D&D 5E Is it just me or have rogues lost the ability to climb?

[Uller]

So one of the themes is (and we see it with spot/search as well) is to allow different abilities to be used in some cases. I can buy that I suppose. The fact is that many tasks require lots of different abilities. Climbing is one obvious example...It require strength to pull your body weight up, stamina to hold on, agility and nimble fingers to get to hard to reach handholds, coordination and balance, good planning and experience to find a suitable route....in the end, a really good climber is going to be trained and/or very practiced. This packet leaves that possibility out, I think. It seems to be the Expertise Die mechanic could work just fine here but it would work much better if it were allowed to be applied to tasks relevant to the character (race/class/background/training), not tasks relevant to an ability score. But then it starts to look a lot more like the skill system in the last packet (which I was pretty much fine with)

 

[Kobold Stew]

There are a number of (former) skills that in the real world require actual practice and not just a dependence on raw ability, for which an expertise die would be a reasonable mechanic: climb, swim, ride, handle animal, perform, tumble/balance.

A skill system would distinguish ability here (give or take a few; I don't mean this as a hard list) more starkly than the other things on the former skill list. Within the existing rules, you could perhaps swap bonus languages for a d4 expertise in one of these (better would be 1+INT, so someone with Int 12 could be "trained" in swimming and climbing). But they have decided to take a step away form that sort of granularity. So we'll just have to see what comes...

 

[Warbringer]

Moreover, I kind of agree with climbing being a strength-based activity, rather than dexterity-based. Climbing is more about gripping strength and muscle power than it is about being quick and nimble.

Climb is an interesting skill because it really highlights a problem with the D&D ability scores. Sure, strength is important in climbing, but its the strength/weight ratio. Watch technical climbers, parkour or gymnasts who really make a mockery of what we would consider difficult for a human to achieve in terms of "ascending" an obstacle, and they are not the standard envisioning of a "strong" character in the game..

For that reason, I say Climb should be Dex based

 

[Remathilis]

Here was my problem with most of the "skills" packages the rogue kept getting.

You couldn't replicate the (A)D&D thief anymore.

Classically, the thief had 8 skills: Pick Pockets, Find/Remove Traps, Hide in Shadows, Move Silently, Open Lock, Climb Walls, Hear Noise, and Read Languages. In every edition of D&D up to 4e, you could do all of these competently as a rogue. In Next, you can't read foreign scripts (int), search/spot/listen (wis) and climb (str) any better than than anyone else; in fact, you're worse at at these skills than a mage/cleric/fighter.

There is more to rogues than the three s's: stealth, steal, and sneak attack. We can't even recreate the original 8 cat burglar skills, lets not even get into things like bluff, sense motive, jump, swim, or appraise.

I'd be ok with the the whole "checks as skills" if it was a little kinder to giving rogues lots of skills...

 

[Manbearcat]

Beyond technique (Intelligence), climbing is about body control/coordination (Dexterity), small muscle (core, hands) and large muscle (lats/delts) strength (Strength), fast twitch endurance (Constitution), spatial perception (Wisdom), and sometimes the will to carry on despite extreme circumstances and demoralizing setbacks (Charisma). Like most things D&D, binary attribute checks fail miserably at reproducing the synergy of multiple, dynamic systems at work.

 

[variant]

There is nothing stopping anyone from making climb a Dexterity based check.

 

[Falling Icicle]

There is nothing stopping anyone from making climb a Dexterity based check.

Rule 0 Fallacy: "It's not broken if you can fix it."

 

[variant]

Rule 0 Fallacy: "It's not broken if you can fix it."

Having a preference of one thing over another and then adjusting the game to fit that preference is not a "fix". Simply because the game doesn't lineup with your particular preference, doesn't mean the game is "broken".

 

[Li Shenron]

Climb is an interesting skill because it really highlights a problem with the D&D ability scores. Sure, strength is important in climbing, but its the strength/weight ratio. Watch technical climbers, parkour or gymnasts who really make a mockery of what we would consider difficult for a human to achieve in terms of "ascending" an obstacle, and they are not the standard envisioning of a "strong" character in the game..

For that reason, I say Climb should be Dex based

I endorse this view, but sadly it's not going to happen in the books.

OTOH, I really liked the short-lived idea of skills not tied to ability scores. So when climbing, you might have sometimes to do a Str check (climbing up a sheer surface or pulling yourself up a rope when carrying heavy gear), a Dex check (climbing a tree or a wall with plenty of features to hold on to), a Con check (hiking up a mountain for a long time) and maybe you can even think of a case for mental stats checks.

Overall I think there is still room to play the game like this... In the current DM's guidelines, it says that the DM decide which ability score is more relevant for a task, that the Common Tasks section presents only the most common ways to use ability checks so it doesn't restrict the DM to those examples, and overall that the ability checks system is supposed to be "an incredibly flexible tool" (lit).

 

[variant]

I endorse this view, but sadly it's not going to happen in the books.

OTOH, I really liked the short-lived idea of skills not tied to ability scores. So when climbing, you might have sometimes to do a Str check (climbing up a sheer surface or pulling yourself up a rope when carrying heavy gear), a Dex check (climbing a tree or a wall with plenty of features to hold on to), a Con check (hiking up a mountain for a long time) and maybe you can even think of a case for mental stats checks.

Overall I think there is still room to play the game like this... In the current DM's guidelines, it says that the DM decide which ability score is more relevant for a task, that the Common Tasks section presents only the most common ways to use ability checks so it doesn't restrict the DM to those examples, and overall that the ability checks system is supposed to be "an incredibly flexible tool" (lit).

Even in the How to Play the ability checks aren't locked. Words like typically and commonly are used for the list of tasks under an ability score and it is always modified with an or that covers everything else you might find under that ability score.