Hmm, interesting and somewhat disappointing- on review the new core books do not mention restricting check attempts by proficiency, at least not anywhere obvious. Seems like a very poor choice for the DMG in particular, given that it’s supposed to be better written to empower a DM to manage such aspects of their game.
Hopefully the concept remains present in the community then, because whether it’s technically RAW or not (insofar as that applies to a DM adjudicating ability checks) it’s one of the best throttles on dice spams.
Hmm, interesting and somewhat disappointing- on review the new core books do not mention restricting check attempts by proficiency, at least not anywhere obvious.
You cannot help without proficiency, but that's the only thing I know of.
Hmm, interesting and somewhat disappointing- on review the new core books do not mention restricting check attempts by proficiency, at least not anywhere obvious.
per the DMG:
Proficiency
When the rules or a published adventure calls for an ability check, a skill or tool proficiency is often called out: for example, “a character who succeeds on a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check can puzzle out the magic involved.” Sometimes the rules allow for any one of two or more proficiencies to apply to a check. When deciding what check a character should make, be generous in determining if the character’s Proficiency Bonus comes into play. You might specifically ask for an Intelligence (Arcana) check, or you can ask for an Intelligence check and let the player negotiate with you to see if one of the character’s skill or tool proficiencies applies.
Also, per the discussion about teamwork: right after that is a whole bit about Group Checks.
The very obvious and supported by material method of throttling roll spams is to only allow rolls if you have prof for specialized tasks like camouflaging a campsite. Pretty sure that’s specifically invoked as a DM tool in both the current PHB and DMG, and while hypothetically a group might try to collectively optimize, in my experience that has been the exception far more than the rule, even when a campaign has a narrow enough scope players can accurately predict that only a few skills will be relevant.
You would think so, but it's actually the exact opposite. The rules are very specific about that.
"If a creature is proficient in a skill, the creature applies its Proficiency Bonus to the ability checks involving that skill. Without proficiency in a skill, a creature can still make ability checks involving that skill but doesn't add its proficiency bonus."
The reality of the rule is that there is no such thing as a skill check-in 2024. You make a d20 ability check. Skills are only tracked for the purpose of identifying under what conditions you get your proficiency bonus.
There is absolutely nothing anywhere in the rules that even suggests that there is some kind of decision or ruling in which wether or not you have proficiency has any impact as to wether or not you get to make a check, quite to the contrary, its very specific that you ALWAYS make a d20 test when one is called for and the proficiency bonus of a skill is only relevant to know how much bonus you get.
Thats it.
That said, I do think that it should. Proficiency should be viewed as "training" in a skill, but I think a part of the reason it was eliminated other than to streamline the rules is because skills are very generic, so really can't write a fast/hard rule that says do it under X or Y conditions and don't do it under A or B conditions.
Which is indicative of the new approach to rules writing, which is one of the more fundamental changes in 5e 2024 compared to 2014, but there are no rules in the game that are not instructive by nature. Meaning there are no "the DM decides" rules that aren't answered with clear instructions on when to or not to execute them. The game as written could be used as a design document for a video game, I believe a very intentional concept and without alternation you could write code to execute it.
Hmm, interesting and somewhat disappointing- on review the new core books do not mention restricting check attempts by proficiency, at least not anywhere obvious.
per the DMG:
Proficiency
When the rules or a published adventure calls for an ability check, a skill or tool proficiency is often called out: for example, “a character who succeeds on a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check can puzzle out the magic involved.” Sometimes the rules allow for any one of two or more proficiencies to apply to a check. When deciding what check a character should make, be generous in determining if the character’s Proficiency Bonus comes into play. You might specifically ask for an Intelligence (Arcana) check, or you can ask for an Intelligence check and let the player negotiate with you to see if one of the character’s skill or tool proficiencies applies.
Also, per the discussion about teamwork: right after that is a whole bit about Group Checks.
Ahh yes, thank you! So it did get translated over. So yeah this would be one of the ways I would address everyone trying to roll. Combined with only allowing players to roll if the DM thinks it's warranted. Saying "no" is an option. I don't prefer to not allow rolls without Proficiency, though. I don't really think it's that necessary.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Hmm, interesting and somewhat disappointing- on review the new core books do not mention restricting check attempts by proficiency, at least not anywhere obvious.
per the DMG:
Proficiency
When the rules or a published adventure calls for an ability check, a skill or tool proficiency is often called out: for example, “a character who succeeds on a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check can puzzle out the magic involved.” Sometimes the rules allow for any one of two or more proficiencies to apply to a check. When deciding what check a character should make, be generous in determining if the character’s Proficiency Bonus comes into play. You might specifically ask for an Intelligence (Arcana) check, or you can ask for an Intelligence check and let the player negotiate with you to see if one of the character’s skill or tool proficiencies applies.
