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I’m all for the increase to 25 skills, especially if Charisma gets at least two or three of them for sure. Also, Wil and Con needs some skill love too! Maybe only one each since they flat determine HP and WP?

For Charisma I propose Persuasion, plus Manipulation, Intimidation, and maybe one for empathy. For Con maybe an Endurance skill, and players could roll this with a bane (instead of persuade) to rally themselves. Makes hardy characters more likely to pull this trick off without help from a friend. Not yet sure of a single skill for Wil but I’m pondering. Maybe a mental endurance type skill?

Im a little on the fence about taking away the designated heroic ability per profession and replacing it with a free choice of any heroic ability. I like the flexibility it would introduce but then it makes a big choice (or roll) in character creation much less pivotal. One compromise might be to give each background a choice of three abilities that still fit the theme of the profession. Sure professions will still determine starting skill choices and gear options but those two things can still quickly change in game. A choice of three would also minimize option paralysis in starting character creation which I definitely like. Im all for keeping character creation fast, and saving the tougher choice of later abilities to pick for advancement, and after the PC has had a little playtime.

Im okey with moving profession abilities to heroic abilities, they must just make them profession restricted and make like 2-3 abilities per profession to pick one during character creation.

P38

Eagle Eye on p38 appears to allow a ranged weapon to have infinite range. I would clarify that this Heroic Ability negates the Bane which is applied when exceeding the effective weapon range (ie is double normal range).

I'll be honest, my opinions are based only on repeated read throughs and no playtesting yet.

While I think a few more skills would round things out, I don't know if we need 9 more of them.

Ironically, I want a Crafting and Naval skill not so much for the Artisan or Mariner themselves, but to make other classes do it poorly and make it more enticing to take those classes. (And I also want crafting to make it easier to make house rules for building strongholds.)

I also would like more CHA abilities to avoid making it a dump stat.

If a sweet spot can be found, I think DB only needs four to five more skills.

Also it seems odd to use Slight of Hand as a Crafting skill for the Artisan. On the other hand, Bushcraft gets used quite a bit and it made sense in every case.

In the latest update, we were asked our opinion about the number of skills:

I personally hope Free League leave it at the 16 skills presented in the beta. I like the fact, that they're all very useable. I think it's important to keep both rules and character creation very simple. I see how you could personalize your character more with additional skills (and other character choices), but people who want that, will proberbly play Pathfinder instead. Lots of choices might be fun for experienced roleplayers, but in my experience it's also intimidating for new players.

I am not in favor of the proposal to add more skills. I played D&D, Pathfinder, and Palladium for years and found the vast array of skills to result not in more choices for characters, but for more holes. I now play mostly DCC and find the lack of codified skills to increase my options, not decrease them. Encourage players to be creative, not to rely on their character sheet. Personally, I would eliminate skills section entirely and replace it with Profession specific abilities: Mage can cast spells, Thief can pick locks, Artisan can make/repair equipment, etc. Everything else can be resolved with Attribute Checks.

Regarding Jack of All Trades - one benefit to this Heroic Ability is that it does allow you to create the kind of character you want to play, but it preserves the value of your starting Profession by ensuring you're the best at what you start with.
For instance, an Artisan who later learns magic can use magic, but will never be as competent as the Mage who knew magic from the beginning. Also, there are two Heroic Abilities that don't list magic as a prerequisite but rather list MAGE as a prerequisite. So your Artisan who later learns magic will never be able to learn multiple schools. Anyone can learn magic. Only a true mage can learn all magic.
If you change the current Profession abilities the way you're suggesting as of the most recent KS update, there's no reason to keep Professions. Just have players choose Kin, Heroic Ability, Skills, and a starting gear package. However, this eliminates the benefit of a Mage, as now anyone who learns magic can learn it all. The niche disappears. But maintaining Professions solely to protect the Mage benefit seems silly, since no other Profession will have something unique. So I suggest either preserving the uniqueness of each Profession (while allowing others to learn the same skills and talents later), or eliminating the idea of Professions entirely.

I realize that some of these suggestions contradict each other. I am not writing this system. I'm only offering a variety of directions from which to select alternatives to the current approach. Feel free to pick the ones you like and discard the rest. I've already paid for the game, so whatever you decide will have no impact on whether or not I buy your product.

