Van Buren skills

Skill advancement
Skills started at 0 with Tag Skills starting at 20. They would not have a % symbol behind them, as this concept was ruled generally frivolous, seeing as players could go far beyond 100% in previous games. Point weighing was to be implemented sooner in order to make skills more difficult to get good at.

The cost on a per-rank basis was:
 * 1 for 1-50
 * 2 for 51-100
 * 3 for 101-150
 * 4 for 151-200 (Max skill)

Each rank bought for a tag! skill was doubled. If you had a 55 Medic, it would cost you two points to increase it one rank—but you would get an additional rank for free.

Each skill had a bonus applied to all rolls that was equal to three ability score values (AG*3 or CH*2 + IN or ST + AG + PE, etc.). Perks that require skill values only looked at the rank, not the rank + bonus. For example: you wanted to take Advanced Research; the prerequisites were IN 8, PE 6, science 175. If the character's science only has 168 ranks, but it's effectively 182 because of his high IN and PE, he wouldn't qualify.

Tag bonus
It was possible that the tag bonus would be 24, since that would have made the bonus equally divisible into 1, 2, 3, and 4. However, +20 was considered a rather hefty bonus on top of what was already accelerated points to rank ratio. A tag bonus of 12 was considered as well because it would fit the first pre-requisite (Being equally divisible), but it ultimately still didn't solve the bonus problem if the skill rank "crossed the barrier" during the increase. Unspent fractions would probably be lost in this scenario.

List of skills
There were to be 13 skills in Van Buren (originally 14, one "stealth" skill was cut). 

Combat skills

 * Firearms: Effects damage done with firearms, governed by Perception. Also known as Marksmanship, the armor is meant to replace and combine the classic Small Guns, Big Guns and Energy Weapons skills.
 * Melee
 * Unarmed

Diplomacy skills

 * Barter
 * Persuasion
 * Deception: The Speech skill was divided into Deception and Persuasion. Joshua Sawyer: ''"This skill is used in dialogue, but it is also used as a limited building skill as means to an "alternate" stealth route. As with Speech in Fallout, Deception is checked in dialogue along with stats. But Deception's dialogue options all take the form of bluffing, misleading, or otherwise flat out lying to the other person in the conversation. Deception can also be used to "sneak in plain sight" through the use of disguises. Disguises can be either found or created with a Disguise Kit. A disguise is a single item that a character wears, though it may occupy several equipped slots when necessary. Disguises may include things like: NCR Ranger Outfit, Hubologist Outfit, Viper Raider Outfit, etc. When a character uses a disguise, the character's effective reputation and identity become invisible. As far as AI is concerned, the character is part of that disguise's "team" as long as the NPC's PE doesn't see through the character's Deception skill (affected by range, lighting, etc.). Of course, for practical/gameplay purposes, a character's disguise does not hold up once he or she enters combat or attempts to initiate dialogue. And some disguises just don't work for some characters (no super mutants in BoS Scribe disguises, no humans in Night Kin disguises). Characters can also manufacture disguises from individual disguise elements through the use of a disguise kit. Placing all the elements of the intended disguise into the kit creates the disguise if the character's Deception skill is high enough. E.g.: Joe wants an NCR Ranger Outfit. This requires an NCR Ranger uniform, NCR Ranger boots, and an NCR Ranger pin (I love that pin). He finds the uniform on a dead Ranger, buys the boots at a surplus store, and trades for the pin with a group of unpleasant but businesslike raiders. Dump them in the kit and -- voila -- NCR Ranger Outfit.

Science skills

 * Mechanics
 * Medic
 * Outdoorsman
 * Science

Stealth skills

 * Security
 * Sneak
 * Steal

Speech skills
There were several ideas for broader application of archetypes that are often called "Charisma Boy" or "Diplomacy Boy" skills. In Fallout and Fallout 2, such characters could focus on two skills with good, but fairly limited applications: Barter and Speech. Barter affected buy and sell prices, Speech affected dialogue options (along with certain attributes).

"Combat Boys" by contrast, not only have skills but tools that helped define their characters. Three characters who focus on Melee can all use different weapon sets for different purposes. This gives a level of depth to match or exceed that character type's skill breadth.

It was generally held by J.E. Sawyer (though he noted many might or would disagree) that the "Charisma Boy" had neither depth or nor breadth in character development as; "He's got two skills, one with no depth, one with slight depth. Barter is pretty flat. It's just a score that goes up and changes store prices. A player can't do much with it to change his or her gameplay experience other than dump points into it and save money. Even the perks available for Barter don't really allow the player to do anything new with the skill."

He went on to explain that Speech opened up a lot of dialogue options, but that was in the end, its whole point. It did not go beyond that. "Attributes can be checked with Speech in dialogue, but ultimately those static checks are just pass/fail. Randomized checks in speech are easily overcome by the ol' "uncontested reload", so there's not much point to them—they need to be static checks because of the environment in which they appear." For these reasons he wanted to keep Barter, but divide Speech into two skills: Deception and Persuasion.