Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana: Get Better At Skills With These Feats

The latest Unearthed Arcana from Jeremy Crawford and again featuring guest writer Robert J. Schwalb introduces a number of feats which make you better at skills. Each increases the skill's primary ability score, doubles your proficiency bonus, and gives you a little bonus ability. "This week we introduce new feats to playtest. Each of these feats makes you better at one of the game’s eighteen skills. We invite you to read them, give them a try in play, and let us know what you think in the survey we release in the next installment of Unearthed Arcana."

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[Mistwell]

Ah, still low level, then. Expertise works fine until you hit around +4 proficiency bonus, then it become apparent that it's breaking down the bounded accuracy assumptions. Especially on opposed skill checks.

I am not sure it breaks it down, it just concludes it for that issue.

What I mean by that is, if you get high enough that you're hitting a 30, you win that type of contest. If we didn't have bounded accuracy, then it would be an arms race where people hitting 30 resulted in additional rules to allow for challenges to exceed 30 which would lead to more PC options to exceed 30 and on and on. Bounded accuracy draws a finishing line: if you can exceed this line, that's it, congratulations, you have focused all your limited resources into this thing and achieved the best you can be at it. You will win those sorts of contests now.

And then they designed the game such that focusing all your limited resources into one thing won't be that attractive an activity to do (given all the other interesting options you could be choosing), and the game should be able to accommodate it in most cases anyway (it's a relatively difficult game to break).

I personally prefer that approach to the arms race approach. But, by making these rules (feats) all optional anyway, they provide an easy fix if it ends up breaking something in your games.

I dunno, are you finding your games are not functioning well because of the expertise issue?

 

[Mistwell]

Since this is the Enworld 5e forums, and everything revolves around the sorcerer and warlord: I will say wins for both. The sorcerer can now know more spells, and someone playing one of the pseudo-warlord subclasses can be better at wardlord-y stuff while not getting any better at stabbing people (which makes it a double win).

I am tired. So I apologize for my laziness, but which feats are you referring to?

And speaking of classes that have spawned many threads, animal handler makes the BM ranger's life much better, although it pretty much precludes hunter's mark.

Yes I noticed that. Not a perfect solution, but a pretty good one. In fact, I think it might be fair to just give this feat to our BeastMaster ranger, if we hadn't already switched to the UA version.

 

[The_Hanged_Man]

Overall I like these. My one suggestion would be to change the contested rolls to saves based on the appropriate stats. As noted by others, the bonus from expertise would mean you almost always win the contest once you hit tier 3 play. Either that or make the bonus abilities have a limited number of uses per short for the feats with contested rolls.

 

[Over the Hill Gamer]

I like this a lot. It begins to address the issue of one size fits all proficiency bonuses.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I am tired. So I apologize for my laziness, but which feats are you referring to?

Mostly medic, historian (I apologize if I missed it, but I can't believe I haven't seen anyone referencing anything like "back in the battle of [insert FR reference here], we used X to get around those guys", because if a crusty, old warrior giving advice to youngsters isn't central to the definition of warlord, the definition is wrong), menacing (for the demotivational warlord), and performer (for the cheerleader warlord, although I would make its effect stronger). I would like to add silver tongued to the list, but it is too focused on the PC with the silver tongue (and who hasn't seen a movie or read a book where the silver tongued bad guy hasn't distracted someone so his buddy can stab the victim in the back?).

If I had a player playing a BM, I think I would give them the animal handler feat too.

Edit: I wouldn't mind historian's effect being powered up a bit too.

 

[Chaosmancer]

In my experience there's no contest: I have seen very few 1-level Rogue dips in actual play (theory, sure, but not when people play through the levels). If that is generally true, then the net result of these feats is weakening the Rogue. Does this help in the long run? I would say no.

I see a lot of pages between this post and where mine will be, but this was a point I felt I needed to address.

Giving expertise, in my opinion, does not weaken the rogue.

I see Cunning Action, Evasion, and Uncanny Dodge as much more iconic roguish abilities at my table, but even if you feel expertise is the Rogue thing, they still get Reliable talent at mid levels, which completely changes the math of the game by raising their minimum to new heights. So I do not see the Rogue weakened by these features, and in fact, as the skill monkey it allows them to get expertise in more skills, which has its own problem.

Ah, I see I misunderstood the medic feat. Limited to one HD? Why? What's the rationale for that? Seems pretty lame to me. If you're going to spend a feat, let the medic max out HD.

I agree with this, I have a hard time getting people to short rest (I had to argue with a cleric in my party that short resting and using their channel divinity was better than just resting 8 hours in the enemy fortress) and the Medic feat is worse than healer in a lot of ways, give it some major punch and a character with Medic and Healer will really feel like a combat medic without needing any magic.


The more I think about it, the more I like feats that give +1 Ability. Proficiency/expertise and some extra ability. I just want those extra abilities.

