, i sure am lucky to have never entered a magical realm.

In 5e?
Performance.

Honorable mentions: Medicine. Whenever you need to identify potions, you can use arcana, and whenever you need to identify herbs, use Nature. Having to identify wounds is very rare, and usually people allow Investigation for it. Technically there's a mechanic to stabilize dying creatures using Medicine, but everyone just uses magical healing instead.

Some DMs also call for Perception for searching a room, which should be Investigation.

>but everyone just uses magical healing instead.
...or just a healing kit, which negates the need for a check.

Gesundheit.

The trainwreck that was sixth edition of Drakar och Demoner had some useless skills, like Ventriloquism, Juggling and Riding Winged Beasts (in a setting that barely has any, and the few they have are extremely rare), as well as some stuff being split into separate skills for no reason, like Hunting, Listen, Spot Hidden, Tracking and Pursuing being separate skills, as were Reading and actually understanding languages.

The best part was that the skill point cost for learning things was priced after how difficult they were, not how useful they were. As a result, shitty, rarely used skills were usually waaay more expensive than useful ones, making them even worse.

I'm currently in a WW2 homebrew game and language is the second most rolled skill after perception.

That's what happens when designers pursue realism over gamism.

Also most knowledge skills, like History, Bureaucracy, Street Knowledge, Folklore, Geography etc were specific to a single country or town, you had to get a separate skill for each place you wanted it in. Which is especially useless in a setting where large cities are rare, and the PCs are mostly wanderers.

Command (VtM)

Either Swim or Use Rope.

This. Even in situations where it seems someone has been poisoned, it's ALWAYS a curse or a hex so Spellcraft (or equivalent) is the relevant stat.

Part that, and part of the problem was that it was a long running franchise that fell into the hands of some dumbasses who clearly didn't know what they were doing. That's also why Entertainers got the Steal skill but Thieves didn't, and Hunters didn't get the Hunting skill.

Pretty much half of all Palladium skills are absolutely worthless and almost never get used. Pic related, it's a trainwreck of epic proportions. Pick any random skill on the list and its apt to be useless in actual play.

Use Rope is still somewhat better than Tie Knots.

Hobby skills in Shadowrun are pretty much useless (and the game is fully aware of it, as they're just there flavour) , but I still make my players take at least a couple of points in them. IIRC, they were even mandatory in the third edition.

That image doesn't even have all the Horsemanship skills in Palladium. It is missing Horsemanship - Cyber-Knight and Horsemanship - Cossack. There's probably more.

Floral Arrangement has always been my favorite skill in any game.

The mediocre-at-best comedy RPG Svenil had some intentionally useless skills like Drink Coffee, Watch TV and Eat Butter, as the "comedy" in that game mostly just came from lolz so randum tables and lists, lazily pasted to a rip off of BRP that didn't suit the theme at all.

That could be a great romanticism-inspired piece, and then anime-face.

You're right, but this might have been made before the latest world books came out or something.

Some of these are hilariously bad: like there's a difference between

>Horsemanship
>Horsemanship - General

or between

>Horsemanship - Night
>Horsemanship - Palladin

>Language skills
Thos is an absolute shame, too. I've homeruled away the base rules for language in 5e. I'd like to implement a system where each language has a value and the total value of all the languages a character knows can't be greater than the characters Intelligence.
Native language is free.
Other languages are 3 or 4 points each.
Taking less than the full value of a language grants an appropriately limited understanding of the language.

Used Rope. I never seen that skill in action, ever.

That's because there is nothing magic can't fix, so add a wound mechanic. Broken bones, limb dislocation, all the fun stuff.

is this b8? it's like the most useful skill at early levels before you can spam hold person and fly

Seconded
Shame too, but language in games is so often done so incredibly poorly, that its easier to just ignore language barriers.
Also I swear to god there is no properly stated out language skill. They're always either so cheap that every character will be a UN interpreter level polyglot, or so expensive that nah fuck that.

This. If you're ever in a situation where medicine works better than magic, you're in a low-magic game or you're fucked.

Play Call Of Cthulhu. In every game you'll have one sobbing doctor trying to staple limbs back on to his dying comrades.

>Profession
>Drive automobile
Professions are too specialized and we usually don't get into a car chase.Of course the automobile skill is never taken and then will fuck us on the off hand we need it.

As much as i agree with you i've personally seen Blather used rather effectively.
Party face in our group was really good at keeping people distracted while the sneak did his sneaky stuff once everyone had their backs turned.

Decipher Script, Heal, or Forgery.

Honestly, disguise sees a lot of use in the games in my group. Turning a scaled fishperson into a false draconian, Alter Self shenanigans, stealing a guard's uniform, etc.

Swim. We never ever use swim

It's even better when swim or dive are seperate skills.

This. I've literally never used it.

Swim is worthless until you need it.

My second character in my first campaign just so happened to be a merfolk.

Almost none of them. Skill systems in RPGs are trash. My group just tries to solve everything through roleplaying.

What if
> Both medicine and healing magic heal, but only medicine can diagnose
> Healing magic is better and quicker, but without diagnostic you're healing everything indistinctly and will waste a lot of magic.
> Knowing what you need to heal will be more effective even with magic.

Really? That sucks. I’ve been looking to make a wizard doctor.

