Read the rules again, it clearly states that the DM can change which attribute applies to a skill use at their discretion. Running comes under Athletics which is usually rolled as Strength + Athletics, but there is no reason you couldn't swap Strength for Constitution for longer duration exertion such as marathon running, or rowing a boat across an ocean or large lake etc. It is completely up to the DM what to ask for on a skill check - just be fair to all players, and don't show bias when deciding. Another example could be a trick shot with a ranged weapon - such as a circus knife thrower, which could call for Intelligence + proficiency instead of Dexterity to work out the angles, or even Wisdom to correctly judge when to throw to hit a moving balloon.
Who are you replying to? Because there's no such thing as a "skill check" in 5e. You don't add ability modifiers to skill rolls, you add skill proficiencies to ability checks.
I know you can replace Athletics with a Con modifier, etc. But I believe that we should have a dedicated skill namely to promote it's use.
If there is an active Endurance skill, It will promote people and DM's to take advantage of it. Endurance could be anything from holding your breath a long time, To running long distance, or for more hardcore DM's; Reflect a strenuous battle.
The idea of Endurance is someone who focused on conditioning. Athletics =/= Cardio for example. A Bodybuilder could have horrible Cardio. Same goes for Acrobatics. Someone who is excellent at dodging and doing backflips, might not have focused their time into exercising their Cardio.
Endurance would be someone who focused on their ability to keep going without stopping. A Marathon runner who could go the distance, or a long-distance sprinter.
Maybe a fighter who could hold out longer in a fighting match.
Regardless, it gives Con a use beyond just HP and Saves.
I can see the arguement for wanting to split that off from athletics, the same way I could see someone wanting to say, split perception into sight and hearing based as separate things. Having sharp ears wouldn't translate to other senses for example. But for the sake of keeping the 5E skills as streamlined as they generally are right now, I think that just fits better under athletics and a DM can just call for con over str for an athletics check. Splitting out endurance just for the sake of having a skill to tie to con by default just feels like it's being more overly specific than other skills are. And HP being universally good for everyone makes CON already useful.
I can see the arguement for wanting to split that off from athletics, the same way I could see someone wanting to say, split perception into sight and hearing based as separate things. Having sharp ears wouldn't translate to other senses for example. But for the sake of keeping the 5E skills as streamlined as they generally are right now, I think that just fits better under athletics and a DM can just call for con over str for an athletics check. Splitting out endurance just for the sake of having a skill to tie to con by default just feels like it's being more overly specific than other skills are. And HP being universally good for everyone makes CON already useful.
Some skills are already overly specific, leading to their own problems. For example, Acrobatics is an incredibly niche skill with very few uses, and it's still much broader in scope than Sleight of Hand. For all of 5E, Acrobatics has led a dubious existence when it could always have been Dexterity (Athletics).
I can see the arguement for wanting to split that off from athletics, the same way I could see someone wanting to say, split perception into sight and hearing based as separate things. Having sharp ears wouldn't translate to other senses for example. But for the sake of keeping the 5E skills as streamlined as they generally are right now, I think that just fits better under athletics and a DM can just call for con over str for an athletics check. Splitting out endurance just for the sake of having a skill to tie to con by default just feels like it's being more overly specific than other skills are. And HP being universally good for everyone makes CON already useful.
Some skills are already overly specific, leading to their own problems. For example, Acrobatics is an incredibly niche skill with very few uses, and it's still much broader in scope than Sleight of Hand. For all of 5E, Acrobatics has led a dubious existence when it could always have been Dexterity (Athletics).
It's interesting that the PHB lists actions that actually are acrobatic "dives, rolls, somersaults..." in the second sentence in the skill description, preceded by the clause "The DM might also call for...". Whereas the first sentence tasks the acrobatic skill with things that aren't necessarily acrobatic, like balance the ability to keep your footing etc.
I think Athletics and Acrobatics could easily be conflated with the proposed endurance skill, and encouraged to be applied among the three abilities as fit.