Also, per the discussion about teamwork: right after that is a whole bit about Group Checks.
Ahh yes, thank you! So it did get translated over. So yeah this would be one of the ways I would address everyone trying to roll. Combined with only allowing players to roll if the DM thinks it's warranted. Saying "no" is an option. I don't prefer to not allow rolls without Proficiency, though. I don't really think it's that necessary.
I’m not saying it should be a blanket rule, but it’s one way to throttle how many dice are being rolled on a particular activity, particularly when people are obviously fishing for high rolls on out of character fields
There are a couple of things I really wish were present in the skill rules: 1) if you don’t have the skill needed then yes you can try - at disadvantage. You might get lucky, but the odds are stacked against you. 2) some descriptions of what it takes in terms of time and downtime activities to gain a half proficiency, a full proficiency and expertise. 3) expertise - you get either an effective “reliable talent” with that skill ( say rolls below 8 are treated as an 8 + 2x PB, or you get your 2x PB and advantage. Of the two I would prefer the first but … yes he untrained can occasionally succeed beyond everyone’s expectations and yes, the expert can fail miserably. However the the two ends should be very rare occurrences with the trained normally failing and the expert normally succeeding regularly.
It has been a "combat engine" game for a while now. Gone are the days when fighters got to shine in combat and magic-users and thieves had other but no less important roles to play. Every class is now designed for combat. A "rogue" can hit as easily as any fighter and do just as much damage as one. Which is absurd. Wizards can now cast damage on repeat. It's poor and lazy game design to allow a wizard to wield a weapon in which it is proficient as proficiently as someone whose life has been spent as a soldier or mercenary. I use an iteration of the game in which there are no limits to the weapons a character of any class can wield. But fighters and only fighters see an increase in attack bonuses as they level up. A rogue with an 18 DEX and a "finesse" weapon getting + 6 to attack and to damage at 1st level is ridiculous. It's power creep like this that has now made the game D&D in name only for so many of us who prefer old-school play.
It has been a "combat engine" game for a while now.
Specifically, it's been a combat engine since 1974. The RP components of D&D have always been bolted on to a tactical game (TSR stands for Tactical Studies Rules).
The other part of DnD 5e that kind of sucks is that by having these really limited skill selections, the designers believe that this makes the game "easier" to figure out, but from my experience the Pathfinder 2e skill system and even some of the older pen and paper rpgs had better systems. The issue is that you aren't really stating anything about the character when assigning skills anymore in 5e. The only way to give definition to the skills is to deliberately mimic the older skill system through a mix of tools and items that don't even have a page in the Players Handbook.
If they want to make Chainmail tabletop and just have generic play pieces, they got a great game. But I can definitely say that DnD is on the 2/5 tier when it comes to actually defining the characters in a way that structurally describes what the character does.
E.g. RPing a character with Knowledge: Architecture is impossible because there is no lore skill in the game that applies to it. They have History, Arcana, Religion, and Nature, of which only one of those even has a remote amount of linkage to the said knowledge skill. And there are no direct craft tools that apply to this knowledge skill in the entire game. They got cartography which has nothing to do with architecture and the closest approx. I could even come to was something like taking a painters set or calligraphy set and adding foot notes.
This is further reinforced with the backgrounds where the only background in the entirety of 5e that even has a remote linkage to architecture is the Izzet League background.
E.g. RPing a character with Knowledge: Architecture is impossible because there is no lore skill in the game that applies to it.
Sure there is. It's a character with proficiency in Mason's tools and the History skill. But yes, there isn't a lot of representation of skills outside of adventuring contexts.
I’m not saying it should be a blanket rule, but it’s one way to throttle how many dice are being rolled on a particular activity, particularly when people are obviously fishing for high rolls on out of character fields.
Checks very clearly require the DM to call for the roll. DMG:
"You decide when a player makes a D20 Test based on what the character is trying to do. Players shouldn’t just roll ability checks without context; they should tell you what their characters are trying to achieve, and make ability checks only if you ask them to."
If you want to gate rolls by proficiency, it's as simple as only calling for a roll when the player has said proficiency.
