D&D 5E Skills Redux

[Satyrn]

Sorry, drop what?

More background stuff. But ignore that bit. It was just a snarky response to Corwin just meant to end my part of that conversation.

 

[Corwin]

More background stuff. But ignore that bit. It was just a snarky response to Corwin just meant to end my part of that conversation.

Fail...

 

[Satyrn]

Let's list the skills alphabetically, and provide each with a few keywords to help DMs to understand when to use them:

Acrobatics (Dexterity): balancing, swashbuckling, dives, stunts
Arcana (Intelligence): spells, magic items, symbols, rituals, planes of existence
Athletics (Strength): climbing, jumping, swimming
Craft (Any): work as a craftsman or artisan, create items
Deception (Charisma): lie, cheat, disguise, misdirect
Diplomacy (Intelligence or Wisdom): etiquette, oratory, inspire, deal-making
Dungeoneering (Dexterity or Wisdom): trapfinding, disarm traps, terrain, edible fungi, follow tracks, avoid getting lost, avoid hazards – all under ground
Feylore (Intelligence): entities from the ethereal, far realms, fey, shadowfolk
Gather Information (Intelligence or Charisma): make people talk, puzzle together clues
History (Intelligence): historical events, legendary people, past disputes, lost civilizations
Insight (Wisdom): detect lies, discern motives, predict behavior
Intimidate (Strength or Charisma): make someone do your bidding using fear, pain and threats
Medicine (Wisdom): stabilize the dying, diagnose and treat illnesses, perform post mortems
Might (Strength): bend bars, lift gates, kick in doors, pushing statues
Perception (Wisdom): spot, listen or otherwise detect things
Performance (Charisma): sing, dance, play instruments, recite poems, tell tales
Persuasion (Charisma): make somebody want to do your bidding
Religion (Intelligence): gods and churches, holy symbols, rites and prayers
Stealth (Dexterity): hide, move silently
Survival (Strength or Wisdom): terrain and weather, plants and animals, follow tracks, avoid getting lost, hunt wild game, avoid hazards – all above ground
Thievery (Dexterity): escape artist, disarm traps, forgery, lockpicking, pickpocketing, rope use

Yeah. You mention upthread (downthread from what I just quoted, obviously) that you want some feedback on the choice of skills you've included, so:

Feylore, while I love the name, seems too narrow. It's just info about other dimensions and a rare type of being. It just feels too niche. But I love the name and I think you could make the game more fantastical by wrapping it around Survival.

Now, Dungeoneering is Survival's counterpart, so it would have to change a little, too. I'd give it a cooler name, something Underdar inspired, and have it also include knowing about underdark creatures.


. . . And going along that theme, there needs to be - I was going to say urban, but something more interesting sprang to mind. Civilization. Knowing about the ins and outs of humanoid culture. I'd wrap History and Religion into it (because really, so much of our history is wrapped up in religion, and it could be so much more so with the gods actively shaping it).

Everything else looks fine to me.

 

[Lanliss]

Yeah, I've read all the threads and I simply can't make it work.

In the end, the simplest solution for me is to remove Investigation from the game. That way, there are no more questions and no more corner cases.

After all, I've run D&D for decades just fine without this idea. I don't want to have to think about "macro" and "micro", I just want to keep using what I know works well.

Is it a monster? Use Perception.

Is it a trap? Use Dungeoneering.

Already here, 90% of cases are covered.

Is it something else? Use something else (doh!) - perhaps Insight (if you want to detect a slight hesitation in a NPC) or Thievery (if you want to see minute differences in some exotic and intricate pattern) or perhaps even Gather Information (if you want to detect how completely separate people use the same speech patterns, as if they've been primed on what to say) or History (if it's about reseach and mapping various legends) or Arcana (if technobabble technobabble strands of energy in the plane-shifting portal or ritual you just found technobabble)...

In none of these cases, using "Investigation" feels natural to me. On one hand, it's too all-encompassing. On the other, it's too abstract, not direcly mapping to the practical use cases you see in the fantasy game. In the end, there is no need for it.

Man, this thread got flooded fast. I like the way this is looking, but have one point to make. I have changed over to using only Passive perception. My players will never roll a "perception" check again. Any active attempt at something will be Investigation. Have not actually used it yet, due to my players not playing, but just the idea feels right, to me. Just my 2cp.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Good thoughts overall.
Since I don't want to completely overhaul shoves/grapples/disarms etc Might is my solution. Any "mighty" monster get proficiency, which fixes the worst WTF moments visavi grappling.

Yep, fair enough. I just personally don't like the way the skill system and combat interact.

Combining athletics and acrobatics is an interesting thought. Especially with Might in the game. Do you have a suggestion for a name? Gymnastics? (The core difference between Might and either of Athletics and Acrobatics is that the latter are things you achieve by training; the former are things you do merely because you're awesome)

My plan would probably be to leave the lists as is, but add might to anyone appropriate. If a player chooses both athletics and acrobatics, I'll tell them that having both is unnecessary.

Also, my thought is that might is actually something you can train: weightlifting is not all about pure strength, after all. There's a fair bit of technique involved. Might is about applying strength effectively.

I tried the active/passive approach, but that was sabotaged by the module itself, which calls for Perception rolls even when the players aren't actively searching. In the end, I've decided "Investigation" is simply a frankenskill with hugely inconsistent usage that I want gone from the game, so I've removed it.

Perhaps I didn't explain well. 5e's passive rolls are not actually 'rolls that the player doesn't ask for'. They're actually 'rolls where the DM decides to set the result of the d20 to 10'. He can fairly arbitrarily say that any check is a passive check. He's encouraged to do so in certain situations, but the wording doesn't seem either exclusive or mandatory.