Incidentally, to another post where someone talked about athletic endurance being divorced from acrobatic training. Dancers, gymnasts and other trained acrobats tend to take to endurance sports very well. I know of professional ballet dancers who BQ'd (qualified for the Boston Marathon) on their first marathon they were doing as a lark with little to no invested running training. The number of folks from those disciplines I've met on tracks or road or trail races who were picking it up and reaching endorsement deal level excellence is almost uncanny. I guess that experience shows why I find it easy to argue Athletics could easily be an explicitly broadly applied skill.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I know you can replace Athletics with a Con modifier, etc. But I believe that we should have a dedicated skill namely to promote it's use.
But why? Everything you ask for is already in the PHB. Basically you are asking for a rules-based solution for a DM-based problem. A DM who doesn't have the inventiveness or creativity (or just hasn't read the rules properly) won't magically become better at calling for the right ability rolls just because you add more complexity to the rules. Such a DM needs to re-read the rules that already exist, not be burdened by additional rules.
If there is an active Endurance skill, It will promote people and DM's to take advantage of it. Endurance could be anything from holding your breath a long time, To running long distance, or for more hardcore DM's; Reflect a strenuous battle.
All of those things you ask for is already covered by Constitution. As mentioned before, certain abilities affect "skills" that aren't covered by the skill list. Strength allowing you to wear heavy armour is one, holding your breath with Con is another. As is running and fighting a streneous battle.
The idea of Endurance is someone who focused on conditioning. Athletics =/= Cardio for example. A Bodybuilder could have horrible Cardio. Same goes for Acrobatics. Someone who is excellent at dodging and doing backflips, might not have focused their time into exercising their Cardio.
So the bodybuilder will have high strength but low Con and the backflipper will have high Dex and low Con. That's already in the game. Why would we want to complicated that?
Endurance would be someone who focused on their ability to keep going without stopping. A Marathon runner who could go the distance, or a long-distance sprinter.
So, someone with a high constitution but not necessarily a high strength or dex, then? Well, have I got good news for you! ;)
Maybe a fighter who could hold out longer in a fighting match.
Do you mean a fighter that could hold out longer with, say, second wind and action surge or just someone who has really good endurance? Because we already have the first and the second is probably just a Con + Athletics (or other suitable skill) roll.
Regardless, it gives Con a use beyond just HP and Saves.
I know you can replace Athletics with a Con modifier, etc. But I believe that we should have a dedicated skill namely to promote it's use.
By the way, I reiterate and simplify: You want to play 3.5/Pathfinder, where there are a lot more situationally specific "dedicated" skills for all manner of things. The entire system is more precise at the price of being much more complex. If that's what you want then just play Pathfinder, no need to customize and homebrew everything, just add yet another narrowly focused skill to the already available myriad list. 5e is specifically streamlined from 3.5 specifically to avoid all of those "extras" you want because it complicates the rules and bogs down gameplay, especially for new players. Also, the number of skills you can be proficient with in 5e is much more limited, and your hyper-specific "endurance" would mean having to drop another skill with broader uses such as Athletics, Stealth, Acrobatics, etc. Want the ability to have more skills so you can take a bunch of situationally specific ones? Go play Pathfinder already because that's what you're getting at.
I know you can replace Athletics with a Con modifier, etc. But I believe that we should have a dedicated skill namely to promote it's use.
By the way, I reiterate and simplify: You want to play 3.5/Pathfinder, where there are a lot more situationally specific "dedicated" skills for all manner of things. The entire system is more precise at the price of being much more complex. If that's what you want then just play Pathfinder, no need to customize and homebrew everything, just add yet another narrowly focused skill to the already available myriad list. 5e is specifically streamlined from 3.5 specifically to avoid all of those "extras" you want because it complicates the rules and bogs down gameplay, especially for new players. Also, the number of skills you can be proficient with in 5e is much more limited, and your hyper-specific "endurance" would mean having to drop another skill with broader uses such as Athletics, Stealth, Acrobatics, etc. Want the ability to have more skills so you can take a bunch of situationally specific ones? Go play Pathfinder already because that's what you're getting at.
Technically in 5e the DM has full authority over whether you can apply proficiency to an ability check. The DM can decide that a certain skill applies to the check, and if your character sheet has proficiency in that skill, you get to add your proficiency. Or the DM can simply arbitrarily decide at the time of the check whether your character has proficiency in the check. A DM who house rules a bunch of additional skill proficiencies is playing completely within 5e RAW. They have simply created for themselves a consistent set of guidelines for how they will decide if proficiency is allowed on rolls.
