D&D 5E Why Don't Barbarians or Fighters Get Bonus Skills?

[Dragoslav]

Why Don't Barbarians or Fighters Get Bonus Skills?

Because Fighters suck and must always be inferior in every respect to their genetically superior counterparts in other classes.

Although, people always want Fighters to have something unique that other classes don't have, so I guess in this case, "Doesn't get an extra skill" is the Fighter's uniquely defining mechanic.

 

[GX.Sigma]

I'd rather no classes have bonus skills. Skills are supposed to be a character customization option. They're no longer special when everyone gets a million bonus skills automatically.

Rogues? Sure. Wizards, Clerics, and Monks? Justifiable. Anyone else? Please no.

We should not look for excuses to add complexity.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I'd rather no classes have bonus skills. Skills are supposed to be a character customization option. They're no longer special when everyone gets a million bonus skills automatically.

Rogues? Sure. Wizards, Clerics, and Monks? Justifiable. Anyone else? Please no.

Seriously? This is an attitude I don't get at all. I can understand saying that NOBODY should get bonus skills, or even that only rogues should get bonus skills, but when you basically say it's justifiable for every class EXCEPT fighters and barbarians to get bonus skills, you're just penalizing those two classes for no good reason.

A barbarian is not just a shrunken-down cave troll whose only talent is bashing things and getting angry. He's a natural athlete and an expert warrior. And a level 1 fighter isn't just a farmhand who picked up a sword. He's trained hard, probably in an army, or mercenary outfit, or under an expert teacher. And if the skill list DOESN'T include any things that fighters and barbarians are good at (which I dispute), that's a problem with the skill list; a Navy SEAL or US Marine is a fighter, and those guys are skilled in about a million ways I'm not.

 

[The Human Target]

Yeah, I don't think skills are something that should be grudgingly given out.

If you're going to have them, let everyone have fun with them.

Fighters are people too.

 

[Rune]

The solution isn't to add skills, but to take them away

This! In my experience, the more skills a character has, the fewer things a player will try that aren't on his/her character's list. Since that is not a play-style I want to emphasize I have used (and am currently using in a modified game of basic) a different set of skills:

Each character has three skills.

The first is a background skill, called whatever the background is called. It provides a bonus to any ability check that a person with said background should reasonably get a bonus to. This skill, like the background, itself, is easily made up by the player at character generation and is intended to be a very quick way to help the player differentiate the character from others of the same class.

The second skill is the class skill. A character is assumed to be skilled at being whatever class they are, so they get a bonus to ability checks that are related to that class, as well. This is the main utility-skill of the character, most likely to see use on a somewhat regular basis.

The third skill is a specialty. At character generation, I ask the players what one thing their characters are better at than anyone else they know. This one produces some interesting results, depending on what mindset the player is at when creating the character (for instance, a player once had his character specialize in "Luck"). As with the other two skills, all ability checks made that ought to be enhanced by the specialty get a bonus. This skill is intended to help the player distinguish the character as an individual (again, very quickly).

That's it. It's easy (especially for neophytes), encourages situational problem-solving, does not encourage players to spend the whole session with their eyes on their character sheets, and helps speed up character generation.

'Course, this is all easy enough to house-rule over whatever skill system they come up with. So, even though I voted "No," my actual vote is "I don't care."

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

At character generation, I ask the players what one thing their characters are better at than anyone else they know. This one produces some interesting results, depending on what mindset the player is at when creating the character (for instance, a player once had his character specialize in "Luck"). As with the other two skills, all ability checks made that ought to be enhanced by the specialty get a bonus.

See, this is one potential problem with open-ended skill systems: unless the players are fairly careful and mature about how they select and use their open-ended skills, it becomes difficult to account for them fairly.

For example, some players who chose "luck" as a skill would then try to argue that every single roll they made had a component of "luck" to it. ("I'm so lucky that the guard I'm trying to persuade happens to be friends with my cousin!" "I'm so lucky that the walls of the pit have crumbled enough for me to climb up!") Others would apply it too narrowly, like only when their character gambled in-game, and be at a relative power disadvantage to other players who interpreted their skills more broadly.

That said, if a fighter in my party with the soldier background is rolling to see if he recognizes the banners of an enemy camp, I'm giving him the dang skill die regardless.

 

[Kobold Stew]

It's for that reason that this free-form approach works better with FATE games (for example) than D&D -- because the wording of the aspect also requires the investment of in-game currency (FATE points) for each roll, it makes absolutely no difference how freely or narrowly any one aspect is applied: the meta-goal is to use the aspects to drive the FATE economy.

