D&D (2024) Size, Carrying Capacity, Strength, Athletics, Mobility

[Yaarel]

Each Ability needs to represent a clear, useful, and discrete gaming concept.

Charisma needs to be the go-to for every social skill, and emotional intelligence. Charisma does better to include Empathy/Insight, being inseparable from understanding and influencing people.

Wisdom is an artificial mess without a coherent concept. As-is, it means something like a "sense of self" including sanity, plus the ability to "pay attention".

Intelligence needs to include all "intuition" checks, especially to represent scientific intuition with its protoscientific speculations. Emotional relationship intuitions are Charisma.

The current confusion between Strength and Dexterity is a glaring mess, because of how it mechanically sabotages the swashbuckling archetype that is vital for the fantasy genre.

A rogue shouldn't have to briefly consider (and then soundly rejecting) the idea of pumping valuable ability points into Strength just to get a decent Athletics value that you want solely because you can't jump or climb without it. Getting Misty Step (or something similar) is a much cheaper approach.

To use either Strength or Dexterity for all Athletics checks is the down and dirty fix. It helps the Rogue class and the Fighter class, and makes Strength useful for classes that dont depend on it.


Within the Abilities design space, it needs to be Strength Ability that handles all Athletics, as the go-to concept. Use Climb checks to balance and Jump checks to land a jump or a fall. Currently Athletics is barely a useful Ability, and needs to consolidate the illogical Acrobatics, a historical artifact glitch.

That said. Within the class design space, the Monk should have a class feature that can use Dexterity instead of Strength for all Athletics checks. Probably, the same or similar class feature goes for the Rogue class too.


Investing in any Ability is a big deal, a huge investment with serious opportunity costs. To force any player to invest in TWO Abilities for little gain, merely to fix a terrible game design that interferes with a straightforward concept, is insane.

when someone is falling and grabbing a cliff edge.

Obviously if someone is falling and grabbing on to a cliff edge, Strength matters. This is a Climb check to see if the person can hold on.


To land a jump (or a fall) with little or no injury is a skillful Jump check.

 

[Yaarel]

the higher the DC, the more every single +1 is worth.

Exactly.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

You are talking about class abilities & the isolated comparative isolated weight of individual class abilities. That's a completely different topic than the skill system. With 5e they built the skill system around most every PC having the same number of do everything overcondensed skills. Splitting those combined skills in a way that actually impacts play is an extremely nontrivial adjustment for a GM to make because it needs to one by one review each class most every subclass & quite a few abilities to work out any one off rulings. Going the other way would be easy because PCs almost always work out at least as good & any gains are part of the goal in the skill consolidation rather than a thing that is likely to need one off exceptions.

I bring it up because casters are less impacted by skill nerfs, because they have spells, which by mid tier become the default means of doing anything in the exploration pillar in D&D. They even have a spell to give them a proficiency. It's the same reason a flat tax disproportionately impacts the less wealthy. Noncasters rely on skills more because they have fewer levers. Athletics barely even DOES anything as it stands, and does even less in 5.5 with escape a grapple moving to Strength/Dex saves. It doesn't let you run faster, carry more, climb/swim faster beyond a binary pass/fail, or even jump further other than 5E's default "make it up!".

Swimming isn't super likely to be impactful in most games. Is it really worthy of the same resource allocation as Persuasion or Deception?

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Exactly.

EVen better, keep to lower DC's and add in crits for exceeding by 10. In PF2E, each +1 is a 10% increased chance to crit.

5E needs a better degree of success and failure (and ideally fail with forward progress and success with consequence).

 

[Yaarel]

EVen better, keep to lower DC's and add in crits for exceeding by 10. In PF2E, each +1 is a 10% increased chance to crit.

5E needs a better degree of success and failure (and ideally fail with forward progress and success with consequence).

Explain how a "crit" might work in a 5e skill check?

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Explain how a "crit" might work in a 5e skill check?

So for example in our last game the party decided to lure a fairly smart brigand leader out of his lair under false premises to an ambush. They wanted him to go alone, which I had already decided didn't make sense for the character, so that wasn't on the table. On a success, he would send some lieutenants to investigate the claims, which would be a moderate challenge to ambush and defeat, weakening his base for further assault. On a crit he would actually investigate himself with a few retainers, leaving the tougher lieutenants back to manage things. Failure would be either he was wasn't interested/didnt believe them and a crit failure meant he would try and imprison the party members sent to parlay to ransom (or probably kill them if they resisted). The party presented a good idea, and rolled well, so he and a few goons went off with them. To my surprise the party ended up allying with him upon learning more of his backstory and ended up ambushing and killing the captain of the guard instead, but that's another story.

When I run a skill challenge, it tends to need X degrees of success before Y failures. Crits count as two successes. I like lower DC's (5-10-15) so people with investment are more likely to crit. I crib a lot from PF2E, so complicated traps with an in combat routine require multiple checks to disarm, critting lets you redirect the next attack.

Off the cuff, I would say something like athletics running faster a DC 10 to increase movement by 10, crit/DC 20 to Dash as a bonus action. Failure you can have it at the cost of an exhaustion. My exhaustion is more forgiving, losing a degree on a short rest/lesser restoration.

 

[Yaarel]

So for example in our last game the party decided to lure a fairly smart brigand leader out of his lair under false premises to an ambush. They wanted him to go alone, which I had already decided didn't make sense for the character, so that wasn't on the table. On a success, he would send some lieutenants to investigate the claims, which would be a moderate challenge to ambush and defeat, weakening his base for further assault. On a crit he would actually investigate himself with a few retainers, leaving the tougher lieutenants back to manage things. Failure would be either he was wasn't interested/didnt believe them and a crit failure meant he would try and imprison the party members sent to parlay to ransom (or probably kill them if they resisted). The party presented a good idea, and rolled well, so he and a few goons went off with them. To my surprise the party ended up allying with him upon learning more of his backstory and ended up ambushing and killing the captain of the guard instead, but that's another story.

When I run a skill challenge, it tends to need X degrees of success before Y failures. Crits count as two successes. I like lower DC's (5-10-15) so people with investment are more likely to crit. I crib a lot from PF2E, so complicated traps with an in combat routine require multiple checks to disarm, critting lets you redirect the next attack.

Off the cuff, I would say something like athletics running faster a DC 10 to increase movement by 10, crit/DC 20 to Dash as a bonus action. Failure you can have it at the cost of an exhaustion. My exhaustion is more forgiving, losing a degree on a short rest/lesser restoration.

A "crit" means a check total of 5 or more above the DC requirement? (It doesnt mean a natural 20?)

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

A "crit" means a check total of 5 or more above the DC requirement? (It doesnt mean a natural 20?)

10+. I also have combat crits on a 10 over AC (9+ for champions or other effects that lower the crit threshold).

 

[Yaarel]

10+. I also have combat crits on a 10 over AC (9+ for champions or other effects that lower the crit threshold).

A total of a 10 or more above the DC is a friendly round number to work with. That is a great mechanic and easy for 5e to employ. Probably all crits should work this way.

Is there any "reward" for a natural 20?

 

[ART!]

What if your Strength was your Size?

As in (using 5E terms) Tiny creatures default to having a Strength of 1, Small have 2, Medium have 3, etc.

Adjust granularity to suit the genre/subgenre, or tone.

Creatures that are unusual strong for their size might have a Strength that's their size +1.