Having played the 2e playtest for a few months, my group is much more comfortable with the changes it provides. While I am personally a big fan of the new proficiency system, one of my players doesn’t care for it in regards to skills. He really liked the customizability of his skill list by dropping points into skills here and there. Be it organically or randomly, it allows him to spread out his skills in a way that shows that he likes to focus on diplomacy while being adequate at bluff and intimidate and only dabbling in religion.
With the new proficiency system, you step through the proficiencies (Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master, Legendary) as you level up. Unless you are a rogue, you only get to upgrade every other level, and as you use the same increase to bump to the next tier as you would to simply be trained, your list of usable skills (at least trained) can be quite a bit smaller than it is in first edition.
After toying with some ideas, I came up with the following house rule as a possible solution to this problem. I created a new Proficiency level called Dabbler that sits between Untrained and Trained. When you receive a skill increase, instead of becoming Trained in a single skill, you can become a dabbler in two skills. Additionally, you may use trained actions for skills you are a Dabbler in once per day for each skill. As you gain future skill increases, should you wish, you could use a Dabbler increase to change an existing Dabbler to Trained.
As of the 1.6 update for the playtest, your Untrained bonus is level – 4 while you add a +1 for each step (+1 Trained, +2 Expert, +3 Master, +4 Legendary) to your level. This means that at first level your base untrained skills are -3 while your base trained skills are +2 (ignoring ability score modifier). Therefore, Dabbler is level – 1, placing it (+0) pretty close to halfway between untrained (-3) and trained (+2).
From what we have heard about the the final changes it seems like Untrained will not get to add level and each step will add +2 (+2 Trained, +4 Expert, +6 Master, +8 Legendary) to your level. At this point, I would change Dabbler so that it provides only half your level to the skill checks.