It has been a "combat engine" game for a while now.
Specifically, it's been a combat engine since 1974. The RP components of D&D have always been bolted on to a tactical game (TSR stands for Tactical Studies Rules).
This is true to a degree but you have to remember that the term RP has been "re-defined" by modern gaming culture and is now being applied as if it this invented definition has always been true. Role-playing used to mean "emergent storytelling" and to a degree this is still the by-the-book definition of role-playing games including D&D. If you had no references like Critical Role for example to "show you" what role-playing is by modern gaming culture standards, there is absolutely no way you would conclude that this is what the game intended to be about, by reading the Players Handbook (past or present). Like there is nothing in any role-playing book ever written for D&D that suggests the theatre show most people today imagine and assume D&D to be. The game is definitely about going on adventures, fighting monsters, getting XP and leveling up and there is nothing written anywhere that would suggest otherwise.
Tactical war gamers were the ultimate role-players back in the day in the context of emergent role-playing experiences, far more than actual role-players are today and they insisted on excessivly detailed rules because the point of the game was to create alternative history - emergent stories told in the most realistic way possible.
This is still true about historical board games and miniature war games today. I mean think about Warhammer 40k, there is a 54 book novel set that describes the Horus Heresy and that is just the backstory of the setting in which the game takes place. There is more lore and story for Warhammer 40k, then there is for D&D and this is a science-fantasy tactical miniature-war game.
My point is that while D&D might have been created as a combat engine, it was a combat engine created by role-players of its time and while their definition of what role-playing was different than what modern gamers think of as role-playing, they cared deeply about making D&D a game about stories, it was the first and only design goal of the game as was the case for all historical war games and miniature games of the time. There is absolutely no question in my mind that old school D&D, aka 1st edition D&D supported the act of role-playing by any definition, 1000% more than it does in modern day and is it precisely for this reason the definition of role-playing has been altered to be this free-form "theatre show" that modern gamers describe, rather than the act of playing a game and deriving the emergent stories, aka-role-playing by the classic definition.
You can argue about which definition and method is better, that's a matter of opinion, but you cannot argue that one is and the other is not a form of role-playing and you certainly cannot suggest that old-school war gamers were not storytellers because that is almost exclusively what they were. As such, there is no other conclusion to come to other than that D&D was always intended to be a role-playing game. The definitions have changed/evolved, but this is what the game is.
I think the reason 5e struggles is that things like skill systems which were never part of the design for a reason, attempt to quantify in certain mechanical terms, every type of action conceivable to be resolved by a mechanic in or out of combat.
I don't know if we can say that 5E is struggling. As far as reach and exposure I think it's actually the most successful edition D&D has had.
Sure I meant, struggling, in the sense that its a role-playing game and there are elements of the game that I don't think work quite like the designers intend it to work. Skills is one area I think modern D&D (since 3rd edition) has been designing and re-designing to find some base that works. Consider for example we haven't altered how Hit Points, or Armor Class or Ability Scores or D20 test etc... work. Meaning we have a solution that works, everyone is generally happy with it and its stable. Skills have been in re-design with every iteration of D&D since their introduction and we still have issues with the system. I would call that a struggle because else we would have a working solution that no longer needs to be addressed and would simply be part of the stable mechanics we see in every edition.
I don't think skills is a huge problem though, I mean in the sense that people have learned to work with the mechanism and more or less make it work, but when we have debates like this one it does reveal some of the warts with it. Not just as a mechanic, but also its place in the sort of role-playing/narrative eco-system of the game. Its really not clear what proficiency means narratively nor exactly what it means to have say "Survival" skill and how that fits into the class structure for example. There are a lot of sort of unanswerable question that go undefined.
To me the closes we ever came to having a sufficiently robust and narratively relatable system was in 5th edition where the skills where a bit more flexible (Knowledge and Crafting skills for example could be specified), you had a distinction between different rogue skills and stuff like that. You also had the class-cross class system which meant that certain classes where very likely to be the only experts in certain areas. I think this structure, while more complex and less streamlined, actually worked better. If you were to wrap that architecture into a proficiency style system with bound accuracy, I think we would probobly have a more function skill system, but of course the main goal of 5e is to be more streamlined and accessible. Meaning it needs to be simpler than what the 3e skill system offered.
It has been a "combat engine" game for a while now.
Specifically, it's been a combat engine since 1974. The RP components of D&D have always been bolted on to a tactical game (TSR stands for Tactical Studies Rules).
