Basic Skills for Pseudo-Medieval Adventurers

Justin Stewart writes in Dragons Gonna Drag: Basic stuff all adventurers can do in old-school D&D?, as a preface to a tentative list of general skills:

... the thing about skills in RPGS is, generally no one gets all the skills, and everybody is limited in some area of expertise, because otherwise there'd be no need for the skill system.

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This is all well and good, as far as I'm concerned...unless it introduces limitations to the capabilities of characters that seem artificial or overly-constraining, to the point of either damaging verisimilitude, or just making simple actions into complicated ordeals involving too much time and thought.

I figure you have to allow a great deal of latitude on skills. For one, few of us really know with any authority what a person trained for any given medieval job would know. For another, if you are too strict about people without training using a skill, you're kind of setting up a chicken-or-egg situation. If no one can ride a horse without the horsemanship skill, how did the first horseman learn?

There's also the matter of most campaigns being mildly cinematic. Most heroes in fantasy film and literature do a number of things without any hint of being formally trained in that skill. They pick up and use weapons they've never seen before, steal strange mounts like elephants or griffins, steal boats, decipher ancient puzzles, climb walls or mountains, fight octopuses and sharks underwater... the general consensus is that heroes should be able to try most things. Personally, I'd only forbid things that clearly few people are able to do, like magic, alchemy, and starship piloting. Most skills I'd let PCs attempt, but require extra time and a roll to see if things go wrong. (That's basically what yesterday's post was about.)