Yeah, I was quite lucky that I played the demo for a while, discovering about that cartography skill. And then Shamus Young wrote about it too. So I got quite a heads up before I bought the game.

Or you can just head to GameFAQs before playing.

RPGs don’t really tell you so because I think from the game’s POV, every skill is important! However, you won’t really discover which skill you will find more worthwhile to suit your style of play unless you dive into the game first; a chicken-and-egg thing. And I feel that this is a hallmark of a good RPG, as it allows you to tailor your skillset into your particular brand of play style. If an RPG has that same sales pitch, but punishes you for not investing in certain skills, I would say that it’s not a very good one.

The cartography thing sucks though – that’s a big gotcha you won’t know until you start the game. They should be a big warning at the character creation screen about that – want mini-map, put points in cartography.

Then again, most RPG’s do suffer from a similar syndrome – they don’t tell you up-front which skills are essentially dump stats and which are of paramount importance.

For example, if you don’t pick Mercentile as your major skill in Morrowind, you will be broke for the first half of the game cause you will be buying at huge markup and selling at a loss. The only way not to get money-raped is to invest in Mercentile and Speachcraft – or to use Mudcrab and Creeper who always buy/sell at base price.

In oblivion if you don’t make Armorer your major skill, you will be hurting. I feel it right now as my character is level 24 and I still can’t fucking fix magic weapons/armor – which btw is all I use now.

And you don’t learn these things until you are like 10 levels up, and you don’t feel like re-playing all the missions you already did.