While this is true, there were secondary skills in the original DMG, IIRC which are very similar to modern backgrounds, even if not so fleshed out. And then they added a skill system in the Unearthed Arcana. Oriental Adventures had a somewhat more fleshed out system. And that is not including various 3rd party systems, some of which were published in Dragon Magazine or White Dwarf Magazine.
So yes, bolted on, but they have been bolting them on since the beginning too.
Sure I meant, struggling, in the sense that its a role-playing game and there are elements of the game that I don't think work quite like the designers intend it to work. Skills is one area I think modern D&D (since 3rd edition) has been designing and re-designing to find some base that works. Consider for example we haven't altered how Hit Points, or Armor Class or Ability Scores or D20 test etc... work. Meaning we have a solution that works, everyone is generally happy with it and its stable. Skills have been in re-design with every iteration of D&D since their introduction and we still have issues with the system. I would call that a struggle because else we would have a working solution that no longer needs to be addressed and would simply be part of the stable mechanics we see in every edition.
You're assuming here that they haven't landed on something stable now with 5e. But the lack of change to skills from 2014 to 2024 belies that assertion - our strongest indicator as of now is that they are in fact happy with the skill system they landed on 10 years ago. Even when they were taking all their "big swings" during the playtest, the biggest change they considered for skills was Nat 20 autosuccess, which frankly tables should be doing when they call for a roll anyway given that failing on a 20 means there was no point in rolling in the first place.
This isn't to say skills are perfect - Stealth could use further tweaks - but the core mechanic of "DM sets the DCs using very broad difficulty sliders from 5-30" doesn't seem like it needs any further fundamental reworks.
I don't think skills is a huge problem though, I mean in the sense that people have learned to work with the mechanism and more or less make it work, but when we have debates like this one it does reveal some of the warts with it. Not just as a mechanic, but also its place in the sort of role-playing/narrative eco-system of the game. Its really not clear what proficiency means narratively nor exactly what it means to have say "Survival" skill and how that fits into the class structure for example. There are a lot of sort of unanswerable question that go undefined.
It's intentionally broad what proficiency "means." Is it training you got from your chosen profession/class? Is it rote practices you absorbed from your pre-adventuring life? Is it biological/metaphysical advantages that come from your species/heritage? Is it cheating all of the above via magic? Mechanically, all of those are true, so they all fit narratively too. Nailing down proficiency to mean just one or two of those is thus not only unnecessary, it's counterintuitive.
To me the closes we ever came to having a sufficiently robust and narratively relatable system was in 5th edition where the skills where a bit more flexible (Knowledge and Crafting skills for example could be specified), you had a distinction between different rogue skills and stuff like that. You also had the class-cross class system which meant that certain classes where very likely to be the only experts in certain areas. I think this structure, while more complex and less streamlined, actually worked better. If you were to wrap that architecture into a proficiency style system with bound accuracy, I think we would probobly have a more function skill system, but of course the main goal of 5e is to be more streamlined and accessible. Meaning it needs to be simpler than what the 3e skill system offered.
I assume you meant 3.5e here rather than 5e?
And no, I couldn't disagree more. I played in those days and even before we had anything better, skills were awful compared to today. Cross-class skills punished inexperienced players for not having encyclopedic knowledge of what skills went with each class. Individual / granular Knowledge/Crafting skills meant even Rogues and Factotums couldn't keep up with the game's massive bloat. Weak skill ranks for martials and no backgrounds left you with Fighters who, despite being town guards, were incapable of keeping watch. And speaking of keeping watch, you needed two separate skills to be any good at doing even that, with a third if you also wanted to look for things that were hard to find. And don't get me started on skill rank taxes prerequisites for the feats and subclasses, excuse me, prestige classes you actually wanted for your character concept. We needed separate skills to keep our feet while moving and keeping our feet while standing still, separate skills for lying verbally and in writing, separate skills for controlling your horse and controlling your dog, etc. And don't get me started on the tables and tables of pre-defined DCs that would get metagamed from dawn till dusk. It was beyond silly.
You're assuming here that they haven't landed on something stable now with 5e. But the lack of change to skills from 2014 to 2024 belies that assertion - our strongest indicator as of now is that they are in fact happy with the skill system they landed on 10 years ago. Even when they were taking all their "big swings" during the playtest, the biggest change they considered for skills was Nat 20 autosuccess, which frankly tables should be doing when they call for a roll anyway given that failing on a 20 means there was no point in rolling in the first place.