I can see the argument about acrobatics but still feel there's enough wiggle room there to make both useful to justify acrobatics being separate from athletics. While I can see the argument though endurance as its own skill just feels even more specific. The fact that it's not about something 'different' you would do from athletics, but merely how 'long' you're doing it makes it feel like just swapping to con athletics is a better solution than a new skill. I feel like skills should generally be more active, describe things you're doing, rather than having a skill for being good at doing something for long strenuous periods of time. Doing something athletic for a strenuous period of time feels to me like it doesn't really warrant a new skill to compete with others, but rather should just swap to constitution instead of strength, or just do a con saving throw to see if the character can keep it up over a long period of time.
Also I get this is going to be a case by case thing with different games so maybe the games i"m in are an outlier, but I generally find acrobatics comes up enough to justify its inclusion.
I can see the argument about acrobatics but still feel there's enough wiggle room there to make both useful to justify acrobatics being separate from athletics. While I can see the argument though endurance as its own skill just feels even more specific. The fact that it's not about something 'different' you would do from athletics, but merely how 'long' you're doing it makes it feel like just swapping to con athletics is a better solution than a new skill. I feel like skills should generally be more active, describe things you're doing, rather than having a skill for being good at doing something for long strenuous periods of time. Doing something athletic for a strenuous period of time feels to me like it doesn't really warrant a new skill to compete with others, but rather should just swap to constitution instead of strength, or just do a con saving throw to see if the character can keep it up over a long period of time.
Also I get this is going to be a case by case thing with different games so maybe the games i"m in are an outlier, but I generally find acrobatics comes up enough to justify its inclusion.
Survival is a good example of a skill that is used in similar timeframes as "Endurance."
That said, I'm more in the camp of chucking acrobatics and just using Athletics over DEX/CON/STR as needed. Re: Athletics, really the backflips and rolls etc. are functionally fluff in the game, unless you're doing it for an aesthetic effect ... where we have performance (another really broad skill). Really acrobatics in game usually describes some sort of parkour type move, which can have "fluff" added to them but are often just precision jumping. I think, as the issue has been presented, the "5e" style way would actually eliminate acrobatics and broaden athletics rather than come up with an endurance skill.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I assume some of the proficiencies' existence has more to do with "this is something class X should be good at, but only in this particular way" than with "we just want to group skills in broad proficiencies". I mean, I can see why WotC gave Fighters Athletics as a possible class proficiency but chose to leave out Acrobatics for them.
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Acrobatics has some uses. My rule of thumb is, if you would see it in Olympic gymnastics, it's acrobatics. If you would see it in any other Olympic event, it's athletics (could be Str (Athletics), Dex (Athletics), or Con (Athletics) depending on the sport).
The things they do in gymnastics include balancing, flips and handstands, and hanging and swinging. Now flips in a D&D setting might be purely for show, but balancing and swinging certainly have their place. I also would use Acrobatics for safely landing from a height. While high jumping is Athletics, high jumpers in the Olympics make no attempt to stick the landing. I would also use Acrobatics for an attempt to long jump and land on a small, awkward platform. The show Floor is Lava would be mostly Acrobatics, not Athletics.
Certainly some of the events in gymnastics are Str (Acrobatics), but I'm not sure those are useful in an adventuring context. Mostly you would use Dex (Acrobatics).
Who are you replying to? Because there's no such thing as a "skill check" in 5e. You don't add ability modifiers to skill rolls, you add skill proficiencies to ability checks.
I don’t play pointless pedantic ‘argue the exact dictionary definition of words’. Go troll someone that gives a damn.
Acrobatics has some uses. My rule of thumb is, if you would see it in Olympic gymnastics, it's acrobatics. If you would see it in any other Olympic event, it's athletics (could be Str (Athletics), Dex (Athletics), or Con (Athletics) depending on the sport).
The things they do in gymnastics include balancing, flips and handstands, and hanging and swinging. Now flips in a D&D setting might be purely for show, but balancing and swinging certainly have their place. I also would use Acrobatics for safely landing from a height. While high jumping is Athletics, high jumpers in the Olympics make no attempt to stick the landing. I would also use Acrobatics for an attempt to long jump and land on a small, awkward platform. The show Floor is Lava would be mostly Acrobatics, not Athletics.
