D&D 5E Paring the skill list

[DEFCON 1]

I'm gonna guess Defcon1 isn't going to like it. lol. But what the heck, thought I'd see what people thought.

--SD

Here's the dichotomy I get into when I see your skill list, SD. One the one hand you do exactly what I have said they should do, which is have lots of different skills. But on the other hand I also think many of your skills are SO specific that they could be combined (which I acknowledge is ironically what I've been fighting against, and thus I'm contradicting myself.)

It's really weird and hard for me to encapsulate what I wish to see... because I want LOTS of available bonuses, but also don't want so specific activities that they will never come up. It's hard to explain.

In my mind... the name of the Background should be enough. That should be all someone needs to know what might give a bonus when the DM asks a player to make an Ability Check. So for instance... Bluff, Disguise, and Forgery. All three are individual skills that satisfy my claims of wanting "a larger skill list". But then again... all 3 each attribute to pretty much a single Ability Check. Bluff affects CHA and nothing else. Disguise affects CHA and pretty much nothing else. Forgery affects DEX and pretty much nothing else. So rather than have three three separate skills, each of them giving a bonus to a single Ability Check... I'd rather just go with the Background of Charlatan. THAT'S your "skill list" right there. Anything a PC does that involves fooling someone... either via performance, or lying, or forging documents, using magic devices, or Indiana Jones trying to replace the golden idol with a bag of sand... you get the bonus to your Ability Check because you are a Charlatan.

Now yes... I know the counter-arguments to that ideal. People have rightly said when I've brought this up before that it's "too hard for new players to understand" by not having actual "skills" and instead requires DM adjudication to determine whether a PC is doing something that falls under a Backgrounds purview. Or the other side, which is that you get a lot less "stuff" by having the Artisan Background say, over the Pirate or Hunter. I get all that.

But the fact remains... in D&DN... we're not making skill checks. So to say that being a Charlatan means you having FOUR specific and defined "skills" that modify only four distinct Ability Checks... I feel is really lame. Because what ends up happening is that in order to give the Background its money's worth... the four "skills" end up being so broad and wide that two completely disparate Backgrounds have the EXACT same "skill", which (by the rules of the game) apply to the EXACT same situations.

The Commoner AND the Knight both have "Persuade". And if you look at what Persuade entails... it makes no distinction about WHO is doing the persuading. So by the rules... the Commoner AND the Knight BOTH get the exact same bonus to Persuade the King (if we assume for a moment that a Commoner would ever get a meeting with the King that is). And I find that kind of ridiculous. Now yes... as a DM I would be well within my right to say that the Commoner doesn't get the bonus... but that's me deliberately house-ruling the situation in the middle of the game.

Whereas in my ideal... having the Commoner BE the "skill list" and requiring that DM adjudication from the get-go... means that the process is: Player of Commoner PC says he wants to try and convince the King to do some thing. DM says okay, roll a CHA check. Then the player has to explain HOW and WHY being this specific Commoner in this specific situation should grant him a BONUS to that CHA check. Now if there's some backstory there as to why he should get the bonus, great! But it's the player's responsibility to roleplay and introduce the reasons in-game why he should be getting the bonus... NOT JUST "well, it's because I have the 'Persuade' skill." And the Knight? Getting the bonus to speak to the King is probably much, much easier for him, as being a Knight means there's a better chance he already has a relationship with the King. But the Knight trying to convince some fence to sell him some black market item? MUCH more difficult! And the Knight would not and should not automatically get the bonus to the CHA check unless he too had some in-game backstory reason to justify it. And that's what using the "Background as skill list" gets you. Players needing to justify why they should be better in certain situations, and many more common sense rulings on the part of the DM to confirm if and when those justifications are real and true. The Commoner has a better shot getting bonuses to CHA checks when dealing with the bartender, other peasants, the weird dude on the edge of town, than the Knight would (assuming of course of what the persuasion involved). Whereas the Knight has much better opportunity to try and convince lords and ladies in court than the Commoner does. It's just common sense that I wish the game made all DMs use for adjudication.

