Design Choices - Skills Focus

Since Trep chars don't have classes, they're defined by the skills they acquire. And there'll have to be a lot of them.

My initial thought as I went to sleep last night, is that it would require a shift in the way I GM; I'd have to make skills matter a lot more than in my player's current system of choice, 5e.

But I'm not so sure; really, what else do players do right now, other than skill checks? The class features, and some of the feats, are really just skills; some of them so amped up that they're no-fail, in essence, but still demonstrations of skill. How is that any different than getting 'tracking-0' and raising it through various career and skill table choices during character creation to 'tracking-5' or similar?

One place I think this'll come in potentially handy is the edge cases - 'does this seem like an athletics or acrobatics check? Arcana or History'? With a greatly expanded list of skills, there's the potential to be more clear-cut about this sort of thing.

(One RPG of yore did something similar, aside from Traveller, now that I think on it - Call of Cthulhu had quite the impressive list of skills. And made frequent use of them, as I recall.)

One current issue with the way of writing skills. Traveller does this: AnimalHandling-3. That means, add 3 to your 2d6 roll for that skill. Which is fine as a standard, but... I use an attribute for damage mitigation, for resistant critters / magic armor / etc: dmg:fire-3, which'd be a minus 3 on the damage roll for fire damage. See the problem? '-3' doesn't mean the same thing across all things.

The obvious solution is to write skills as 'AnimalHandling+3', and that's what I think I'll do. Make the die modifier obvious.