Certainly some of the events in gymnastics are Str (Acrobatics), but I'm not sure those are useful in an adventuring context. Mostly you would use Dex (Acrobatics).
One of the ones the rules get wrong is climbing. If it has to be one or the other, it should be an acrobatics check, not athletics. While strength definitely becomes a variable with increasing difficulty, if it isn't coupled with the techniques that fit more on the gymnastic side, it's most often useless. It's also bizarre that the average barbarian is going to be better at climbing than the average rogue or possibly ranger. Even this proposed 'Endurance' skill might be more suitable than Athletics for anything over 60'.
I disagree. It should be Dex (Athletics). My rule of "is it Olympic gymnastics" says that climbing is not Acrobatics.
Circus acts are another application of gymnastics. But rock climbing isn't like either of those. Acrobatics deals more with dynamic balance: keeping your orientation while tumbling and flipping. Rock climbing does involve static balance and flexibility, but those are generic Dex abilities that are likewise involved in Stealth. There are occasionally dynamic moves in rock climbing, but those are kind of advanced.
I agree rogues should be better than barbarians at climbing, since if anything the strength involved in climbing needs to be in proportion to your weight, and people who are small but strong for their weight are usually agile, but not necessarily good at lifting heavy objects.
For climbing specifically, if it's say, climbing up a cliff or wall, I'd go with athletics. If you're say just trying to hop over a hurdle and keep going I might allow acrobatics. There is certainly some potential overlap between the two, but I think if you put it into athletics altogether and dump acrobatics it tends to make athletics TOO broad. And it's already pretty broad.
Leaping over a short wall during a chase (like some vaults) I'd grant athletics STR athletic DEX or acrobatics whatever. Climbing is definitely not just dexterity, especially if you're free hand climbing as a rogue would most likely do (I usually use Survival checks if the group actually wants to belay ropes, haven't read Surivalists Guide to Spelunking, but curious about their climb rules). Circus climbers get that climbing ability through conditioning work in practice and a lot of pull ups. No one thinks a static pull up is anything but strength move, though arguably there is some dexterity at use in kipping pull ups, which gymnastically fit types tend to practice as well (you could put it in strength since you're really just mobilizing your hip strength to give you momentum over the top). Plenty of gymnastically untrained mountaineers traverse precarious footings that would require some sort of agility check, I think the arguments to keep it gymnastically/athletically distinct doesn't realize there are plenty of contexts were landing in the right spot matters (ahem, skydiving to go way out there).
Forms of fitness like CrossFit put this all together where people compete on handstand walks (probably strength) but also agility type runs. As I think more on this, I don't really know why a lot of the athletic functions folks are necessitating toward acrobatics need be held in the sanctuary of a skill separate from Athletics (with the knowledge that Athletics can be DEX/CON/STR applied). I think of the opening parkour chase scene between Bond and unidentified bad guy in Casino Royale.
Both I think have comparable athletics, though one is clearly more DEX based (jump through a vent) and the other STR based (run through the drywall), but probably are not dump statting the other values (or CON for that matter, it's a pretty exhausting chase by DMG guidelines).
Let's also remember that "athletic" gymnasts in the Olympics are working in a static environment. There are plenty of human mountain goats in the mountaineering world, and tree topping lumberjacks who do this work too, so again I think this is just trying to make some rogue's special (though every rogue being graceful is a limiting trope, you can have rogues who are brutes, or just talkers who accomplish their slight of hand more through social misdirection than ninja reflexes).
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
One of the comments I make a lot, is that Strength and Dexterity are really the same thing. Red muscle fibers provide power (that's Strength) and white muscle fibers give fine control (that's Dexterity). Every single muscle in the human body can have a different proportion of red and white fibers, and there are quite a few of them. Strength would be Athletics, Dexterity would be Acrobatics, and if you like, just be proficient in both of them, then you can climb like an athlete, or jump up and grab something like an acrobat. Of course, if you grab something, you'll need your Athletics again to hang on, and if you don't, falling damage can't be resisted, but you could use your acrobatics skill to do cartwheels or flips after you hit.