And of course... the bonus of this system being that being a Knight means not just the CHA bonus for persuading the King... but also the WIS bonus for knowing if the chambermaid is lying to him, the INT bonus for recognizing the banners of an opposing army, the CON bonus for forced march, the DEX bonus for leaping down from a horse, and the STR bonus for lifting drawbridges or portculli.

That's the kind of thing I wish we'd see. Even though I realize I'm going to be sorely disappointed when the game finally gets released.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

That's the kind of thing I wish we'd see. Even though I realize I'm going to be sorely disappointed when the game finally gets released.

Honestly, as a GM, I would find that very easy to work with. I still think that the first playtest packet was my favorite in regard to backgrounds and skills.

This would be even better if you could pick up a couple backgrounds as you play, say by joining a guild or getting involved in court politics.

 

[steeldragons]

Not a threadjack at all, @steeldragons ! Thanks for sharing your list. Your combat sense skill perhaps is doing what I want Knowledge: warfare to be doing -- interesting. I think your list is further away from the playtest than I wanted to go -- I'm thinking (aloud) about how it will play in playtest (what I'll want to do, and what I'll want my players to try), and eventually about the feedback I'll give. Re-writing the list wholesale is more ambitious!

I'm curious about your suggested skills: for almost any time it's rolled, I could make the case for either stat you list being relevant -- are you thinking that the players would just choose? How to discern between Int+combat sense and Wis+ combat sense?

Thanks for sharing!

Welcome. Glad you like it...mostly.

As for the ability options, in short, yes. In less short, the player's can choose (in theory whichever is higher)...most of the time. As you noted, coming up with a difference for when Combat Sense would be Int. and when it would be Wis. is tough. Probably would never come up, but one never knows. Then, you have things like Acrobatics. Want to run across the rafter in the ceiling to get to the other side of the room? Dex. Want to vault over the chasm or an enemy's shoulders? That's Strength and I would expect DMs to notice and call for those specific abilities. BUT, if they just want to let their players use whatever's higher...who am I to judge?

I was very conscious to make at least ONE skill that is dependent, exclusively, on 1 ability. One for each ability. The rest, I could see certain circumstances, with minimal effort, for more than one...so figured, why not let them use either? And that became the norm.

Here's the dichotomy I get into when I see your skill list, SD. One the one hand you do exactly what I have said they should do, which is have lots of different skills.

Really? I thought keeping it to 25 (I was shooting for 20, but just couldn't make it work) was quite limited compared to some of the lists I've seen in various editions over the years.

But on the other hand I also think many of your skills are SO specific that they could be combined (which I acknowledge is ironically what I've been fighting against, and thus I'm contradicting myself.)

Really?! I would not have been expecting that. Which are "so specific" they could be combined?

It's really weird and hard for me to encapsulate what I wish to see... because I want LOTS of available bonuses, but also don't want so specific activities that they will never come up. It's hard to explain.

It's ok. I think I get it. As I was paring through and setting up what was in and what should be out, I discovered just how very difficult a line it is to draw. How much overlap (Insight vs. Perception for example) is ok and how much makes a skill unnecessary? How broad is too broad (because some thigns just are!)? Do I really need to have separate Climbing, Jumping and Swimming or can Athletics handle it? It is a very very fine...often moving and, I'll daresay, rather subjective....line.

--SD

 

[Kobold Stew]

That's the kind of thing I wish we'd see. Even though I realize I'm going to be sorely disappointed when the game finally gets released.

Do you know Barbarians of Lemuria? It has a heavily abstracted skill system, where you have poits invested in backgrounds -- You might have Knight 2, Pirate 1 and Escaped Gladiator 1, and these are used as bonuses when the experience is plausibly related to the activity (as determined by the table at the time). It's a completely (non-D&D) different way of thinking about skills, but it's really smooth in play. I don't think this is quite what you are asking for, but it does answer some of these specific concerns.

 

[Szatany]

No -- unless rolled into the combined "Perception", in which case yes.

