Montage Skill Retraining (3.5e Variant Rule)

These rules are part of the Tome of Prowess, but you don't need to use anything in that work to make use of the retraining rules presented here.

Montage Skill Retraining
There will be situations where you’ll want a skill ready that you haven’t been investing in. You may need to learn how to climb to scale the Frostfell Mountains, or you may decide that you don’t ever use the acrobatics and something else would serve you better. Casters deal with these situations the same way they deal with anything else; they just rememorize or supplement their spell selection with scrolls, and then they go back to ignoring the skill system entirely. Since skilled characters can’t do that, it’s really quite necessary that they get to retrain their skills instead. It’s not a big deal; real people do it all of the time. It just takes some time, dedication, and (because this is a game) a training montage.

To retrain, you simply dedicate some time to the process and, at the end of that time, move a number of skill points from the skills which had them at the beginning to the other skills that you wish to raise. The time required depends on what you wish to train your new skills up to, as indicated in the table below. The days spent must be consecutive, but after you have spent the required time you may raise one skill up to any rank equal to or less than the maximum rank indicated. If you wish to retrain any other skills during the same period, you may do so; simply increase the time spent by 2 days for each additional skill. If you wish to train several skills up to different levels, you must spend the time required for the highest skill rank you wish to achieve, plus 2 additional days for each additional skill.

For example, if you have a level 8 character with 6 skill points per level who wished to consolidate all of their skill points into 6 skills at max rank, you would need to spend a total of 17 days to accomplish this: 7 days for the first skill to achieve maximum rank plus 2 additional days for each of the 5 extra skills. If you wanted to train 4 skills up max rank and 4 others up to a cross-class maximum, you would need to spend a total of 21 days retraining: 7 days for the first and 14 additional days for each additional skill. Seriously, your character is an adventurer and they can prepare for just about anything in less than a month.