My method for handling passive checks basically takes the "arbitrarily" bit to heart. I will use a passive (ie "you rolled a 10") check any time I feel like I don't want to roll dice, either because the action is relatively unimportant or the dice rolling would make things unnecessarily random (ie - both sides of a conflict rolling d20s). I will use a real roll at all other times, regardless of the character's declared actions.

The second part is that perception is a skill which doesn't require that the character changes the environment - it's observation, not interaction.

This means that it's fine when a module hands out perception rolls against a static DC without needing the players to ask for them.

Further to that, if a character then chooses to investigate something which could have been detected with a perception check, I can lower the DC substantially and let them try.

 

[CapnZapp]

If you allow me a moment to play devil's advocate here.

From your entire post above, it appears that the problem you're experiencing is not so much due to a lack of a skill within the PHB but a lack of a monster ability. If you don't want your fighter or mage to be able to pin a bullete perhaps instead of creating an entirely new skill called Might you give the bullete advantage on Strength checks, with a +5 bonus on such checks for each size it is larger than its opponent/s or something like that.

To me, your concerns above are valid, but your solution by introducing a Might skill is not a practical one, rather create the Might trait for monsters and state it more elegantly than I have above

In a scenario where you aren't remodeling skills, you would be correct.

But since I'm already adding and removing skills, I consider it an opportunity to be able to add a skill for "bend bars" type of checks, so Fighters can be proficient in that stuff.

If all you want to do is "fix" monster grapples, the easiest solution would be to give all beefy monsters Athletics proficiency (and Expertise to the few that already have it), and perhaps Acrobatics profiency to slinky/dexterous monsters.

 

[CapnZapp]

You are increasing the total number of skills, while simultaneously hoping to make them all more important. To me this means, as a holistic percentage, your PCs have become less skilled. In an overall sense, at least. Unless you give out more skills training. Does that make sense?

What I'm getting at is, if you consider a few of the current PHB skills are pointless (lets say just 3 for ease of math), that mean a v.human fighter has training in a third of the effective skill field (15/5=33.3%). But now, with your 21 useful skills, he is trained in less than a fourth (21/5=23.8%). This leads to less competent adventuring.

A fair point to bring up.

Currently, I feel that if you pick, say, Athletics, Perception and either Intimidation or Persuasion, you cover much more than half of all practical makes-a-difference checks in a typical published adventure. With just three or four skills.

And currently, I feel that every character regardless of build can easily achieve that kind of "coverage".

This is something I want to change.

I want to return to a design where
....Fighters have more "fighter-y" skills, the Wizard more "wizard-y" skills, and so on
....Dwarves are likely to know Dwarf-y things, Elfs Elven things and so on
....many different skills actually see significant use instead of having just a handful of essential skills and a dozen academic skills that only make a practical difference once in a blue moon
....where no single party member can cover all the important skills

Instead the heroes must band together and start a "adventuring party" in order to cover all the bases together

With my Redux, I hope every party will feel they need both Dungeoneering and Survival. Somebody needs Gather Information (and not just the "face"). Skills that a combat-oriented player formerly might have considered "useless" such as History or Feylore now provide exciting and immediately-practical details about monsters. Same with Survival and Intimidation.

Also, remember, that if many skills are useful, thus increasing the likelyhood that the party collectively fails more often, that makes imo the game better!

Not only does this mean that failure isn't such a big deal (since it now actually happens, instead of skill checks being a joke)... but also that success regains its sweetness since it is no longer taken for granted.

(In practice, a well-tuned group of players will not ignore an entire area of skills - skill monkeys will be especially appreciated here for their ability to cover more than their fair share of skills - so I'm not overly concerned about the failure part)

So, I guess you're right - the "competence level" of any given character will drop. But anything that provides a little more challenge is a good thing in my book, especially since this can be overcome with good cooperation!

 

[CapnZapp]

Will traps, set in forests for example, still use Dungeoneering?

A good question.

"Outdoors" (including Underdark as a terrain) trapfinding will use Survival.

"Indoors" (including private houses, dungeons and cellars) trapfinding use Dungeoneering.

Hope that division makes as much sense to you as it does to me

So do we base the skill for trap-finding on the material components of the trap (Arcana for magical traps) or the location of the trap (Dungeoneering for a trap in a Dungeon)? What about a trap in a forest or underwater? Would the trap-finder need to at least be familiar with the terrain?

In 5e, you don't need Arcana to find magical traps, only Perception (if you believe official modules).

I'd like to keep the first idea (that Rogues can find traps even with no magical training of their own, and that Wizards aren't automatically better than Rogues at finding traps).

I want to ditch the second idea, and to do that without involving Investigation.

Splitting up trapfinding between "manufactured traps" (like the indoors "trap traps" you generally think of when you hear the term "D&D traps") and "hunting traps" (like outdoors snares and bear traps) seems like an entirely natural split.

On one hand, traps designed to catch looters. On the other, traps originally designed to provide food. (Both can kill heroes of course) This is the designation my fantasy brain finds the easiest to use

 

[CapnZapp]

yeah. When I see a skill like Dungeoneering, it always makes me wonder when we'll see: Mountaineering, Waterneering, Deserteering, and so on.

Never. Unless you run a Dark Sun campaign, perhaps.

The important criteria is how prevalent a terrain type is in actual play.

"Indoors" and "Outdoors" is just the right level of specialization for my needs.

 

[CapnZapp]

Man, this thread got flooded fast. I like the way this is looking

Indeed

Thanks