But we already have perception, it's called wisdom ability. Every skill related to wisdom should be, by virtue, much narrower in scope.

It's like saying that we should only have 2 INT skills: smart and knowledgable. Sure it could work, but I would hate if it was like that. This isn't 3e, where it was good idea to have broad skills. In 5e narrow skills work best because of how task resolution works.

 

[Stormonu]

I very much liked how a game called Chronicles of Ramlar did skills. There was no set skill list, and you could get as general or specific as you liked. For example, you might have three players with different skills - Jump, Athletics and Knight. All three might be used by the player when trying to jump a chasm. The difference was in the slot cost and benefit. Knight might cost 3 skill slots and provide a +1 bonus to your actual Jump check. Athletics might cost 2 skill slots and you get a +2 bonus. Taking straight up Jump would cost 1 skill point, but you'd get a +4 bonus for being so specific. None of the bonuses stacked if they happened to overlap, you just got the best bonus for the activity you were undertaking.

 

[Stalker0]

I'm about ready to say we should drop the idea of perception as a skill altogether. Let elves and rangers get a small bonus to wisdom checks to detect things.

Yep, I would be fine to leave "super perception" in the realm of feats to maintain those archetypes and take it out of general skills. You want to play the elven ranger with the crazy good senses. Pick feats like:

Danger Sense - You are never surprised.
Blindsight - You detect all hidden and invisible creatures within 10 feet of you.
Attention to Detail - If you successfully make a wisdom check to spot something, you get as much detail as if you had rolled a 20 on your check.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

Yeah! This makes more and more sense the longer I think about it. Perception is far and away the most common check. The generic skill worked better than Spot and Listen because it included the other senses. But everybody wanted it, and put everything they could into it. So yeah. Just a wisdom check is good enough.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I think it's a great call to remove perception, or spot and listen as skills. Skills are adding to ability checks, and there are some ability checks that we never use skills for: strength for breaking down a door or lifting a portcullis, dexterity to catch something thrown to you, intelligence for remembering a certain plot detail, charisma for first impressions. There are some checks that hovered between being skills and being raw ability checks, such as balance/dexterity and endurance/constitution.

Whilst we could establish a skill for all possible activities (like weightlifting, or memory), I think we can establish, for each ability, what tasks you might attempt that should not have skills associated with them - those activities for which formal training adds little to one's ability. For strength, we have raw displays of destruction and powerlifting. For dexterity we have reflex actions, though you might argue that initiative could be improved by a skill. For constitution I actually think endurance is something you can train towards, so you have only passive resistances to poisons and disease (though these are more often saving throws) and weather conditions. For intelligence we have character/plot-relevant memory. For wisdom we should have perception, with search being a genuine skill. For charisma we have first impressions. The only problem I forsee - sneaking *is* a skill, so there needs to be an opposing skill, but perhaps, perhaps if we have hide and move silently separately, and yes we have two opposed rolls for stealth, there's no need to have a perception skill - math required there!

 

[Derren]

So the skill list is too long, and what's more, it has some lame choices in it. Below are an initial offering of suggested tweaks. Thoughts?

1. roll Drive into Ride.
2. roll Balance into Tumble.
3. roll Spot and Listen together
4. Eliminate Search as a separate skill, but have a feat that grants a bonus to searching.
5. Eliminate Knowledge: Heraldry
6. Eliminate Perform as a skill, since it is also a Background trait.
7. Eliminate Disguise and make it a Rogue Skill trick, not a skill.
8. Is anyone interested in the Heal skill, when Herbalism exists? Maybe it can go too.
9. Clarify Knowledge: Warfare -- probably make it not a knowledge skill, but one of leadership and tactics (profession: tactician?)

10. I'd also like to make it a requirement that every background (even customized ones) have at least one Knowledge or Profession skill attached to it.

1. For a game primarily set in medieval times yes (not including things like sailing)
2. no opinion
3. Why? Those have two very different sets of applications
4. Roll into spot
5. No. That stuff is actually quite important in a feudal society most D&D games play in
6. One has to go
7. No, other classes might also want to disguise