D&D 5E A question for athletic gamers

Definite technique in lifting. Normally do paperwork but threw 9000 kg in just over an hour earlier in the week.

Endurance has a mental component IMHO both in can I do this and ignoring pain.

Younger days army drill sergeant could do wonders as well.

Krachek said:

Abilities cannot come without practice of some sorts, thus skill.
A fighter is an athlete, just by learning to hit, throw, dodge, feint. Does he need to be trained in athletic on top of that?
a wizard is an accomplish Arcanist. Training in arcana seem obvious.
i take a look at the old thief in aDnd. A thief was trained in all thief skill.
maybe skill should come with class as a package of skills related to this class.

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Isn't this the idea behind Pathfinder giving everyone +3 in all of their class skills instead of doing the x4 skill points at first level thing?

Xeviat said:

The question is would "can I lift it", "I want to break down the door", and "how far can I throw it" be raw Str checks or do you think a new skill could apply (I'd personally want it to be separate from athletics).

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Played 4 years of college football and track, and 8 years of rugby post college, with lots of time racking weights. But honestly, very little of any of that training makes me inherently better at knocking down doors, lifting boulders, or tossing people (well maybe a little, as a lifter in the line outs). All my training made me very good at sports and lift specific movements. But outside of me being generally stronger than someone that didn't train in those things, my "skills" or technique would not help me with breaking doors and such.

Personally, if you look at what athletics is primarily used for within the game, its to initiate or oppose grapples, trips, being disarmed, ect. And for that, there is a good bit of technique and stuff that can be taught/learned. But for more general feats of strength, it's probably better to make it a general strength check rather than athletics. And for strength type saving throws, it's better to just think of that as a mechanical abstraction that is a bit of raw strength plus luck.

Xeviat said:

The other question is checks to resist fatigue, should they be passive Con saves, raw con checks, or an Endurance skill.

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I would avoid an endurance skill. Personally, it is something that I don't see coming up often enough to merit a separate skill, so mechanically it just doesn't make sense to me. Additionally, in general, exertion and endurance are active tasks that require focus and mental concentration. Therefore, to me they seem better represented by an active check rather than using a passive score/save.

Hope this helps.

Raw strength type stuff and athletics stuff aren't the same thing. Athletes normally train to do something particular, as much as their training does a lot fo stuff, they have a teleos, a goal, something they want to be able to do better/stronger/faster. that's mostly not lifting cows and breaking down doors. There are people who train for that other thing,Strongman competitors, but mostly you'll notice they aren't much for the stuff we'd normally scribe under Athletics.

in the real world Strength is a combination of muscle power, endurance AND agility ie when somebody lifts a heavy weight or swings a hammer etc they are going through a complex set of motions to apply their power SO Yes Strength is something which can be trained and Lifting technique should be treated as a potential skill.

Endurance should be a Save

[MENTION=57494]Xeviat[/MENTION], here are some other questions you could also ask:

...Do genre conventions support two characters being equally strong, but one being better at Bending Bars/Lifting Gates/Bashing Doors/etc.? Or, two characters being equally "healthy" but one being better at Long Distance Running/Rowing/Hard Labor?

...What exactly do the ability scores represent? Is Strength really the ultimate measure of muscular force -OR- does Strength merely indicate how effective you are at applying muscular force to attacks, saves, and ability checks? The distinction is subtle and usually doesn't matter, but consider something like racial traits which double your carrying capacity, or consider how the barbarian's rage lets you hit harder and get advantage on Strength checks without actually making your Strength score go up (which is what Rage did in 3E, where it was much clearer that ability scores represented ultimate reality rather than game mechanical constructs). Or, another example might be the Tough feat: if Constitution represents raw health, how does Tough increase your hit points?

...What exactly do skills represent? Are they purely based on training, or do they more broadly cover aptitude from a variety of sources? I just re-read the Skills section in the PHB (Chapter 7) and it doesn't mention training; it instead treats skills merely as aspects of an ability score, in which a character might be proficient.

...Is there ever a need for a raw ability check? The PHB (Chapter 7) gives numerous examples, but most either a) involve tools with which you might be proficient, b) could plausibly be folded into an existing skill (the Dexterity and Wisdom examples fit this well), or c) could be folded into a new skill. I'd call out Might for the Strength examples, Endurance for the Constitution examples, and something like "Streetwise/Gather Information/Connections/Social Groups" for the Charisma examples (I'm not sure what to call that skill exactly, but it involves navigating, influencing, and understanding entire broad groups of people). That skill could also plausibly cover the "appraise" example under Intelligence, although tool proficiency might fit better.

I like where you're going with this exercise, as I feel like the skill list in 5E is one of the weaker parts of the system. They tried to give ability scores primacy over skills but it didn't quite work.

I kind of see the skills as catch-alls where you can do lots with what you are trained at. If you have Athletics, you can do all the sports, all the climb-jump-swim, all the open doors and other physical things. Does it make great sense, no, but in game terms it allows each PC to be able to do things well if they are trained. If there are too many skills, you now need a system to give more skill points, like 3e. Which could be fine, but I feel that 5e make some balance between the views.

