MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Say the party comes across a terribly mauled corpse. It would seem logical that a character skilled in both investigation AND medicine would be in a better position to determine what creature mauled the corpse and other details than a character skill in only one of the skills.
Party finds a magic relic. if you are skilled in both arcana and history, would you not have a better chance of knowing something about it than someone with a skill in just one?
But the rules state that "Your proficiency bonus can't be added to a single die roll or other number more than once."
I try to keep to the RAW, but I'm wondering if there is room to let characters with complementary skills benefit from that.
What I do, is when you have to two skills that can apply, I let you roll using both. Basically, it acts like advantage. Maybe your history skill wasn't helpful, but your arcana skill was.
I think that better reflects the value of overlapping expertise.
Generally I only allow this for knowledge-based skills. Your extra knowledge and study gives you extra rolls.
For activities that require both acrobatics and athletics, I treat it a bit differently. You are basically making multiple skill rolls for different things. For example, if you have to run along a railing an make a big jump to a balcony, you would roll independently for a dexterity (acrobatics) check to run along the railing and a strength (athletics) check to jump. Once isn't really helping the other. I find "athletics" to be rather silly as a "skill", but that's perhaps a topic for another thread.
Does anyone else do anything similar? How do you handle overlapping skill sets?
Party finds a magic relic. if you are skilled in both arcana and history, would you not have a better chance of knowing something about it than someone with a skill in just one?
But the rules state that "Your proficiency bonus can't be added to a single die roll or other number more than once."
I try to keep to the RAW, but I'm wondering if there is room to let characters with complementary skills benefit from that.
What I do, is when you have to two skills that can apply, I let you roll using both. Basically, it acts like advantage. Maybe your history skill wasn't helpful, but your arcana skill was.
I think that better reflects the value of overlapping expertise.
Generally I only allow this for knowledge-based skills. Your extra knowledge and study gives you extra rolls.
For activities that require both acrobatics and athletics, I treat it a bit differently. You are basically making multiple skill rolls for different things. For example, if you have to run along a railing an make a big jump to a balcony, you would roll independently for a dexterity (acrobatics) check to run along the railing and a strength (athletics) check to jump. Once isn't really helping the other. I find "athletics" to be rather silly as a "skill", but that's perhaps a topic for another thread.
Does anyone else do anything similar? How do you handle overlapping skill sets?