D&D 5E Skill Ranking

[Clint_L]

Inspired by the "Is Intimidate the worst skill in the game thread," let's see what people on this forum think. Pick your bottom FOUR skills for D&D5e.

 

[Clint_L]

For my choices, I basically considered two factors: how often the skill tends to get used, and its impact on the game when it does get used. I also considered adding Thief's Tools and Tinker's Tools, but decided not to muddy the waters.

So, for example, Intimidation doesn't get used a ton, but when it does, it can often be quite impactful by gaining key information, or even ending a fight before it begins.

Edit: also, I would love to see the DDB data on how often each skill gets rolled. I suspect Perception to be number one by a country mile, probably followed by Investigation and Stealth.

 

[Lazybones]

A lot will depend on the setting. In my current urban-focused campaign, History and Religion get used a lot more than Nature, for example. I find Intimidation and Persuasion to be somewhat redundant, in most instances. Medicine tends to be fairly unnecessary if there is a cleric in the party. I almost picked Acrobatics, but I have seen a few situations where creative players have used it to great effect.

EDIT: I looked at the other thread and saw that those points have all been made already.

 

[abirdcall]

I would have picked Medicine 4 times if I could. It should be part of Nature.

History is weird and I don't like it. It confuses players because isn't everything part of history? Maybe my biggest issue is the character building aspect of it.

If a character travels to a new plane why would they know the history of it?

Animal Handling should just be part of Survival.

Performance is tricky. Is it worth having to get advantage on the few checks they will make? No, but then it feels like the character is missing theme without it.

Intimidation is good. There are 3 main approaches to getting what you want with an NPC. Most often it is persuasion but when it isn't it is good to be able to do something else.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Everything that's not Perception.

Followed closely by Perception.

 

[Minigiant]

Hard to say.

The 5e skill system was designed with the assumption that the DM would add additional skill uses.

Like can you roll Medicine vs a DC to double or triple the healing of a heal spell?
Can you roll Performance to perform a tropey role and use that to bluff or browbeat people?

 

[Seramus]

Stretching on my 4th choice, but went for Sleight of Hand. It IS a useful skill, but you can go entire campaigns and never notice it missing if you don't intentionally try to use it.

 

[Kobold Stew]

While I've hit the top 3 (Animal Handling, Medicine, and Performance), I am surprised more have not chosen Perception. Is it useful in the game world? Sure, obviously, and made more so since many table seem not to play with disadvantage in low-light conditions (which include darkness for those with darkvision). For me, it's that that makes it such a terrible skill: it defies the rules as written, and is made to do so much more than it was originally designed to do, and as a result it becomes a must-have.

Plus, it is stupidly given to a number of species for free which exacerbates the problem. Perception is badly designed and exists in tension with the rules in the first place. It defies common sense that it is a skill that is trained in the first place.

 

[Charlaquin]

My picks were as follows:

Performance - It’s useless in two of three pillars, and while it has some function in the social pillar, it’s far less directly useful for getting NPCs to do what you want them to than the other Charisma skills. Most of the time, it just ends up being “roll to see how much you impressed an audience” skill, which tend to be pretty low-stakes rolls

Medicine - No real use other than stabilizing dying characters, which is done more reliably and more effectively by any source of healing. Might also sometimes be used to gather forensic clues in a murder mystery type scenario, but those uses are often brushed over, given that failure on them can cause the players to get stuck. Not pure flavor like Performance, but extremely limited usefulness.

Acrobatics - Almost everything you want to use Acrobatics for is actually a function of Athletics. As-written, Acrobatics is really only used for maintaining balance, which… I mean, how often does that even come up? Not much in my experience. Beats out the previous two because at least you can use it to escape grapples and restraints if you have low Strength/Athletics.

Nature - by far the most useful skill on this list, as it, like all intelligence-based skills, is often used for information-gathering rolls. Ends up being the lowest-ranking int skill for me, only because it often overlaps with the more generally useful Survival skill.

(Dis-)Honorable mention to Sleight of Hand, which under the 2014 rules I might actually rank below Performance, since it’s also mainly a flavor pick, but instead of being used to impress an audience, it can only really be used to get pocket change in a game where money is useless, at the risk of getting yourself and maybe your allies into trouble if you fail. In 2024, it shoots way up the list due to now being the assumed “pick locks” skill.

 

[Charlaquin]

Surprised Animal Handling has such a large portion of the votes at this point. I mean, sure, it’s only useful when interacting with animals, but it’s also functionally all Charisma-based skills combined in that specific context. So, narrow application, but pretty useful within its niche. I certainly wouldn’t call it worse than Performance, which has fewer votes at the moment.