This isn't to say skills are perfect - Stealth could use further tweaks - but the core mechanic of "DM sets the DCs using very broad difficulty sliders from 5-30" doesn't seem like it needs any further fundamental reworks.
Certainly I think they have landed on the list of skills, but their usage is so broad, the list itself and the meaning behind them is really quite irrelevant. Meaning, proficiency is not a requirement to be proficient in a sense. This system has effectively reverted to being a ability score test that under certain conditions, you get a proficiency bonus. This means that skills aren't really defined in a narrative context, they are a mechanical bonus. A high intelligence with no arcana skill for example is the same thing as an arcana proficiency with a low intelligence, their is nothing to distinguish these two things.
For example if you have no Arcana skill proficiency but have an 18 Intelligence (+4 bonus), you actually know more about Arcana than a 1st level character with a skill proficiency but lower intelligence, for example a 10 Int with a skill proficiency you would have at 1st level a +2 bonus.
Without governance over usage and specific representation of what proficiency means or how it impacts the narrative, it basically just boil down to a generic ability score roll and its just a question of what bonuses you get (ability score modifier and/or proficiency bonus).
I assume you meant 3.5e here rather than 5e?
And no, I couldn't disagree more. I played in those days and even before we had anything better, skills were awful compared to today. Cross-class skills punished inexperienced players for not having encyclopedic knowledge of what skills went with each class. Individual / granular Knowledge/Crafting skills meant even Rogues and Factotums couldn't keep up with the game's massive bloat. Weak skill ranks for martials and no backgrounds left you with Fighters who, despite being town guards, were incapable of keeping watch. And speaking of keeping watch, you needed two separate skills to be any good at doing even that, with a third if you also wanted to look for things that were hard to find. And don't get me started on skill rank taxes prerequisites for the feats and subclasses, excuse me, prestige classes you actually wanted for your character concept. We needed separate skills to keep our feet while moving and keeping our feet while standing still, separate skills for lying verbally and in writing, separate skills for controlling your horse and controlling your dog, etc. And don't get me started on the tables and tables of pre-defined DCs that would get metagamed from dawn till dusk. It was beyond silly.
I'm not suggesting the system was better whole sale, meaning that I understand that there were issues with the implementation of the design, but I still hold that class-cross class skills as a concept could have been improved and would have given us a better result.
With skills in a class system, in order for the narrative purpose of classes to make sense and for the role of skills to make sense their have to be a couple of things that govern their use.
1. Classes as experts should be a concept included in the game. The Wizard and Sorcerer for example should have an advantage in skills like Arcana over a Barbarian or Rogue. This makes narrative sense and that should be reflected in the mechanics in my opinion. This is a trope, but its one that defines fantasy, in a word, we expect this to be true and so it should be.
2. Skill expertise should have some impact on when a skill can and can't be used. A person who is not trained in survival should not be able to get "lucky" and suddenly, magically know how to be an expert survivalist just because the dice landed in their favor. You either know something or you don't, if you don't you cannot even make the attempt or at the very least the outcome should reflect your expertise.
For example a 10 Int Barbarian with no proficiency should not be able to make an Arcana roll to determine the origins of an Arcane Rune... There is nothing about their class, intelligence level and training that would suggest they know anything about magical runes, but as it is in D&D today, they could roll a 20 effectively be an expert on the subject.. While an 18 Int Wizard with Arcana proficiency might look at a Rune, roll a 1 and be dumbfounded by it.
To me the absence of of addressing that is a real problem as it effectively breaks the suspension of disbelief and disconnects the narrative concepts built into classes and skills.
The 3.5e system certainly had its issues, but there were clear requirements and restrictions that defined the fantasy and while I would certainly make a far more improved and streamlined implementation to get this effect in 5e, abandoning this concept entirely I think was a mistake, its resulted in a very generic and narratively disconnected skill system.
So I don't disagree, I am an experienced 20+ yr DM so I have the tools to approach the game this way, but if I was brand new coming in then I would not know that these where possibilities, that is my fear, that in 10 years time the majority of DnD players and DM's will be playing the game the way it is in the book because they don't know any better. It will have become more and more generic, and the materials made for it will also flow that way because that is the players Wizards has got because of it's new system. There is nothing here that is even remotely risky, or innovative, or new. Nothing that makes us go, wait, that's different. As another poster answered it is all just Beige, lots and lots of Beige, and beige is good, if you have the ability and skill to know how to accentuate it, how to use colour and accesseries to make it better. But, if you don't then you will think that Beige is what is normal.
