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D&D 5E Skill Ranking

What are your picks as the four worst skills in D&D5e?

  • Acrobatics

    Votes: 19 27.1%
  • Animal Handling

    Votes: 47 67.1%
  • Arcana

    Votes: 3 4.3%
  • Athletics

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Deception

    Votes: 6 8.6%
  • History

    Votes: 15 21.4%
  • Insight

    Votes: 6 8.6%
  • Intimidation

    Votes: 19 27.1%
  • Investigation

    Votes: 4 5.7%
  • Medicine

    Votes: 46 65.7%
  • Nature

    Votes: 12 17.1%
  • Perception

    Votes: 5 7.1%
  • Performance

    Votes: 42 60.0%
  • Persuasion

    Votes: 3 4.3%
  • Religion

    Votes: 11 15.7%
  • Sleight of Hand

    Votes: 14 20.0%
  • Stealth

    Votes: 2 2.9%
  • Survival

    Votes: 1 1.4%

maybe we just need fewer skills to make bad skills better by merging them together.

Athletics: merge with acrobatics, use str, dex or con depending on the type of the check
Stealth: same
Thievery: sleight of hands+thief tools, locks traps
Lore: arcana, religion, history, nature
Perception; investigation added to it.
Survival: animal handling, medicine, survival
socialize: persuasion, intimidation, deception, perform

every background give 1 skill, class gives 1 skill
bard, ranger gives +1 skill
rogue gives +2 skills

skilled feat: 2 skills
skill expert: 1 expertise
 

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I kind of disagree with this. Yes, different groups can stretch the bounds of certain skills, but this ignores that certain skills just naturally have much larger bounds than others.

If you are a magical themed class, you basically only need the Arcana skill. It covers knowledge of magic, knowledge of magical items, knowledge of constructs and magical creatures, knowledge of magical spells, knowledge of the planes of existence and their inhabitants.

If you are a nature themed class, the Nature skill only gets you one third of the way there. You also need Survival, to actually survive in nature and Animal-Handling, to interact with animals.

Likewise, running, jumping, swimming, climbing, grappling all use Athletics, but if you are lying to someone, you need a different skill than to persuade them.
I'm not sure if I follow this line of reasoning. Who decides it's more valuable to be the guy who remembers things about magic and the other planes than it is to be the guy who remembers things about the natural world, or the guy who can navigate, track, hunt, and forage, or the guy who can keep domestic animals calm and under control and glean the intentions of animals? Putting the focus of gameplay on any of these areas seems to be a matter of group preference. And who decides overcoming challenges while climbing, jumping, or swimming and being good at grappling/shoving is more important than influencing others by hiding the truth or influencing others through diplomacy? Aren't these decisions a matter of group preference? This seems to be privileging certain preferences over others.
 

Heh heh... so you believe three different influencing skills (Deception, Intimidation, Persuasion) should all be combined into a single skill, but yet the three wilderness-based skills (Animal Handling, Nature, Survival) all should remain separate? That is certainly one way (and a valid way) to look at it for yourself... but it doesn't then follow that other people are wrong for believing in the opposite combinations. :)
As I said, deceiving, intimidating, and persauding, are all forms of influencing. You want to get them to do something or believe something... in other words: to "go your way." Which is why they are all also Charisma-based. Even the text for Intimidation and Persuasion both begin with "When you attempt to influence someone..."

Athletics (climbing, jumping, swimming, and even grappling in combat), while all "physcial", involve very different forms of movement, but are grouped together.

Meanwhile, the three "wilderness-based skills" which you lumped together all perform fairly different functions:

Nature. Your Intelligence (Nature) check measures your ability to recall lore about terrain, plants and animals, the weather, and natural cycles.

Animal Handling. When there is any question whether you can calm down a domesticated animal, keep a mount from getting spooked, or intuit an animal's intentions, the DM might call for a Wisdom (Animal Handling) check. You also make a Wisdom (Animal Handling) check to control your mount when you attempt a risky maneuver.