I’d suggest Athletics is usually about applying strength as effectively and efficiently as possible, while Acrobatics is about coordination. That’s why their respective default abilities are Str and Dex. Most climbing, at its core, is overcoming gravity - pulling/pushing up your own weight - which would make it IMO a function of Athletics more than Acrobatics. The technique (which is what skill proficiency represents) involved is there to let you apply your strength more than to help you find balance.
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The entry for Constitution Check says that no skills apply to it being more passive. DMs can always decide to sill apply a skill such as Athletics or Survival if he think it's appropriate though
Constitution Checks: Constitution checks are uncommon, and no skills apply to Constitution checks, because the endurance this ability represents is largely passive rather than involving a specific effort on the part of a character or monster. A Constitution check can model your attempt to push beyond normal limits, however
Who are you replying to? Because there's no such thing as a "skill check" in 5e. You don't add ability modifiers to skill rolls, you add skill proficiencies to ability checks.
By the way, I suppose to clarify and reiterate:
I know you can replace Athletics with a Con modifier, etc. But I believe that we should have a dedicated skill namely to promote it's use.
If there is an active Endurance skill, It will promote people and DM's to take advantage of it. Endurance could be anything from holding your breath a long time, To running long distance, or for more hardcore DM's; Reflect a strenuous battle.
The idea of Endurance is someone who focused on conditioning. Athletics =/= Cardio for example. A Bodybuilder could have horrible Cardio. Same goes for Acrobatics. Someone who is excellent at dodging and doing backflips, might not have focused their time into exercising their Cardio.
Endurance would be someone who focused on their ability to keep going without stopping. A Marathon runner who could go the distance, or a long-distance sprinter.
Maybe a fighter who could hold out longer in a fighting match.
Regardless, it gives Con a use beyond just HP and Saves.
I can see the arguement for wanting to split that off from athletics, the same way I could see someone wanting to say, split perception into sight and hearing based as separate things. Having sharp ears wouldn't translate to other senses for example. But for the sake of keeping the 5E skills as streamlined as they generally are right now, I think that just fits better under athletics and a DM can just call for con over str for an athletics check. Splitting out endurance just for the sake of having a skill to tie to con by default just feels like it's being more overly specific than other skills are. And HP being universally good for everyone makes CON already useful.
Some skills are already overly specific, leading to their own problems. For example, Acrobatics is an incredibly niche skill with very few uses, and it's still much broader in scope than Sleight of Hand. For all of 5E, Acrobatics has led a dubious existence when it could always have been Dexterity (Athletics).
It's interesting that the PHB lists actions that actually are acrobatic "dives, rolls, somersaults..." in the second sentence in the skill description, preceded by the clause "The DM might also call for...". Whereas the first sentence tasks the acrobatic skill with things that aren't necessarily acrobatic, like balance the ability to keep your footing etc.
I think Athletics and Acrobatics could easily be conflated with the proposed endurance skill, and encouraged to be applied among the three abilities as fit.
Incidentally, to another post where someone talked about athletic endurance being divorced from acrobatic training. Dancers, gymnasts and other trained acrobats tend to take to endurance sports very well. I know of professional ballet dancers who BQ'd (qualified for the Boston Marathon) on their first marathon they were doing as a lark with little to no invested running training. The number of folks from those disciplines I've met on tracks or road or trail races who were picking it up and reaching endorsement deal level excellence is almost uncanny. I guess that experience shows why I find it easy to argue Athletics could easily be an explicitly broadly applied skill.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
But why? Everything you ask for is already in the PHB. Basically you are asking for a rules-based solution for a DM-based problem. A DM who doesn't have the inventiveness or creativity (or just hasn't read the rules properly) won't magically become better at calling for the right ability rolls just because you add more complexity to the rules. Such a DM needs to re-read the rules that already exist, not be burdened by additional rules.
All of those things you ask for is already covered by Constitution. As mentioned before, certain abilities affect "skills" that aren't covered by the skill list. Strength allowing you to wear heavy armour is one, holding your breath with Con is another. As is running and fighting a streneous battle.
So the bodybuilder will have high strength but low Con and the backflipper will have high Dex and low Con. That's already in the game. Why would we want to complicated that?