If not more skills, Charisma definitely needs something. To a lesser extent, I think Intelligence could use more than just skills. I'd prefer to see something like 2nd Edition AD&D's tables of Attribute benefits, instead of just determining skill starting values. But if that isn't a viable option, then I think CHA needs more than just Persuasion.

An alternative of leaning more heavily into the Professions would also be an option, because then CHA becomes just as useful as other Attributes in terms of skills (if that direction is "there are no skills, Attribute contributes to Base Value and Profession determines if you get a higher roll"). But I also don't see a problem with blurring the lines between classes. It makes multi-classing style character concepts available.

Here's a thought...
Keep Professions and their tethered starting ability.

Keep Jack of All Trades.

Eliminate Skills and replace with Attribute Checks for accomplishing tasks.

Provide a Boon to Attribute Checks with your Key Attribute.

Use Heroic Abilities for specialized "skills" using the Artisan as the guide. This would allow for Thieves to have "thief skills" and Mages to have "magic skills" that are as unique to the class as the Artisan's current ability. Anyone who wants to be able to do those things either selects that Profession, or obtains it via Jack of All Trades.

Everyone could then have 1 weapon category that they have "proficiency." All other weapon rolls are made with a Bane.
Warriors can use all weapons proficiently, but gain a Boon with one category due to a Specialization.

I agree with increasing the number of skills, but 25 may be too high. There are some obvious skills missing (Ride), but not too many.

In terms of removing professional abilities and making them heroic abilities, I support this. I like professions as a concept for what characters did before they became adventurers, but I’d prefer this wasn’t another class based game where niche-protection is mechanically enforced by locking special abilities away behind a choice made at character creation i.e. if a character wants to learn magic after they’ve been adventuring for a while, why not if it makes sense? There are other limitations built in that make it unlikely that everyone will take magic (e.g. inability to wear metal armour, low attributes for casting, other heroic abilities that someone wants more). One of the things I always loved around BRP-derived games was the ability for any character to learn any ability; niche protection (IME) tends to be enforced by the PC choices in-game, it doesn’t really need the mechanical restraints that classes impose.

Personally, I would keep Professions but make them starting ‘skill-packages’ reflective of what you did before you became an adventure. I would probably replace the Mage profession with a ‘Scholar’ profession, but with a similar group of trained skills to choose from, including Magic. The Magic skills could be used as both academic knowledge about magic and casting skills with the appropriate heroic ability. I would also modify the Magic ability to only provide the base skill level in magic and not a trained level, i.e. that means anyone picking it up after character creation would have to work (in terms of spending advancement picks) to be as good as a Scholar who had spent a skill pick on it being trained at character creation.

EDIT: I forgot there was already a Scholar profession. Given that, I’d probably still get rid of Mage as a profession and maybe add a Mystic or Priest like profession. Make Magic (Type) a skill pick for the Scholar and Mystic professions so you can make either an archetypical book-learned Wizard (Scholar with Magic), or a meditative mentalist (Mystic with Magic (Mentalism)) or a priestly caster who prays and relies on spirits (Priest with Magic (Animism))

I believe a small number of skills are best for the reasons listed in Update #20, most specifically, "Another reason for having few skills is that because the more skills there are in the game, the more skills will there be that the player characters don't have. This means having lots of skills in a game will generally make the characters less competent. And we don't want that."

Having lots of skills feels like a step backwards in game design, but if it is necessary to appease long time players of the game, I would try to keep the list as short as possible. Also, I noticed that Charisma has only one associated skill (Persuasion), whereas Strength, Agility, and Intelligence have five each. Perhaps more Charisma based skills could be added to keep Persuasion from being the one Skill everyone chooses. Some additional Charisma skills could be Carousing, Deception, Haggling, High Society, Insight, Intimidation, Seduction, or Underworld Contacts.

I agree, each attribute should have an equal amount of skills for it, like in Forbidden Lands, 3-4 each (weapons for STR can be combined into Melee, like in FL for example, CON and WIL could be excluded since they are used for HP and WP). As for Professions, i like the "only i got this" abilities, it gives everyone a purpose/usefulness in the party and forces team play and learning to deal with your weaknesses. Give the Fighter something else than just weapon skills and have weapon users make a choice between melee/ranged and have a boon for a preferred category (axe, sword, blunt) to add diversity. Put out rules to make your own profession for those who aren't satisfied with the listed ones.