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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8091338" data-attributes="member: 6779196">That’s why no DM on earth says that in actual play. In my experience, DMs who point out that “there’s no such thing as skill checks” do one of two things: Either they ask for an ability check and suggest a proficiency that might apply (e.g. “make a strength check, plus Athletics if you have it), or - more often - they ask for an ability check and leave it up to the player to suggest a proficiency that might apply (e.g. “make a strength check.” “Can I add Athletics?” “Sure/No.” In some cases, the DM tells the players they don’t need to ask.So, this actually goes all the way back to the D&D Next Playtest. From the very first packets, skils were not bundled with any particular ability score, so only the skill bonus was written next to them on the playtest character sheets, rather than the skill bonus and the ability modifier added together. And in the playtest adventures, there were no skills written next to the ability checks in parentheses. That was a later addition, and they were meant to be suggestions for a proficiency that might apply. This kinda got lost in translation in the final draft, but it isn’t that “Strength (Athletics)” was seen as an improvement over “Athletics,” it’s that it was seen as an improvement over “Strength.”If you’d like to see actual play of people playing it this way, there’s an old stream of Mike Mearls running Against the Slave Lords (IIRC) concerted to the playtest rules somewhere on the Internet. It’s a pain to find, but it’s still around if you look hard enough. And it’s a painfully boring stream.This is accurate, but if the DM assumes good faith on the part of the player, they can set the expectation that they will make that call in the affirmative under the assumption that the player will make an appropriate choice using their own best judgment. Not all DMs would be comfortable setting such an expectation, and that’s fine.I do find this rather frustrating myself. I’m working on a custom character sheet that will address this problem at my own table.So is the ability-first method. It only seems to be difficult to explain to people who already have entrenched notions about “skill checks” from previous editions.You can say what ever you like, but the fact that “make an athletics check” is a viable shorthand for “make a Strength (Athletics) check” in your games is a clear indication that the difference is more than semantic, as it would not be a viable shorthand in mine. We are clearly following meaningfully different procedures.</blockquote>

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