D&D (2024) 5e 2024 Skills

[jgsugden]

I am normally opposed to 'wasting' a skill choice on Endurance.

But now that 5.24 has new rules for Exhaustion ... that DM doesnt need to feel guilty about enforcing ...

Maybe Exhaustion can be a routine − sometimes even fun − part of the game. So the Endurance skill that can (among other things) play around with the Exhaustion, might now be worthwhile having...

I'm with you on the feels here ... it gave me the icks. However, skill represents things you can learn ... and you can train endurance. It also severs some concepts from Athletics which covers too much ground in some ways. I had to be sold on it, but I think it works.

Something else to consider as an option while we're talking skills: I have 5 to 10 'specialization' abilities for each skill. When you gain proficiency or expertise you get to select one. For athletics we have:

• Swimmer - your swim speed increases by 5'
• Climber - your climb speed increases by 5'
• Leaper - treat your strength score as 4 higher when jumping.
• Hurdler - Ignore the first 5' of difficult terrain you enter each turn.
• Scamper - Your movement speed is not decreased when crawling.
• Grip of Iron - Add 2 to d20 contests involving grappling or maintaining a grip.
• Kicker - You may make unarmed attacks with your legs (requiring no hands). These attacks deal 1d4.
• Biophysics - You have expertise in knowledge checks that relate to humanoid physiology.
• Hurler - Add 10 to the ranges of thrown weapons.

This gives each PC a little more uniqueness and a fun specialization. I printed these out as a deck of cards and suggest to players that they select one at random for each skill proficiency.

Alas, most of the intelligence skills just give a small bonus for particular topics.

 

[Yaarel]

• Swimmer - your swim speed increases by 5'
• Climber - your climb speed increases by 5'
• Leaper - treat your strength score as 4 higher when jumping.
• Hurdler - Ignore the first 5' of difficult terrain you enter each turn.
• Scamper - Your movement speed is not decreased when crawling.
• Grip of Iron - Add 2 to d20 contests involving grappling or maintaining a grip.
• Kicker - You may make unarmed attacks with your legs (requiring no hands). These attacks deal 1d4.
• Biophysics - You have expertise in knowledge checks that relate to humanoid physiology.
• Hurler - Add 10 to the ranges of thrown weapons.

This gives each PC a little more uniqueness and a fun specialization. I printed these out as a deck of cards and suggest to players that they select one at random for each skill proficiency.

Mechanically, I want to treat this kind of specialization as a toolset proficiency, despite that specializations such as Swim and Jump dont have 'tools' per se. Abstractly, it represents a specific kind of body training.

For me, Biophysics = Medicine. Medicine is already a specialization of Nature.

Each of the application of 'Unarmed Strike' (Grapple, Shove, Damage) can benefit from specialization.

 

[Yaarel]

I am wondering if 'Unarmed' should be a separate skill from Athletics. But in the 5.24 rules, there is not much benefit from it being a skill, except to escape from a Grapple. Trying to Grapple someone else imposes a Dex save, and there is no skill check per se.

Note, when Dexterity agility is muscular, the DC for Grappling is always Dexterity Reflex (not Strength).

As far as I can tell, Unarmed Combat can remain an aspect of the Athletics skill.


Note, I use Grapple to hold on to a larger creature, such as hanging on to Horse or a Dragon, or even a Giant that is trying to shake one off. In this case, the target has the Grappled condition except the target is the one that determines the Move.

 

[Yaarel]

Running

The fastest runner, Bolt, ran at 10.44 meters per second, equivalent to 34.5 feet per second.

Thus, a highly trained athlete (Proficiency +3, maybe +4) with an ability score of 18 (+4, representing the peak of natural human ability), would run about 210 feet per turn.

Normal movement during an encounter is 30 feet per turn.

In other words, the top Running speed = Speed x7.

Running speed seems to work out to be something like:

Run = Speed x (Proficiency + Dexterity)


If proficiency was +4, then doubled from Expertise, the Run at Speed x (+8 + +4) would be Speed x12, superhumanly fast.

 

[tetrasodium]

Skill options ane even skill system mechanics are absolutely something I think that could be system specific, but I don't think that wotc has any interest in considering supporting GM's with such a thing before 6e.