If any argument for or against a system starts "an experienced DM/Player will be able to work around this" then the system is fundamentally flawed from the outset. It is asking for a someone new to understand an inherent truth that is not defined in the books.
Hmm, interesting and somewhat disappointing- on review the new core books do not mention restricting check attempts by proficiency, at least not anywhere obvious. Seems like a very poor choice for the DMG in particular, given that it’s supposed to be better written to empower a DM to manage such aspects of their game.
Hopefully the concept remains present in the community then, because whether it’s technically RAW or not (insofar as that applies to a DM adjudicating ability checks) it’s one of the best throttles on dice spams.
You cannot help without proficiency, but that's the only thing I know of.
per the DMG:
Proficiency
When the rules or a published adventure calls for an ability check, a skill or tool proficiency is often called out: for example, “a character who succeeds on a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check can puzzle out the magic involved.” Sometimes the rules allow for any one of two or more proficiencies to apply to a check. When deciding what check a character should make, be generous in determining if the character’s Proficiency Bonus comes into play. You might specifically ask for an Intelligence (Arcana) check, or you can ask for an Intelligence check and let the player negotiate with you to see if one of the character’s skill or tool proficiencies applies.
Also, per the discussion about teamwork: right after that is a whole bit about Group Checks.
You would think so, but it's actually the exact opposite. The rules are very specific about that.
"If a creature is proficient in a skill, the creature applies its Proficiency Bonus to the ability checks involving that skill. Without proficiency in a skill, a creature can still make ability checks involving that skill but doesn't add its proficiency bonus."
The reality of the rule is that there is no such thing as a skill check-in 2024. You make a d20 ability check. Skills are only tracked for the purpose of identifying under what conditions you get your proficiency bonus.
There is absolutely nothing anywhere in the rules that even suggests that there is some kind of decision or ruling in which wether or not you have proficiency has any impact as to wether or not you get to make a check, quite to the contrary, its very specific that you ALWAYS make a d20 test when one is called for and the proficiency bonus of a skill is only relevant to know how much bonus you get.
Thats it.
That said, I do think that it should. Proficiency should be viewed as "training" in a skill, but I think a part of the reason it was eliminated other than to streamline the rules is because skills are very generic, so really can't write a fast/hard rule that says do it under X or Y conditions and don't do it under A or B conditions.
Which is indicative of the new approach to rules writing, which is one of the more fundamental changes in 5e 2024 compared to 2014, but there are no rules in the game that are not instructive by nature. Meaning there are no "the DM decides" rules that aren't answered with clear instructions on when to or not to execute them. The game as written could be used as a design document for a video game, I believe a very intentional concept and without alternation you could write code to execute it.
Ahh yes, thank you! So it did get translated over. So yeah this would be one of the ways I would address everyone trying to roll. Combined with only allowing players to roll if the DM thinks it's warranted. Saying "no" is an option. I don't prefer to not allow rolls without Proficiency, though. I don't really think it's that necessary.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I’m not saying it should be a blanket rule, but it’s one way to throttle how many dice are being rolled on a particular activity, particularly when people are obviously fishing for high rolls on out of character fields
There are a couple of things I really wish were present in the skill rules:
1) if you don’t have the skill needed then yes you can try - at disadvantage. You might get lucky, but the odds are stacked against you.
2) some descriptions of what it takes in terms of time and downtime activities to gain a half proficiency, a full proficiency and expertise.
3) expertise - you get either an effective “reliable talent” with that skill ( say rolls below 8 are treated as an 8 + 2x PB, or you get your 2x PB and advantage. Of the two I would prefer the first but …
yes he untrained can occasionally succeed beyond everyone’s expectations and yes, the expert can fail miserably. However the the two ends should be very rare occurrences with the trained normally failing and the expert normally succeeding regularly.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
It has been a "combat engine" game for a while now. Gone are the days when fighters got to shine in combat and magic-users and thieves had other but no less important roles to play. Every class is now designed for combat. A "rogue" can hit as easily as any fighter and do just as much damage as one. Which is absurd. Wizards can now cast damage on repeat. It's poor and lazy game design to allow a wizard to wield a weapon in which it is proficient as proficiently as someone whose life has been spent as a soldier or mercenary. I use an iteration of the game in which there are no limits to the weapons a character of any class can wield. But fighters and only fighters see an increase in attack bonuses as they level up. A rogue with an 18 DEX and a "finesse" weapon getting + 6 to attack and to damage at 1st level is ridiculous. It's power creep like this that has now made the game D&D in name only for so many of us who prefer old-school play.
