Q:

Table relationships Many to many without a middle table in sql?

I am making an app that can lookup creatures and am in the process atempting to increase my knowledge.
I have a table Creatures  and a table Skills
A creature and have multiple skills and a skill can be used by multiple creatures.
I am coding in java using sql manager.
I am using 1,2 to represent skills in the creature table and reference the skills table using the numerical values.
One thought I had was is there a way to make an overloaded stored procedure?
I have not started coding yet as I am still planning but would appreciate any ideas sent my way.
I am not trying to avoid the middle table just see if there is a way to do it another way that is not so hard its pointless.

A:

You will probably need the middle table.  
Storing a comma-separated list of skills in the Creatures table makes it easy to fetch the skills per creature, but what if you ever want to know the creatures who have a given skill?
Comma-separated lists are fraught with problems.  You can use them to optimize one way of accessing the data, but that causes a drastic de-optimization of other ways of accessing the data.
See also my answer to Is storing a delimited list in a database column really that bad? 