I got fed up with every check of any importance getting swarmed with a chorus of "oh I'm proficient too, can I try? Set to the drumbeat of rattling d20s and a rapid fire series of numbers being rattled off years ago but was never able to get over x"wotc knows what's fun" & "I can't do that in ddb [so I won't & will just crumble that I can't if ever pressed]". At one point I even made a customized character sheet with less all inclusive skills but it's almost impossible for the skills I'm 5e to be any more broad & accessable to PCs so any meaningful change comes off as a defacto nerf and it doesn't take much for small number of players to channel their resulting frustrated grumpiness to poison the table's mood.

 

[Yaarel]

Skill options ane even skill system mechanics are absolutely something I think that could be system specific, but I don't think that wotc has any interest in considering supporting GM's with such a thing before 6e.

I got fed up with every check of any importance getting swarmed with a chorus of "oh I'm proficient too, can I try? Set to the drumbeat of rattling d20s and a rapid fire series of numbers being rattled off years ago but was never able to get over x"wotc knows what's fun" & "I can't do that in ddb [so I won't & will just crumble that I can't if ever pressed]". At one point I even made a customized character sheet with less all inclusive skills but it's almost impossible for the skills I'm 5e to be any more broad & accessable to PCs so any meaningful change comes off as a defacto nerf and it doesn't take much for small number of players to channel their resulting frustrated grumpiness to poison the table's mood.

If I am reading this right.

'Important' skill checks can have a high Difficulty Challenge. So high, only characters that have Expertise can reliably succeed.

Meanwhile, utilize toolset proficiencies to represent specializations within a broad skill.

 

[Yaarel]

What if?

Planar Knowledge
Arcana: Arcane; Feywild, Shadowfell; spellcasting, magical energy, magic items.
Religion: Divine; Astral, Outer (Celestial, Fiend, Aberration); symbolism, language, philosophy.
Nature: Elemental; Ethereal-Elemental; alchemy-physics-chemistry-math, metal, gems; space.
Survival: Primal; Material; Medicine, poison; wilderness, environment, botany-zoology, farms.

Sagacious (Multi-Discipline) Knowledge
Commerce: marketplace, banking, import-export; traderoutes, travel; toolset (Vehicle).
Deception: replica, convincing simulation, reenactment, impersonation, forgery.
Engineering: clockwork machinery, gears, pulleys, architecture, complex constructs.
History: urban culture, sociology, politics, military, decorum, honor; toolset (choose culture).
Investigation: logic, intuition, divination, piecing clues together, 'DM hint'; gambling.

Social Skills
Animal Handling: 'whisperer', understanding and caring for animals; toolset (Mount, pet).
Insight: Psionic; psychology, sanity, authenticity, people reading, empathy, telepathy.
Intimidation: confidence, give courage, frighten; criminality, policework, street smarts, news.
Performance: artistic beauty, esthetics, crafting luxury items, prestige; expressing personality.
Persuasion: winning friends, inspiring trust, charm; negotiation; debate, oration.

Physical Skills
Athletics: Martial; Acrobatics; gross motor skills; 'toolset' (choose sport: Swim, Grapple, Run, ..).
Lifting: powerlifting, strength test, load carrying.
Sleight: fine motor skills.
Stealth: detecting sensory information, and avoiding detection.

(Conceptually, Persuasion and Intimidation merit merger. But Persuasion is already a good skill, and I like articulating the aspects of 'fear and fascination'. Intimidation gains 'skullduggery', criminality, policework, as part of darkside psychology. Notice the deletion of Perception: the choice of skill depends on what a character is trying to detect. Use Stealth to detect hidden creatures. For History, one always has sotospeak 'toolset' proficiency with ones own culture.)

A main goal is each of the skills are balanced, being about equally useful. If one skill feels notably better than an other, then probably the skills need tweaking. Which of these skills feel overpowered or underpowered compared to the other skills?

 

[GrimCo]

First thing i house ruled - players just put their prof bonus on the sheet next to skills they are proficient with (don't add ability mod)

Second- dropped some skills. Acrobatics is gone. Athletics covers all the cases. Deception and Intimidation are also gone, it's all covered by Persuasion.

