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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thank Dog" data-source="post: 6399755" data-attributes="member: 6780250">Currently my biggest annoyance with 5e is the skills. In fact, it's not even the skills so much as it is how they're still tied to abilities. Moreover, abilities that I don't feel make any sense in relation to how the skills predominantly work. In the case of Survival, for instance, I feel it has been shoehorned onto Wisdom solely to suit the ranger. And clerics being perceptive has bugged me ever since the Perception skill was introduced. And Animal Handling for riding using Wisdom just feels wrong in so many ways.Every time I bring this subject up as a separate gripe about a particular skill, however, one of the common factors in retorts is, "You can just use a different ability for different situations." This, I already know. The problem stems from the assumption that a skill will always use the default ability score. Moreover, this assumption is intrinsically supported by the character sheet and the ability descriptions in the PHB. Due to these factors, breaking away from that paradigm is problematic in anything but a home game where I am the DM and even then, players gripe that their expectations are not met.5e, however, does offer a possible "out" that could one day result in a turn-around of this paradigm. The default assumption for 5e isn't making a skill check, but rather an ability check and adding proficiency to it if you have a skill that relates to the task. This subtle alteration to the way in which skills work has, so far and in my experience, been overshadowed by player and DM assumptions as to how the system works, based on knowledge of previous system mechanics.So I'm hoping that I can encourage players and DM's to divorce skills from default abilities. To do so I encourage players and DM's to make character sheets with only those skills with which the character has proficiency being listed and not associated in any way with ability scores. DM's asking players to make Ability Checks rather than skill checks and adding in that a player with proficiency in a certain skill can add it to the check. For instance, if a DM feels that Constitution makes more sense for a Perception (after all, eyes, ears, taste, touch & smell are all related to the healthy functioning of the body and nervous system) check, ask the players to make a Constitution Check and tell them to add their proficiency bonus if they're proficient in Perception. Or if they need to control a horse, a Dexterity Check and add their proficiency bonus if they're proficient in Animal Handling, etc.Now, you might not agree with my above examples but that's actually something that I feel speaks in favour of this method. Your group does it their way instead of falling back on the default assumptions. Maybe Intelligence makes more sense to you for Perception checks. Maybe Strength makes more sense for Intimidate checks. Whatever the DM determines is appropriate in a particular situation and what players agree to is what it should be, not what everyone assumes it is because the character sheet has it written down and automatically calculated for them. In this way, this method also makes the skill system far more flexible and interesting.To me, making an Ability Check with an ability that is appropriate to the situation, and adding proficiency with a skill that is appropriate to the situation, makes far more sense than the default assumptions that tie certain abilities to certain skills. It's also a very simple change to make but one that I feel will have a profound effect, for the positive, on people's games and experiences with the 5e system. But it is also a change that will require a certain amount of effort on a majority of people's parts in order for it to become the new paradigm. Breaking away from established methodologies is difficult at first but I think is worth the effort in the long run.</blockquote>

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