So, someone with a high constitution but not necessarily a high strength or dex, then? Well, have I got good news for you! ;)
Do you mean a fighter that could hold out longer with, say, second wind and action surge or just someone who has really good endurance? Because we already have the first and the second is probably just a Con + Athletics (or other suitable skill) roll.
It already is.
By the way, I reiterate and simplify: You want to play 3.5/Pathfinder, where there are a lot more situationally specific "dedicated" skills for all manner of things. The entire system is more precise at the price of being much more complex. If that's what you want then just play Pathfinder, no need to customize and homebrew everything, just add yet another narrowly focused skill to the already available myriad list. 5e is specifically streamlined from 3.5 specifically to avoid all of those "extras" you want because it complicates the rules and bogs down gameplay, especially for new players. Also, the number of skills you can be proficient with in 5e is much more limited, and your hyper-specific "endurance" would mean having to drop another skill with broader uses such as Athletics, Stealth, Acrobatics, etc. Want the ability to have more skills so you can take a bunch of situationally specific ones? Go play Pathfinder already because that's what you're getting at.
Technically in 5e the DM has full authority over whether you can apply proficiency to an ability check. The DM can decide that a certain skill applies to the check, and if your character sheet has proficiency in that skill, you get to add your proficiency. Or the DM can simply arbitrarily decide at the time of the check whether your character has proficiency in the check. A DM who house rules a bunch of additional skill proficiencies is playing completely within 5e RAW. They have simply created for themselves a consistent set of guidelines for how they will decide if proficiency is allowed on rolls.
I can see the argument about acrobatics but still feel there's enough wiggle room there to make both useful to justify acrobatics being separate from athletics. While I can see the argument though endurance as its own skill just feels even more specific. The fact that it's not about something 'different' you would do from athletics, but merely how 'long' you're doing it makes it feel like just swapping to con athletics is a better solution than a new skill. I feel like skills should generally be more active, describe things you're doing, rather than having a skill for being good at doing something for long strenuous periods of time. Doing something athletic for a strenuous period of time feels to me like it doesn't really warrant a new skill to compete with others, but rather should just swap to constitution instead of strength, or just do a con saving throw to see if the character can keep it up over a long period of time.
Also I get this is going to be a case by case thing with different games so maybe the games i"m in are an outlier, but I generally find acrobatics comes up enough to justify its inclusion.
Survival is a good example of a skill that is used in similar timeframes as "Endurance."
That said, I'm more in the camp of chucking acrobatics and just using Athletics over DEX/CON/STR as needed. Re: Athletics, really the backflips and rolls etc. are functionally fluff in the game, unless you're doing it for an aesthetic effect ... where we have performance (another really broad skill). Really acrobatics in game usually describes some sort of parkour type move, which can have "fluff" added to them but are often just precision jumping. I think, as the issue has been presented, the "5e" style way would actually eliminate acrobatics and broaden athletics rather than come up with an endurance skill.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I assume some of the proficiencies' existence has more to do with "this is something class X should be good at, but only in this particular way" than with "we just want to group skills in broad proficiencies". I mean, I can see why WotC gave Fighters Athletics as a possible class proficiency but chose to leave out Acrobatics for them.
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Acrobatics has some uses. My rule of thumb is, if you would see it in Olympic gymnastics, it's acrobatics. If you would see it in any other Olympic event, it's athletics (could be Str (Athletics), Dex (Athletics), or Con (Athletics) depending on the sport).
The things they do in gymnastics include balancing, flips and handstands, and hanging and swinging. Now flips in a D&D setting might be purely for show, but balancing and swinging certainly have their place. I also would use Acrobatics for safely landing from a height. While high jumping is Athletics, high jumpers in the Olympics make no attempt to stick the landing. I would also use Acrobatics for an attempt to long jump and land on a small, awkward platform. The show Floor is Lava would be mostly Acrobatics, not Athletics.
Certainly some of the events in gymnastics are Str (Acrobatics), but I'm not sure those are useful in an adventuring context. Mostly you would use Dex (Acrobatics).
I don’t play pointless pedantic ‘argue the exact dictionary definition of words’. Go troll someone that gives a damn.
I disagree. It should be Dex (Athletics). My rule of "is it Olympic gymnastics" says that climbing is not Acrobatics.