If I were to integrate magic and medicine, I would treat spells cast as if they were given more power (higher spell level, less points spent for stuff like psionics) depending on the Medicine check.
Of course, that would also require a revision of magic, which people will bitch about to no end.

>Almost none of them.
As in, almost none of them are used.

>Ventriloquism
In a totally different game, I had quite a lot of fun confusing mooks with ventriloquism. And also failing to confuse non-mooks.

I always have at least 1 player invest in swimming in my games. Everyone remembers that one time. You know the time. It isn't even always a drowning, had a little tourney going in a seaside dutchy once, the party's lack of ability to swim cost them an entire event's worth of points. Since then at least someone always takes swimming, and as a result I keep making sure water happens so it isn't a waste. Usually shortcuts, maybe some shiney thing at the bottom of a well, that sort of thing.

I doubt this would work without adding too much extra fiddly bits to something like d&d, but savage worlds hands the existence of magical and mundane healing well. Regardless of which type of healing is used the healer can only at most cure 2 wounds (a savage worlds character functionally has 4 wounds). So for most of the game the only real benefit from magical healing is that it doesn't take 15 minutes (though depending on the magic system being used there will be some form of limit to how many spells you can throw out). The healing and spellcrafting rolls also use the exact same modifiers. Well until you can get the greater healing spell and regrow limbs, and good luck doing that with mundane healing outside of scifi.

Please stop. You're giving me an erection.

Have you ever played it? Depending on the scenario it can be really gruesome.

Swimming is never interesting

>not Use Rope

I love Disguise in FC. I once made a Fire Brave Assassin whose go to play was to disguise himself as someone else. It was useful in so many situations.

Common sense.

Blather is amazing while investigating shit. Pretending to be retarded can get you pretty far with elaborate multi-world spanning bureaucracy

Kind of an underrated skill. Shit with freedom of movement doesn't give a fuck, but the fact that the skill check sets the DC means you can get it pretty absurdly high

Can't see how that needs its own skill

What I like about TOR is that it puts a lot of emphasis on skills that otherwise go unused, or aren't even present.

I've got a better one than that. Freefalling. I've had runs on boats and runs involving helicopters, but I've never been That GM enough to ask for a roll where the logical consequence of failing is "you incorrectly use your parachute and die". Some things don't need to be quantified.

Empathy, or Insight or Sense Motive. It is least used by most players and most used by a small number, but it is also the most useless, because even the people who use it never trust it.

I've made a lot of cash playing a Rogue with Forgery. That is if the DM has one wit of creativity.

jesus christ, look at that stupid fat face.

he looks like a cross between kurt cobain on down syndrome and a ham sandwich.

god i just want to punch that stupid fuck in the face. look at that half lit, dull witted smile. the drooping eyelids and drooling twist at the edge of his smile, i just want to rub sand all over his face and slam his hand in a fucking trash compacter, throw a ball into traffic and watch him chase after it and get hit by a semi truck

the dumb cunt looks like hes taking a fucking shit, or watching the short bus take off without him. dumb bastard probably sits there staring at butterflies while his parents are up all night searching for him, stares into the sun until the stars shine over the horizon and starts to cry.

God i just want to bash his teeth in with a wrench, fucking MORON

DC 15 heal check to stabilize comes into play almost every session.

Common Sense

Why not just adulterate talents of gold with other metals?

look at that big, bulbous nose, product of inbreeding. You could slam a fucking 2x4 into that nose and split his septum and you wouldn't even fucking notice. That wide, sloped, gaping forehead with all the dead fatty tissue where his fucking forebrain should be, if they performed a lobotamy they'd probably find a peice of fried chicken skin he somehow snorted up his nose while scuzzing on a bucket of KFC.

why not smear saphires with pig shit?

look at his dead, soulless eyes. Christ, a man could lose his soul staring into those empty pits of nothingness. Abandon all hope, ye who cast their gaze into this soulless orb.

I just want gouge out his fucking eyes with an ice pick.

I want to slam a fucking sledgehammer into the back of his skull, but I'm afraid if I do instead of splitting his skull it will somehow just get lodged in there like a hammer in bowl of poridge. I imagine his fucking brains healing the same way you might cast suction into a thick morass of cake mix.

Where are his fucking eyebrows? Did he burn them off playing with a lighter while igniting carpet trimmings he trimmed off the floor of his home using a straight razor?

he belongs in diaper, and that diaper belongs in the trash.

...

How can you not hate him?
How can you not hate his face?

Well at least you're proving that the least used skills on Veeky Forums are janitorial.

I'd have agreed with you right up until I played OW/DH. We got a ton of use out of it in our campaign, had entire subplots based around treating injuries actually.

The first system I played in actually had language skills you needed to roll against to understand what foreigners said. If you didn't have any skill in that particular language but did in a related one, you could even, with a penalty, roll against the one you actually had points in to try and decipher what was said.

>Profession
I've seen this filled out but never used and put points into. Crafting skills have been useful a few times, but knowledge of a particular profession is usually hand waived.

Shoggy!! Have a wonderful christmas Shoggy!!

i don't know who that person is but i hope they get punched

I really like this, I'm taking it. Thank you user.

Accounting, in a cyberpunk game. I've at least used physics for a controlled detonation.

I'd say ride or sail in the systems I'm running, exalted namely. Maybe survival depending on the campaign.