I mean, if you are worried about skills getting too high to be manageable, what do you do with a Rogue who has expertise and gets the help action. I have a party with a lot of rogues and the one pair is man and wife, and they almost never do any sort of investigation check without expertise and help, so +9 or so with advantage is the average I deal with a lot of the time.

These rules just give the option for other classes to do similar things with skills. And I’ll argue that even with these most bards and rogues are still going to be superior most of the time. It just makes it better for your fighter to be intimidating or your barbarian to be athletic and strong. It’s the skill tricks I want to see improved, those need to be worth something cool, because expertise in a skill you don’t have the ability for (Religion for clerics, since Int, or Intimidation [I’ve never seen a Charisma character use that skill, only melee types who are bad at charisma try it]) isn’t going to be nearly as useful as a lot of other things you could get, and it needs to be worth it to the player to invest in those skills

 

[Corwin]

Giving expertise, in my opinion, does not weaken the rogue.

Agreed. I even see the opposite being true. Reducing the need to multiclass, because you want expertise, means potentially less rogue dipping. Which reduces rogue dilution. Everyone taking a level of rogue, to be good at a skill or two, is what weakens rogues in my book. Now PCs can have another option.

 

[Corwin]

Heck, I might even consider a houserule to give every starting character one free pick from this list. Everyone gets something special to set them apart or highlight their capabilities. Yeah. I think I like that.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I am tired. So I apologize for my laziness, but which feats are you referring to?

Mostly medic, historian (I apologize if I missed it, but I can't believe I haven't seen anyone referencing anything like "back in the battle of [insert FR reference here], we used X to get around those guys", because if a crusty, old warrior giving advice to youngsters isn't central to the definition of warlord, the definition is wrong), menacing (for the demotivational warlord), and performer (for the cheerleader warlord, although I would make its effect stronger). I would like to add silver tongued to the list, but it is too focused on the PC with the silver tongue (and who hasn't seen a movie or read a book where the silver tongued bad guy hasn't distracted someone so his buddy can stab the victim in the back?).

If I had a player playing a BM, I think I would give them the animal handler feat too.

Edit: I wouldn't mind historian's effect being powered up a bit too.

I don't usually contemplate building a new class wholesale, but this has got me thinking of a Mentor class (with subclasses based on fighters, barbarians, rangers, rogues, and paladins) for the old timer who can still swing a sword (not as fast as he/she used to), but who is mostly there to guide the "young pups" on their adventures. I think that avoids the leadership issue of the warlord (since in fantasy the mentor's leadership is usually short lived: time for the chosen one(s) to step up to leadership) and fits the 1-20 class structure a little better (the mentor is learning how to be a better mentor [translate experience into teachable lessons/advice] as the party progresses--also reflecting a switch from mentor to advisor as the party gains more xp). I am not sure if it will happen (or when), but it has got me thinking.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I am not sure it breaks it down, it just concludes it for that issue.

What I mean by that is, if you get high enough that you're hitting a 30, you win that type of contest. If we didn't have bounded accuracy, then it would be an arms race where people hitting 30 resulted in additional rules to allow for challenges to exceed 30 which would lead to more PC options to exceed 30 and on and on. Bounded accuracy draws a finishing line: if you can exceed this line, that's it, congratulations, you have focused all your limited resources into this thing and achieved the best you can be at it. You will win those sorts of contests now.

And then they designed the game such that focusing all your limited resources into one thing won't be that attractive an activity to do (given all the other interesting options you could be choosing), and the game should be able to accommodate it in most cases anyway (it's a relatively difficult game to break).

I personally prefer that approach to the arms race approach. But, by making these rules (feats) all optional anyway, they provide an easy fix if it ends up breaking something in your games.

I dunno, are you finding your games are not functioning well because of the expertise issue?

I find they function less well. This is largely due to monster design not incorporating any real attempt at skills proficiency or expertise allows contested rolls to be heavily skewed in favor of expertise without DM adjustment. Stealth vs perception, for one, as a rogue just following archetype wins stealth related contests with a large portion of the MM by 9th level, and almost all of it by 11th (reliable skill paired with expertise is kinda off). This requires zero feat interaction. And no, I have no problem with rogues being good at sneaking, but it leads to a rather static game where the rogue almost always surprises the foe. Usually surprises is better than almost always.

Shield master + brawny is another big deal, where I might as well allow the shield master a straight bonus action to shove or knock prone his target. Only a handful of creatures are trained in athletics (giants, notably), so this is nearly an autosuccess on opposed rolls.

Diplomacy, now, with this new feat, becomes extremely easy to use, as does deception. Again, being able to push into nearly assured success on opposed rolls removes something vital from the game. Players will begin to angle to always use their I win buttons, and either the DM has to force situations that it doesn't work or inflate DCs on occasion to prevent it from being an I win button.

I didn't like the expertise rules when they were limited to specific classes (although rogue has most of my least favorite mechanisms, and I like rogue archetypes), now it appears to be something that's easily worth trading a +1 to a stat to get expertise and a nifty ability.