Circus acts are another application of gymnastics. But rock climbing isn't like either of those. Acrobatics deals more with dynamic balance: keeping your orientation while tumbling and flipping. Rock climbing does involve static balance and flexibility, but those are generic Dex abilities that are likewise involved in Stealth. There are occasionally dynamic moves in rock climbing, but those are kind of advanced.
I agree rogues should be better than barbarians at climbing, since if anything the strength involved in climbing needs to be in proportion to your weight, and people who are small but strong for their weight are usually agile, but not necessarily good at lifting heavy objects.
For climbing specifically, if it's say, climbing up a cliff or wall, I'd go with athletics. If you're say just trying to hop over a hurdle and keep going I might allow acrobatics. There is certainly some potential overlap between the two, but I think if you put it into athletics altogether and dump acrobatics it tends to make athletics TOO broad. And it's already pretty broad.
Leaping over a short wall during a chase (like some vaults) I'd grant athletics STR athletic DEX or acrobatics whatever. Climbing is definitely not just dexterity, especially if you're free hand climbing as a rogue would most likely do (I usually use Survival checks if the group actually wants to belay ropes, haven't read Surivalists Guide to Spelunking, but curious about their climb rules). Circus climbers get that climbing ability through conditioning work in practice and a lot of pull ups. No one thinks a static pull up is anything but strength move, though arguably there is some dexterity at use in kipping pull ups, which gymnastically fit types tend to practice as well (you could put it in strength since you're really just mobilizing your hip strength to give you momentum over the top). Plenty of gymnastically untrained mountaineers traverse precarious footings that would require some sort of agility check, I think the arguments to keep it gymnastically/athletically distinct doesn't realize there are plenty of contexts were landing in the right spot matters (ahem, skydiving to go way out there).
Forms of fitness like CrossFit put this all together where people compete on handstand walks (probably strength) but also agility type runs. As I think more on this, I don't really know why a lot of the athletic functions folks are necessitating toward acrobatics need be held in the sanctuary of a skill separate from Athletics (with the knowledge that Athletics can be DEX/CON/STR applied). I think of the opening parkour chase scene between Bond and unidentified bad guy in Casino Royale.
Both I think have comparable athletics, though one is clearly more DEX based (jump through a vent) and the other STR based (run through the drywall), but probably are not dump statting the other values (or CON for that matter, it's a pretty exhausting chase by DMG guidelines).
Let's also remember that "athletic" gymnasts in the Olympics are working in a static environment. There are plenty of human mountain goats in the mountaineering world, and tree topping lumberjacks who do this work too, so again I think this is just trying to make some rogue's special (though every rogue being graceful is a limiting trope, you can have rogues who are brutes, or just talkers who accomplish their slight of hand more through social misdirection than ninja reflexes).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
One of the comments I make a lot, is that Strength and Dexterity are really the same thing. Red muscle fibers provide power (that's Strength) and white muscle fibers give fine control (that's Dexterity). Every single muscle in the human body can have a different proportion of red and white fibers, and there are quite a few of them. Strength would be Athletics, Dexterity would be Acrobatics, and if you like, just be proficient in both of them, then you can climb like an athlete, or jump up and grab something like an acrobat. Of course, if you grab something, you'll need your Athletics again to hang on, and if you don't, falling damage can't be resisted, but you could use your acrobatics skill to do cartwheels or flips after you hit.
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I’d suggest Athletics is usually about applying strength as effectively and efficiently as possible, while Acrobatics is about coordination. That’s why their respective default abilities are Str and Dex. Most climbing, at its core, is overcoming gravity - pulling/pushing up your own weight - which would make it IMO a function of Athletics more than Acrobatics. The technique (which is what skill proficiency represents) involved is there to let you apply your strength more than to help you find balance.
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The entry for Constitution Check says that no skills apply to it being more passive. DMs can always decide to sill apply a skill such as Athletics or Survival if he think it's appropriate though
Constitution Checks: Constitution checks are uncommon, and no skills apply to Constitution checks, because the endurance this ability represents is largely passive rather than involving a specific effort on the part of a character or monster. A Constitution check can model your attempt to push beyond normal limits, however
...which is a perfect example of someone using Strength + Athletics (Bond) versus someone using Dexterity + Acrobatics.