Survival. The DM might ask you to make a Wisdom (Survival) check to follow tracks, hunt wild game, guide your group through frozen wastelands, identify signs that owlbears live nearby, predict the weather, or avoid quicksand and other natural hazards.

Of those three, the only overlap is recalling lore about the weather and predict the weather. There isn't enough overlap IMO to warrant making all three into one "Wilderness" skill.

So, yeah, I do think someone would br wrong for combining those three skills into one (just like I think someone trying to use Acrobatics instead of Athletics when climbing is wrong). A knowledge skill is very different from an application skill. Now, given the synnergy between them, I could see someone who had more than one skill given advantage in using the other. For example, a Ranger with Nature trying to recall lore about some beasts would have advantage due to also having Survival (but would roll INT). Trying to track an animal with Survival (rolling WIS) but knowning some lore about the terrain (Nature proficiency) would also grant advantage.

But trying to track using Animal Handling or Nature? No. That is Survival.

Trying to get a guard to let you pass? Do you want to lie to him, convince him, or threaten him? Whichever method you use they are all Charisma and result in you influencing the guard to do what you want.

Finally, I can think people are wrong. They can think I am wrong. I have no issue with disagreements. :)
 

maybe we just need fewer skills to make bad skills better by merging them together.

Athletics: merge with acrobatics, use str, dex or con depending on the type of the check
Stealth: same
Thievery: sleight of hands+thief tools, locks traps
Lore: arcana, religion, history, nature
Perception; investigation added to it.
Survival: animal handling, medicine, survival
socialize: persuasion, intimidation, deception, perform

every background give 1 skill, class gives 1 skill
bard, ranger gives +1 skill
rogue gives +2 skills

skilled feat: 2 skills
skill expert: 1 expertise
At this point just use Ability Score Proficiency variant from the DMG. It works well enough IME. You can boil it down to those six if you wanted, but otherwise around 10 distinct skills is what you get when merging as you suggest. We did it in one homebrew, D&D Story Mode does it IIRC, and some others.
 



I really struggled to come up with four--my DM rolls a lot of skill checks, and literally everything has been useful at some point. But these are the three I settled on:

  • Medicine has been used to diagnose issues, but that doesn't come up too often, and stabilization is rare--we mostly use spells or potions.
  • We don't use Nature a lot--it's generally overshadowed by Survival and probably could be merged into it.
  • And I can see the argument that Performance should be replaced with a situation-relevant social skill (e.g., Persuasion), so somewhat grudgingly I can go along with that.

We use History for general "remember stuff," with the character's background the determiner of whether they can make a roll.
 

Yeah, the four Intelligence "lore" skills cover differ areas of knowledge, but people often fail to realize just which ones cover what. But a general "Lore" (or Knowledge) skill would be too broad IMO.
wanting to combine the various lore skills into one, it just makes me think of someone going:
"oh, you're a particle physicist right? that means you obviously also know about 17th century french politics, flora and fauna diversity in the indian jungles and the four stages of enlightenment in buddhism"
like, you don't go to your local priest if your car engine is broken...
 

wanting to combine the various lore skills into one, it just makes me think of someone going:
"oh, you're a particle physicist right? that means you obviously also know about 17th century french politics, flora and fauna diversity in the indian jungles and the four stages of enlightenment in buddhism"
like, you don't go to your local priest if your car engine is broken...
That's less crazy for a historic setting though. Fields used to be less specialised as there was simply less to know. You could just be a generic scholar, a sage or a philosopher.

In my game I combined religion and history into lore skill, which entails knowing all sort of mundane things about history, culture etc. I left arcana as separate esoteric skill that covers magic theory and occult stuff. Nature got combined into survival.
 

Ranked purely based on how often I have need to call for those kind of checks:

Acrobatics, Animal Handling, Medicine, Performance
 

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