 

[Rune]

See, this is one potential problem with open-ended skill systems: unless the players are fairly careful and mature about how they select and use their open-ended skills, it becomes difficult to account for them fairly.

For example, some players who chose "luck" as a skill would then try to argue that every single roll they made had a component of "luck" to it. ("I'm so lucky that the guard I'm trying to persuade happens to be friends with my cousin!" "I'm so lucky that the walls of the pit have crumbled enough for me to climb up!") Others would apply it too narrowly, like only when their character gambled in-game, and be at a relative power disadvantage to other players who interpreted their skills more broadly.

Wasn't a problem. First of all, that player had never played an RPG in his life, so he definitely wasn't out to break the game. Second, I told him at the outset that it would only apply in situations where luck was the predominate deciding factor between success or failure. Third, I designed the system for me to run, as I know that I'm not going to have a problem keeping such skills balanced (as much as is necessary) while adjudicating on the fly.

Frankly, another character's skill required more attention: Jack of all Trades. In this case, I eliminated the other skills and lowered the bonus granted and accepted that it would apply to everything. Worked out just fine. As for encouraging creative skill use, it actually suited my purposes very well.

 

[Falling Icicle]

Wait, since when are were fighters or barbarians trained in climbing, swimming, driving, survival or, for the most part, riding? Intimidation and Knowledge (Warfare) is a -possibility- at best.

Fighters and are often very athletic people. It makes sense that they would be good at those type of things. Barbarians are uncivilized people so it makes perfect sense that they'd know how to survive in the wilderness and handle/ride animals. Both should be able to get spot, IMO. Barbarians always need to be alert for danger in their savage, untamed environment. Fighters are often those who are trained to stand guard, and it never made sense to me why they couldn't be good at standing watch at night.

Fighters are trained in combat. Barbarians are not trained in anything, except possibly picking up heavy objects and setting them back down.
You could tie them into a background, but they shouldn't get these skills just for the sake of being these classes.

That's the kind of drastic oversimplification of the classes that I dislike. Fighters and Barbarians aren't just meat shields with big weapons and high ACs. They're people that live in a world where there's far more to do than just kill things.

 

[Falling Icicle]

Four PCs in the game will cover about 20 of those skills in the list (I think there are 27 but Knowledge and Profession are multiple skills). Minimum will be 16, then 2 classes give no bonus skills and 6 classes give 1-4 bonus skills, and races give 0-2 bonus skills.

Overall I think 20 is enough already, considering that most of the skills don't follow the trained/untrained rules of 3ed, thus you don't need to "have" the skill to use it.

It is mostly a gamestyle issue whether you want your party to cover ALL skills or only part of them.

Don't forget that there will also be alot of overlap. Some characters are going to have some skills in common. You might have two party members that have spot, or diplomacy, or whatever else. That reduces the total number of skills that the party covers.

But whatever your choice, you should remember that the key point is that nobody needs e.g. the Stealth skill to be stealthy or the Survival skill to survive in the wild, so "covering" all skills in the game is really a non-issue. Whether your party has the Survival skill determines how easy/hard it is (i.e. how frequent is success), but behind the curtain the DM can just dial the checks DC to the point that having or not having the Survival bonus can be made irrelevant.

This is just to say that how many skills you have on your character sheet sometimes has more of a psychological effect than a practical one.

You make a good point about not needing a skill to attempt it. But I still think 4 skills is just a bit too few. Skills help to set your character apart and make him feel unique. More than ability scores, they give a personal feel for what things your character is good at doing. I don't mind having 4 skills as a starting point, but considering that you never, ever get more skills as you level, that bothers me.

With these numbers in mind, regarding your suggestion on the Barbarian, I actually change my mind and say that after all, why not? One bonus skill (from a short sublist) to the Barbarian will be quite in line with the concept of someone generally more skillful on wilderness stuff, compared e.g. to the Fighter. But if this means that we then have to please Fighters with a bonus skills, then give 2 to Rangers because they should be even more skillful than Barbarians, then Rogues will be complaining that they are not so much better than others etc, then it's not going to be so good.

Rangers will probably be skilled in Survival and Tracking (since they decided to make those separate skills for some reason), and perhaps one other skill chosen from a list. Yeah, that gives them almost as many skills as rogues, but that was always the case.