What Skills are Underused?

[the Jester]

In your experience, which skills are underused? Which need more ways to come into play? Obviously this will vary by group- this thread was inspired by a post mentioning that Religion gets less love than Arcana in their campaign- but I'm curious what everyone thinks. I'll post my own answer in a bit.

 

[keterys]

Well, looking at the skill list for a second:

Acrobatics: Combat, and Physical SCs
Arcana: Monster Knowledge, Ritual SCs including often in combat SCs
Athletics: Combat, and Physical SCs
Bluff: Social SCs, sometimes useful for bypassing encounters entirely or achieving surprise
Diplomacy: Social SCs, sometimes useful for bypassing or ending encounters early or getting better options
Dungeoneering: Monster Knowledge, Survival SCs
Endurance: Disease, Survival SCs
Heal: Combat (mostly for giving saves, so less useful investment past Heroic), lesser role in investigative or Survival SCs
History: lesser role in Investigative, Ritual, or Social SCs
Insight: Social SCs, sometimes useful for avoiding surprise
Intimidate: Social SCs, sometimes useful for avoiding combat or ending it early
Nature: Monster Knowledge, Survival SCs, some Ritual SCs
Perception: Combat, generic Exploration as well as Investigative and Survival SCs, lesser role Social and Physical SCs
Religion: Monster Knowledge, Ritual SCs, including often in combat SCs
Stealth: Niche used for scouting and rogues in combat, Survival SCs
Streetwise: Social SCs
Thievery: Delaying Traps, lesser role in only a few SCs

So, looking over that, Streetwise, Thievery, Stealth, History.

 

[Mengu]

Very character/party/campaign/DM dependent. My gut feeling would be:

Most used: Athletics, Diplomacy, Perception

Some use: Acrobatics, Arcana, Heal, Insight, Intimidate, Nature, Religion, Stealth, Thievery

Least used: Bluff, Dungeoneering, Endurance, History, Streetwise

But in some games, there will be a character who is all about his Bluff, and it gets used a lot, whereas, in one of my games, Thievery rarely gets used, because no one has it, I try to avoid making it part of skill challenges, and use it just enough to make them ponder if one of them should train the skill.

In one of our games, we are almost always outdoors, and Nature is used a lot. In a city based campaign, that might be replaced by the frequent use of Streetwise, and in a dungeon exploration campaign, it will probably be Dungeoneering.

 

[Larrin]

Streetwise; We barely ever spend time in cities, thus we never use this.

oddly enough my first instinct was insight, but i guess we use it every now and then when we suspect the DM is having people lie to us, it usually just tells us what we already knew or that we should pretend we don't know what we already know.

 

[Kingreaper]

Streetwise is a definite.

I'm thinking of allowing it to detect scenery powers in urban fights. Possibly also for monster knowledge checks.

Even with those though, it'd still be pretty rare in my main campaign. It'd just mean that in the urban campaign (if that goes to 4e) it was worthwhile.

Dungeoneering? Haven't spent much time in dungeons. If we did, it'd come up, so I'm okay with it, it's a skill you get if you're ready for dungeon life.

History would be an issue, but using it for the occassional monster knowledge check helps a lot.



Stealth, arcana and perception probably take center stage though, with everything else being far rarer than those three.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For my game the answer begins and ends at Streetwise. Reason being is because it ends up being nothing more than a criminal/street urchin analog of Diplomacy, and once my party got past like 3rd level they became more reknowned, and never really talked with the lower class folks anymore. On the rarest of occasions the rogue might 'take to the streets' to gather some info... but that occurs so rarely that having a specific skill for it ends up being kind of pointless. It would have been better to have just removed Streetwise from the game, and stuck with Diplomacy (for all positive communication regardless of the class of person being spoken to), Intimidate (for all negative communication), and Bluff (for all lying communication).

The only other one that comes close for us is Endurance, because starvation, thirst, suffocation, and fatigue occur so infrequently that we'd be better off with a different mechanics. Quite honestly I think in future iterations of the game I'd rather see starvation, thirst, suffocation, and fatigue all be treated like traps or damaging terrain, where they would become Attacks that a player would use his/her Fortitude defense to resist. Because that is really all Endurance is... a defense against long-term damage. And since we already have defenses, having the skill is a little redundant.

 

[OchreJelly]

Least used in our group is probably:
heal, streetwise, thievery.

Mind you we play mostly published adventures (H1-H3; P1-P3).

But clearly the star of the show is:
Perception.

I find it interesting that even the hardest perception DCs in the published adventures are laughably surpassed by one of the PC's passive perception. It seems pretty easy to beat the hardest DCs with a character trained in perception who has WIS as a primary stat.

 

[keterys]

Anecdotally, in the 4E Curse of the Crimson Throne games I've been running, Streetwise has been awesome. Yay for playing in a city... kinda like Nature + Dungeoneering in that respect, but without the side benefits.

Now, side question - which skills are only really an issue for _one_ person to have, vs ones that are useful for anyone to have.

 

[TerraDave]

Not even close to the issue it was in past editions.

I guess I am not seeing much heal or endurance, but these are things that could be hugely important when they come up. Also, my players could certainly get more use of their skills then they do, but they do use them. In any case, this seems like a strength of the edition.

 

[Bold or Stupid]

None.

Though it does depend on campaign, my city politics game has lots of use of streetwise and no use of nature (except when it does). The game that I've finished (ran 1-30) I called for rolls on every skill at some point.