Why no ability mod? Cause it's flexible. Depending on what player tries to do, they get to add different ability mod. Wanna run marathon? Athletics + Con. Run on slippery surface? Athletics + Dex. Run uphill? Athletics + Str.

 

[tetrasodium]

If I am reading this right.

'Important' skill checks can have a high Difficulty Challenge. So high, only characters that have Expertise can reliably succeed.

Meanwhile, utilize toolset proficiencies to represent specializations within a broad skill.

I don't think so. Important in the sense that the check is likely to have a meaningful impact on the game. The dc has nothing to do with it because those checks can also be context relevant "see how well the PC succeeds at this check or badly they fail at that one. It's no secret that some skills are far more valued than others because they apply to checks with far more weight than others (ie stealth persuade arcana / history nature basket weaving). There are so few top tier skills that it's not uncommon to see the majority of players have selected skills exclusively from S & A+ skills with so much overlap that they never even needed to coordinate in coming to the table with no meaningful gaps in party capability to fill through creativity consumables and NPCs.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't think so. Important in the sense that the check is likely to have a meaningful impact on the game. The dc has nothing to do with it because those checks can also be context relevant "see how well the PC succeeds at this check or badly they fail at that one. It's no secret that some skills are far more valued than others because they apply to checks with far more weight than others (ie stealth persuade arcana / history nature basket weaving). There are so few top tier skills that it's not uncommon to see the majority of players have selected skills exclusively from S & A+ skills with so much overlap that they never even needed to coordinate in coming to the table with no meaningful gaps in party capability to fill through creativity consumables and NPCs.

For me the first question any DM needs to ask themselves when it comes to their skill list for their game is "Which checks am I asking for or are the players making more often than the others, and am I comfortable with that inequity?" These are the "important" checks that you rightly mention. If a DM finds they are constantly gating information they are doling out to players behind "Make a Perception check!" statements... it's no wonder every player tries to get proficiency in Perception. If a DM constantly has combats that start with monsters jumping out at the PCs and trying to take them by surprise... it's no wonder every player tries to get proficiency in Stealth in order for the party to avoid being noticed (and thus NOT get jumped all the time.) If a DM finds themselves constantly running wilderness adventures where the PCs are climbing trees/cliffs and swimming across lakes/rivers, and NOT running ocean or urban-based adventures and thus PCs are not needing to keep their balance on ship decks or across building peaks/ledges... it's no wonder every player forsakes Acrobatics and wants Athletics instead.

How useful is Sleight of Hand as a skill to players if DMs makes failing at a pickpocket check a potential arrest every time the PC fails, and thus players don't ever bother because the reward is not nearly worth the risk? Or how often does the DM have guards harass the PCs looking for contraband where they need to hide it on their person and it not get found? If the DM has created their narratives where Sleight of Hand just isn't worth having (because the players don't need to or don't want to make SoH checks)... then no player will bother to take it as a skill.

How often does a DM run scenarios in their games where players HAVE to do long-distance running or go on forced marches... enough so that creating and using an Endurance skill
is not only worthwhile to that DM and their game, but that players would think it important enough to use one of their few skill proficiencies to take that skill?

How often do DMs run scenarios where the different types of strength-based actions occur so often that not only would they call for individualized Swim checks, Jump checks, Lift checks, Throw checks, Climb checks and so forth, but again that players would find and have the desire to spend precious proficiencies on getting them? I mean I'm currently playing in a Pathfinder game where Climb and Swim are separate skills and I do not find that "more meaningful" to have that rather than just having a combined Athletics skill. Mainly because neither skill comes up nearly enough for me to bother to spend many (if any) skill points on them. Not when I'm having to make Perception and Knowledge checks constantly just to receive information that our GM gates behind rolls.

This is why there is no "One size fits all" skill list OR skill system. Because every GM runs skills differently and uses them more or less often that others. So at the end of the day it doesn't matter what WotC puts in their book, because every DM should be amending the system to match their own needs and expectations. Sure, we all can whimper about the system they gave us and think there were better options available (like not putting in skills that directly overlap with tools in terms of proficiency, as I did earlier)... but none of us should play the game as written if we don't like it. Change the list to what we need... combine or split skills so that our eventual list ends up being called upon for checks relatively equally if possible... and let other DMs do the same. Because all of us are going to need something different.