D&D 5E Heavily used skill proficiencies

aco175 · Jan 31, 2021

I'm interested in seeing that most everyone picks Perception, while only some pick Investigation. My campaigns tend to have both of these used roughly equally.

Li Shenron · Jan 31, 2021

Blue said:
For example, I find when I run there's a lot of athletics, acrobatics, survival, investigation, perception and persuasion checks.

...

Blue said:
So at your table(s) what skill proficiencies get applied to a lot of meaningful checks?

I still have some open issues with overusing Perception.

I used to have too many Athletics and Persuasion, but eventually I realised the problem is not with the system. It is all our fault. We just assume that there HAS to be a check to resolve challenges, but that's not really what ability checks are for... their purpose is to resolve a DM's indecision i.e. when the DM doesn't want the responsibility to decide an outcome. Does the Barbarian break the door, does the Rogue find the trap, does the Wizard know the arcane symbol? The rules allow the DM to decide yes or no, or let the dice decide instead.

I used to call for a lot of Athletics checks but why? Why did I have to let the dice decide for every tree to be climbed, hole to be jumped or door to be forced? Having too frequent checks meant that Athletics had become a must-have or no-brainer at least for one PC in every party. But it also meant to have a LOT more failures than necessary, so I cut it short and let my players know I would not call so many Athletics checks anymore.

Persuasion had its own issue because it's used for contests (not always but still), and those make a lot more sense to leave it to the dice, since they are challenges between characters. It got used more often than Deception which in turn got used more than Intimidation, presumably because players prefer parleying nicely than aggressively (when they want to be aggressive, they rather attack). But I managed to balance the three of them better when I realized that Intimidation doesn't have to be called for only when the PCs want the targets to believe THEY are the threat, but also when ANYTHING ELSE is the threat. Meaning, use Intimidation whenever the purpose is to scare the target as in "if you don't do as I say, something bad will happen to you". It helped turning a lot of Persuasion checks into Intimidation.

That said, I still haven't managed to decrease the amount of Perception checks using similar ideas, mainly because of the checks against being surprised, they are still a lot.

Charlaquin · Jan 31, 2021

Hard to pick just 6. Obviously Perception and Stealth are always big ones. Athletics is pretty common as it gets applied to the majority strength checks. Investigation is less common than Perception but it gets it’s fair share of use. Insight is the Perception of social interactions. And that only leaves me with one more, for which I was torn between the social skills, as they all get quite a bit of use (except animal handling), but I went with Persuasion.

el-remmen · Jan 31, 2021

Athletics, Intimidation, Perception, Persuasion, Stealth.

Blue · Jan 31, 2021

Li Shenron said:
I still have some open issues with overusing Perception.

I find when I run I'm about 50% perception, 35% investigation, and 15% insight. It was a definite retraining from earlier editions where "Spot" was the god of noticing things to call for different checks. Whenever there's a more specific skill, including things like Survival to track or notice spore, I do that. But I play with a DM who is like 80% perception, it's really almost like a skill tax. My first character with him was a bard who I gave expertise with it, it came up that much.

I don't really want more gradations of Perception because I don't want bloat, but I do wish it wasn't so front and center. Also if you have something like a Loxadon's Keen Smell that grants advantage on smell based perception, insight and investigation checks, those are almost always perception.

Li Shenron said:
I used to have too many Athletics and Persuasion, but eventually I realised the problem is not with the system. It is all our fault. We just assume that there HAS to be a check to resolve challenges, but that's not really what ability checks are for... their purpose is to resolve a DM's indecision i.e. when the DM doesn't want the responsibility to decide an outcome. Does the Barbarian break the door, does the Rogue find the trap, does the Wizard know the arcane symbol? The rules allow the DM to decide yes or no, or let the dice decide instead.

I see where this could be a problem. But for me athletics and acrobatics are much more coming up in Challenges (think more freeform 4e skill challenges). For example while climbing through an extended cave complex there was chutes that required climbing, where the default for that is STR (Athletics), and planned if they had a few navigation failures was for them to start making CON (Athletics) checks to stave off levels of exhaustion.

Athletics also comes up mechanically in every offensive grapple and a good number of breaking grapples, which inflates the count.

Li Shenron said:
Persuasion had its own issue because it's used for contests (not always but still), and those make a lot more sense to leave it to the dice, since they are challenges between characters. It got used more often than Deception which in turn got used more than Intimidation, presumably because players prefer parleying nicely than aggressively (when they want to be aggressive, they rather attack). But I managed to balance the three of them better when I realized that Intimidation doesn't have to be called for only when the PCs want the targets to believe THEY are the threat, but also when ANYTHING ELSE is the threat. Meaning, use Intimidation whenever the purpose is to scare the target as in "if you don't do as I say, something bad will happen to you". It helped turning a lot of Persuasion checks into Intimidation.

This is a really good idea, I'll borrow this if you don't mind.

Oofta · Jan 31, 2021

Maxperson said:
Wow. I'm still the only one who picked religion. Given the prevalence of holy symbols on even commoners here in the real world, the game I run has religious symbology, holy days, etc. for the dozens of gods all over the place. That and I still use it for undead lore. It comes up a lot.

It was #7 for me.

DND_Reborn · Jan 31, 2021

Athletics
Stealth
Arcana
Investigation
Perception
Survival

Popular but not picked: Acrobatics, Insight, and Persuasion.

With more choices, I would have added Acrobatics and Insight, but not Persuasion (Deception and Intimidation would be more used IME).

Sword of Spirit · Jan 31, 2021

The only one I find disproportionate is Perception. Stealth would be so if we used it much, but we don't.

I initially included Investigation, but only because I finally decided to ignore the way the rules tell you to use Perception vs Investigation (which is that Perception is generally required for traps and secret doors, and Investigation might be useful as a follow up after you detect them with Perception) and instead said that Investigation always works by itself to find traps and secret doors, and Perception might work as an alternate method for some traps/doors. Then I decided that is a good amount of usage in the proper situations, rather than disproportionate.

tetrasodium · Jan 31, 2021

I use arcana a lot when I gm for investigating anything understanding or getting clues about most magic* but notice that a lot of gm's don't use it as much more than "do you remember the page this thing was written on in some book" so disappointed to see only about 20% of people listed it. arcana is also used to feel magical energy in stuff at my table.

* This includes but is not limited to things like a safe or building warded with various magical enchantments beyond ye olde lock akin to hollywood style hackers like this real world tool but less premade & more use of crystals/lenses/reading of runic or glyph based clues

Ashrym · Feb 1, 2021

Shiroiken said:
...my real issue is with the "worthless" skills that pretty much never see play: Animal Handling, Medicine, and Performance. Animal Handling can be used to placate beasts, either in an encounter to control a mount/pack animal, but PCs usually just kill the beast and don't use mounts/pack animals much. Medicine is completely worthless thanks to Healer's Kit, Poisoner's Kit, and Herbalist's Kit, which can all provide the same use. Performance is similar to Medicine...

I use all 3 regularly. Medicine with the forensics checks that published adventures use have caused me to also use them, perform to create friendly environments or making contacts or influencing how 3rd parties might be viewed by NPC's, or controlling mounts and pets with animal handling.

Havin a horse run away with all your equipment (and possibly the PC riding it) because it panics isn't good.

I still believe it's not that skills are useless -- it's DM's and players don't always choose or know how to use them. ;-)