Xeviat said:

Hi everyone. I've got a question for those in the Ven Diagram overlap between gamers and athletic people. I'm looking at expanding the skill system.

Do you believe weight lifting is a technique that can be learned beyond just training that increases strength?

Do you believe endurance is something that can be trained for beyond just training that increases constitution? Do you feel like pushing beyond your endurance limit is something you actively do (an ability check), or is resisting fatigue something passive (a saving throw)?

I'm in the process of seeing if I want to expand the skill system, and I'm wondering if Strength should have another skill for applications of strength (like lifting, throwing, bending, and breaking objects) beyond what Athletics covers, and if I should have Endurance as a constitution skill or if those uses would be more in line with Constitution saves.

Thanks for your input!

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How "granular" do you want your game to get?

It is generally assumed that adventurers have a certain level of grounding in a lot of skills (can attempt checks even without proficiency) and most of the capabilities that they are actually solidly trained in are very broad.
For example Athletics covers jujitsu, jumping, swimming, sprinting, climbing etc.
Most people who know how to use a pike also know how to use a longbow and a warhammer.

And so on. Many aspects of D&D training lump disparate skills together under a single category for the sake of simplicity and balance.

"Weight lifting" (and by that I'm assuming you mean strongman style goal-oriented training rather than just bodysculptor-style pumping iron) has aspects of technique but it would be hard to separate these out into a skill the equal of Athletics. It would probably easier to represent as a pure increase in the Strength score. Or perhaps a feat giving you advantage on checks involving raw sustained force like bending bars/lifting gates etc, and considers you a size category larger for determining carrying capacity.

Likewise it would be tricky to try to separate Endurance from pure constitution. Depending how you view hit points, you can view ability to push past pain and exertion in a race to be directly comparable to contributing to HP for example. - So improving endurance in a way that doesn't improve your HP (as learning an Endurance proficiency rather than just increasing your Constitution score would.)

77IM said:

...Is there ever a need for a raw ability check? The PHB (Chapter 7) gives numerous examples, but most either a) involve tools with which you might be proficient, b) could plausibly be folded into an existing skill (the Dexterity and Wisdom examples fit this well), or c) could be folded into a new skill. I'd call out Might for the Strength examples, Endurance for the Constitution examples, and something like "Streetwise/Gather Information/Connections/Social Groups" for the Charisma examples (I'm not sure what to call that skill exactly, but it involves navigating, influencing, and understanding entire broad groups of people). That skill could also plausibly cover the "appraise" example under Intelligence, although tool proficiency might fit better.

I like where you're going with this exercise, as I feel like the skill list in 5E is one of the weaker parts of the system. They tried to give ability scores primacy over skills but it didn't quite work.

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Thanks for the response. I hadn't really looked at the "raw checks" example, but I think that's a good place to look. I'm going to be writing myself a new skill chapter with example check DCs and special actions (stealing from 3E and from a lot of the skill feats in the PHB and UA).

I'm not looking to get granular, though. In the past, I did think about breaking up some of the more important skills (like perception and stealth) into separate skills (spot/listen, hide/move silently) in a larger effort to balance the skills (more useful skills are effectively doubled), but I don't think I'll go in that direction.

Xeviat said:

Hi everyone. I've got a question for those in the Ven Diagram overlap between gamers and athletic people. I'm looking at expanding the skill system.

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First a little background: I am naturally athletic. I played soccer, was on the ski clud, and played tennis and ran track in highschool. I never did much "training," but was pretty consistently faster, quicker, pound for pound stronger and had more endurance than most of the athletes I competed with and against. However, I was never the best at any particular task because I relied to much on natural talent / ability and not enough on skill / training. With that out of the way...

Xeviat said:

Do you believe weight lifting is a technique that can be learned beyond just training that increases strength?

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Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned I never trained much. When I first started "training" for my college track team and I learned some of the skill behind weightlifting, I quickly found I could lift more than I thought. I didn't get stronger, I just learned how to lift properly. However, the reason a could leg press 650lbs was still mostly natural talent + strength training, with a little bit of technical training. Now, if you look at the "Strongman" competitions. I think it is pretty clear that the strongest person is not always the person who wins. There is skill / technique involved in doing more complex feats of strength.

Xeviat said:

Do you believe endurance is something that can be trained for beyond just training that increases constitution? Do you feel like pushing beyond your endurance limit is something you actively do (an ability check), or is resisting fatigue something passive (a saving throw)?

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I believe so. I know when I was running the 1/2 mile I developed mental techniques to help me push through when I just wanted to stop. Conversely, when trailing someone I knew had a better time than me in a race, I got a little deflated and couldn't push through to another gear. I think if I trained my mental skills, perhaps I could overcome my doubt and pushed on harder.

I have no idea how to make that into skills, but I hope that helps!