Specifically, it's been a combat engine since 1974. The RP components of D&D have always been bolted on to a tactical game (TSR stands for Tactical Studies Rules).
The other part of DnD 5e that kind of sucks is that by having these really limited skill selections, the designers believe that this makes the game "easier" to figure out, but from my experience the Pathfinder 2e skill system and even some of the older pen and paper rpgs had better systems. The issue is that you aren't really stating anything about the character when assigning skills anymore in 5e. The only way to give definition to the skills is to deliberately mimic the older skill system through a mix of tools and items that don't even have a page in the Players Handbook.
If they want to make Chainmail tabletop and just have generic play pieces, they got a great game. But I can definitely say that DnD is on the 2/5 tier when it comes to actually defining the characters in a way that structurally describes what the character does.
E.g. RPing a character with Knowledge: Architecture is impossible because there is no lore skill in the game that applies to it. They have History, Arcana, Religion, and Nature, of which only one of those even has a remote amount of linkage to the said knowledge skill. And there are no direct craft tools that apply to this knowledge skill in the entire game. They got cartography which has nothing to do with architecture and the closest approx. I could even come to was something like taking a painters set or calligraphy set and adding foot notes.
This is further reinforced with the backgrounds where the only background in the entirety of 5e that even has a remote linkage to architecture is the Izzet League background.
Sure there is. It's a character with proficiency in Mason's tools and the History skill. But yes, there isn't a lot of representation of skills outside of adventuring contexts.
Checks very clearly require the DM to call for the roll. DMG:
"You decide when a player makes a D20 Test based on what the character is trying to do. Players shouldn’t just roll ability checks without context; they should tell you what their characters are trying to achieve, and make ability checks only if you ask them to."
If you want to gate rolls by proficiency, it's as simple as only calling for a roll when the player has said proficiency.
This is true to a degree but you have to remember that the term RP has been "re-defined" by modern gaming culture and is now being applied as if it this invented definition has always been true. Role-playing used to mean "emergent storytelling" and to a degree this is still the by-the-book definition of role-playing games including D&D. If you had no references like Critical Role for example to "show you" what role-playing is by modern gaming culture standards, there is absolutely no way you would conclude that this is what the game intended to be about, by reading the Players Handbook (past or present). Like there is nothing in any role-playing book ever written for D&D that suggests the theatre show most people today imagine and assume D&D to be. The game is definitely about going on adventures, fighting monsters, getting XP and leveling up and there is nothing written anywhere that would suggest otherwise.
Tactical war gamers were the ultimate role-players back in the day in the context of emergent role-playing experiences, far more than actual role-players are today and they insisted on excessivly detailed rules because the point of the game was to create alternative history - emergent stories told in the most realistic way possible.
This is still true about historical board games and miniature war games today. I mean think about Warhammer 40k, there is a 54 book novel set that describes the Horus Heresy and that is just the backstory of the setting in which the game takes place. There is more lore and story for Warhammer 40k, then there is for D&D and this is a science-fantasy tactical miniature-war game.
My point is that while D&D might have been created as a combat engine, it was a combat engine created by role-players of its time and while their definition of what role-playing was different than what modern gamers think of as role-playing, they cared deeply about making D&D a game about stories, it was the first and only design goal of the game as was the case for all historical war games and miniature games of the time. There is absolutely no question in my mind that old school D&D, aka 1st edition D&D supported the act of role-playing by any definition, 1000% more than it does in modern day and is it precisely for this reason the definition of role-playing has been altered to be this free-form "theatre show" that modern gamers describe, rather than the act of playing a game and deriving the emergent stories, aka-role-playing by the classic definition.
You can argue about which definition and method is better, that's a matter of opinion, but you cannot argue that one is and the other is not a form of role-playing and you certainly cannot suggest that old-school war gamers were not storytellers because that is almost exclusively what they were. As such, there is no other conclusion to come to other than that D&D was always intended to be a role-playing game. The definitions have changed/evolved, but this is what the game is.
I think the reason 5e struggles is that things like skill systems which were never part of the design for a reason, attempt to quantify in certain mechanical terms, every type of action conceivable to be resolved by a mechanic in or out of combat.
