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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maxperson" data-source="post: 8655193" data-attributes="member: 23751">So if something applies equally to anyone who uses it, it's not a penalty for using it that someone else doesn't have.It's not absolute at all.  You don't get to control whether or not the DM calls for an ability check.  If you cross the room during that fight and hit something unexpected, you're rolling at disadvantage.  That's a penalty that only applies to the non-proficient shield user.Nope! You have disadvantage on ability checks.  You don't have complete control over when those happen. You can only control when you attack and when you cast spells, though if you've pulled out the shield for an emergency, you probably still want to make attacks or you're eventually going to die anyway.Less effective doesn't equal non-effective, and so what if it takes an action.  You pulled it out in an emergency.That's untrue as a general statement.  Circumstances might warrant giving up an important attack that round in order to gain the added defense.  Further, other rounds may still have important attacks that happen in addition still wanting that defense.Um.  First off, the two bolded statements contradict each other.  Second, you never know when that 10% is going to help out.  It could be the first attack, or it could be the tenth.  If you are close to death and the creature does a lot of damage, you might want to toss the Hail Mary and hope it works out in your favor.And you are flat out wrong.  Hail Mary's do happen.  I've watched enough football to know that.  You can say that it's unlikely to help, but you cannot say that it is not useful in an emergency, because you don't know whether it will be or not.A 10% extra chance of the creature missing is going to be vastly more useful in an emergency combat situation than any carpenter or mason tool ever will be.  Further, it will be helpful in far more combat scenarios than those tools will be useful in non-combat scenarios.  You're going to get into emergency combat situations far more often than "emergency" carpenter or mason situations, whatever those look like.  I've been playing since 1983 and I can't recall a single emergency instance where I needed to build a chair.Same.  Neither of those require tool proficiency, though.  Those are knowledge checks to see what they mean.  History, religion and arcana are going to be infinitely more useful than being able to mimic a painting or glyph.  Being able to paint a glyph has no bearing on whether you know what it means or not.Perhaps you are talking about the Xanathar suggestions for how to make tools more useful than they actually are.  Those don't make any sense.  Someone who knows the history of paintings or knowledge of arcane glyphs isn't going to be any better at knowing about either by virtue of being able to paint or draw a glyph.  It's a contrived bonus to make subpar proficiencies better.Incorrect.  People who do things for character concept can and will make the trade.  Even if you don't use the other proficiencies, the one of the type of armor you wear will be useful in 6-8 encounters per day.  Further, the ability to just pick up and wear the magic armor you just found of one of the other types will still be more useful than a tool proficiency that will rarely, if ever used.It would really suck to give up your medium armor proficiency right before you find that +3 medium armor.</blockquote>

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