D&D 5E Is Intimidate the worse skill in the game?

[Minigiant]

I remember designing my own little quick RPG and in it Bluff, Threaten, and Persuade have different rolls and roles.

Basically, the higher you roll, the more the target agrees to do for and risk for you.
The lower you roll, the less the target does for you and more they might harm you.

Persuade/Persuasion is the safe option. You cannot roll under 0 and make the target more hostile.

Bluff/Deception is the manipulative option. You can keep trying but you get a penalty based on the target's Intelligence every time to try to roll higher.

Threaten/Intimidate is the risky option, You automatically get -X to your roll based on the target's Bravery. But you get to roll 2 dice and add the result. So you can roll high and scare the target into doing a lot. Or you can roll low, fail, and lock the target into more hostile.

Thus Intimidate worse best on cowards whereas Deception worked best on idiots.
So you would want to roll other skills to see if you were dealing with a moron or wuss first.

This is essentially how 4e skill challenges were supposed to work.

 

[Bae'zel]

Again part of the issue is the 5e designers never attempted to make Intimidate near equally useful as the other skills.

4e was forced to ponder each skill when they ponder skill powers. Every skill had powers. So they had to think up 5 uses for every skill.

Ominous Threat: You threaten someone to battle. They are Marked and one ally marked by the target lose their mark.
Demoralize Foe: You scare someone causing a penalty to their attacks
Everyone Move: You shout at everyone near and everyone safely backs away from you.
Try the Stick: You threaten someone during diplomacy. When the DM calls for a Persuasion roll, you make it an Intimidation roll.
Snap out of it: You smack and scare an ally. Your ally gets to make another saving throw roll against dazes, fear, and stuns.

4e actually let its Heal skill heal.

Are these from the 4e rules? These are great!!

 

[Minigiant]

Are these from the 4e rules? These are great!!

yup
Skill powers
4e Players Handbook 3

 

[CreamCloud0]

No. Neither is better than 4e. Both are dramatically worse, albeit in radically different ways. That doesn't mean the 4e one was perfect, it wasn't, but it was most assuredly better.

The irony is that 5e's skill system actually resembles 4e more than any other! But the 5e culture of play makes it almost as bad as the 3e version even when the books explicitly say not to do those things. The DMs running it runnit like it was 3e, even when that is actively detrimental to the experience. I still to this day have no explanation for why this happens, but I'm not the only one to have noticed this problem.

would you mind elaborating for someone who's only properly been exposed to 5e mechanics how 5e's skill system resemble 4e's more than 3e's and why '5e culture of play and running 5e skills like they're 3e skills' is so detrimental to using them?

 

[Minigiant]

would you mind elaborating for someone who's only properly been exposed to 5e mechanics how 5e's skill system resemble 4e's more than 3e's and why '5e culture of play and running 5e skills like they're 3e skills' is so detrimental to using them?

If I may

5e's skill system is a "copied homework version" of 4e's skill system.

4e took the 3e skill system and cut the chaff. Useless or Nonscaling skills were removed. Skills that go together were combined. (Climb/Jump/Swim was made Athletics. Hide and Move Silently was made Stealth) A ton of prescribe skill actions were removed from the core. With this equilibrium, you would swap skills or get skill new abilities freely as the skill were near equal and balanced.

You know the whole "Intimidate with Strength", A DM could do that and let you threaten someone with a Athletics check by showing off your arms or with and Endurance check (4E had a Con skill. Stupid 5e!) but breaking something over your knee or head to show how tough you arm.

Or you could sub Nature for Initiative or Perception or Stealth when you are in a natural terrain. Or do that with Dungeoneering with in a dungeon. Or Streetwise in a city. Just costs a Skill power.

Or use Intimidate to slap someone out of a charm or use Religion to invoke weak divine magic.

But people play 5e like 3e.
In 3e you can't do anything fun with skills unless the core rules let you and took a feat to make it work. Or if you took a feat to unlock a new skill feature.

So few played around with skills in 5e.

You want to know why Xanatars and 2024 5.5e started adding new hardcored used for skills and tools.... because people where not getting creative and only did what the books said skills and tools did. So they added all the stuff they assumed DMs would allow as new rules.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, they weren't. This is a straight-up falsehood, often repeated but simply false. 4e has plenty of fixed DCs for things. It just also provides guidance for how to pick appropriate DCs when there isn't already a predefined one.

4e and 5e skill systems have same flaw, there are poor guidelines on how the rules connect to the fiction. Like what sort of situations do various DCs correspond to?

And I think 4e makes this slightly worse as it indeed connects DCs to the character level, creating the situation where the world scales with you. And what to these DCs actually represent is just and afterthought at best.

 

[Bae'zel]

How would you incorporate skill "Powers" into 5e? In 4e, you had to swap a Class power to use a Skill one. Not sure what the equivalent would be here.

 

[Minigiant]

4e and 5e skill systems have same flaw, there are poor guidelines on how the rules connect to the fiction. Like what sort of situations do various DCs correspond to?

And I think 4e makes this slightly worse as it indeed connects DCs to the character level, creating the situation where the world scales with you. And what to these DCs actually represent is just and afterthought at best.

The disconnect of 4e is that the guidelines assume you move a certain way.

The world's DCs don't scale with you.
The DCs scale with different planes and locations in the planes.

4e assumes you plane-hop and the different planes have tougher and more magical stuff with higher DCs.

The wood door on the Material plane is DC 10 to break. The lock is a fancy one bought by the count and is a DC 15 to pick.
In the City of Brass, the bank's safe is made of magmawought bronze or something and is DC 30. The lock was designed by Zaxinkin the Insane and has a DC 25 to pick.


A core issue with D&D for since forever is it refuses to tell you the assumptions and guidelines in order to not offend the DM by telling them what to do and how the game works.
Because DMs scream the last lyrics of RATM's Killing in the Name if you DARE explain how the rules work,

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The disconnect of 4e is that the guidelines assume you move a certain way.

The world's DCs don't scale with you.
The DCs scale with different planes and locations in the planes.

4e assumes you plane-hop and the different planes have tougher and more magical stuff with higher DCs.

The wood door on the Material plane is DC 10 to break. The lock is a fancy one bought by the count and is a DC 15 to pick.
In the City of Brass, the bank's safe is made of magmawought bronze or something and is DC 30. The lock was designed by Zaxinkin the Insane and has a DC 25 to pick.

Yes, but it doesn't even bother to explain what the different DCs correspond to, and very strongly implies you should scale the DCs by the level. So yeah, the "skin" of the door changes, but that is an afterthought. It is very rules first rather than fiction first.

Whilst 5e does utterly crap job of explaining what the DCs correspond to as well, at least the implication is that the DCs are set due the things they represent, not by the level of the characters.

 

[Minigiant]

Yes, but it doesn't even bother to explain what the different DCs correspond to, and very strongly implies you should scale the DCs by the level. So yeah, the "skin" of the door changes, but that is an afterthought. It is very rules first rather than fiction first.

Whilst 5e does utterly crap job of explaining what the DCs correspond to as well, at least the implication is that the DCs are set due the things they represent, not by the level of the characters.

That's because the DCs correspond to dozens of things.

A DC 30 door could be dwarven steel or duergar steel or psyweb or glamorgold or giantstone or magmawrought or infernal bronze or demon brass.
You'd need a whole page to list them all the types of door.
Your DM would suppose to determine the what it is.
But for how "creative" people claim they are, they can't create reasons why an ifrit sultan's vault is harder to crack than the mayor of Dirttown's chest.

That's why most RPGs don't scale.