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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7819021" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Not all fighters would be great tacticians. I can see many of them not being more than a great personal scale fighter. A Valor Bard, however, might be a good way of representing someone focused on being an officer or leader. (Not that D&D has really ever done much past individual figure small unit combat.) In many respects, it would have been nice for there to be some kind of class features that bumped that up the utility of a particular skill, with there being a few choices for players to make. Rather than putting in choices that just make PCs more powerful I'd suggest a boost to a more non-combat skill that's situational. For example rather than Expertise, which just feels kind of goofy, give a nice hefty bonus on History checks when the question regards tactics or battle issues. As to what I use with something like a History check for Tactics, I could see it being useful to identifying foes, knowledge about particular weapons (e.g., "this weapon looks like it's probably magical"), and might even let a PC check during combat for a bit of a hint about the enemy's battle plan. Of course, 5E's skill system is kind of an a-system with very little detail. For some DMs this is a feature not a bug, but it doesn't give much for most people---even quite experienced players and DMs---to work with. Contrast this with how much space is spent on spells and combat. I haven't used this kind of mechanic in 5E but one thing that I think might be a good way of doing this would be to have a "class level" check of some sort representing the knowledge that is accumulated by being in a particular class. The nice thing there is that multis automatically are worse at class level checks than pure classers. I can't recall if this kind of thing is one of the alternative skill systems in the DMG but it might be a useful way to run things: Proficiencies are allocated to classes, but the bonus is determined by some formula related to the number of class levels. It would be a bit complicated when skills are obtained from multiple classes, but not impossible to work out.</blockquote>

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