I don't know if we can say that 5E is struggling. As far as reach and exposure I think it's actually the most successful edition D&D has had.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Sure I meant, struggling, in the sense that its a role-playing game and there are elements of the game that I don't think work quite like the designers intend it to work. Skills is one area I think modern D&D (since 3rd edition) has been designing and re-designing to find some base that works. Consider for example we haven't altered how Hit Points, or Armor Class or Ability Scores or D20 test etc... work. Meaning we have a solution that works, everyone is generally happy with it and its stable. Skills have been in re-design with every iteration of D&D since their introduction and we still have issues with the system. I would call that a struggle because else we would have a working solution that no longer needs to be addressed and would simply be part of the stable mechanics we see in every edition.
I don't think skills is a huge problem though, I mean in the sense that people have learned to work with the mechanism and more or less make it work, but when we have debates like this one it does reveal some of the warts with it. Not just as a mechanic, but also its place in the sort of role-playing/narrative eco-system of the game. Its really not clear what proficiency means narratively nor exactly what it means to have say "Survival" skill and how that fits into the class structure for example. There are a lot of sort of unanswerable question that go undefined.
To me the closes we ever came to having a sufficiently robust and narratively relatable system was in 5th edition where the skills where a bit more flexible (Knowledge and Crafting skills for example could be specified), you had a distinction between different rogue skills and stuff like that. You also had the class-cross class system which meant that certain classes where very likely to be the only experts in certain areas. I think this structure, while more complex and less streamlined, actually worked better. If you were to wrap that architecture into a proficiency style system with bound accuracy, I think we would probobly have a more function skill system, but of course the main goal of 5e is to be more streamlined and accessible. Meaning it needs to be simpler than what the 3e skill system offered.
While this is true, there were secondary skills in the original DMG, IIRC which are very similar to modern backgrounds, even if not so fleshed out. And then they added a skill system in the Unearthed Arcana. Oriental Adventures had a somewhat more fleshed out system. And that is not including various 3rd party systems, some of which were published in Dragon Magazine or White Dwarf Magazine.
So yes, bolted on, but they have been bolting them on since the beginning too.
You're assuming here that they haven't landed on something stable now with 5e. But the lack of change to skills from 2014 to 2024 belies that assertion - our strongest indicator as of now is that they are in fact happy with the skill system they landed on 10 years ago. Even when they were taking all their "big swings" during the playtest, the biggest change they considered for skills was Nat 20 autosuccess, which frankly tables should be doing when they call for a roll anyway given that failing on a 20 means there was no point in rolling in the first place.
This isn't to say skills are perfect - Stealth could use further tweaks - but the core mechanic of "DM sets the DCs using very broad difficulty sliders from 5-30" doesn't seem like it needs any further fundamental reworks.
It's intentionally broad what proficiency "means." Is it training you got from your chosen profession/class? Is it rote practices you absorbed from your pre-adventuring life? Is it biological/metaphysical advantages that come from your species/heritage? Is it cheating all of the above via magic? Mechanically, all of those are true, so they all fit narratively too. Nailing down proficiency to mean just one or two of those is thus not only unnecessary, it's counterintuitive.
I assume you meant 3.5e here rather than 5e?
And no, I couldn't disagree more. I played in those days and even before we had anything better, skills were awful compared to today. Cross-class skills punished inexperienced players for not having encyclopedic knowledge of what skills went with each class. Individual / granular Knowledge/Crafting skills meant even Rogues and Factotums couldn't keep up with the game's massive bloat. Weak skill ranks for martials and no backgrounds left you with Fighters who, despite being town guards, were incapable of keeping watch. And speaking of keeping watch, you needed two separate skills to be any good at doing even that, with a third if you also wanted to look for things that were hard to find. And don't get me started on skill rank taxes prerequisites for the feats and subclasses, excuse me, prestige classes you actually wanted for your character concept. We needed separate skills to keep our feet while moving and keeping our feet while standing still, separate skills for lying verbally and in writing, separate skills for controlling your horse and controlling your dog, etc. And don't get me started on the tables and tables of pre-defined DCs that would get metagamed from dawn till dusk. It was beyond silly.
Certainly I think they have landed on the list of skills, but their usage is so broad, the list itself and the meaning behind them is really quite irrelevant. Meaning, proficiency is not a requirement to be proficient in a sense. This system has effectively reverted to being a ability score test that under certain conditions, you get a proficiency bonus. This means that skills aren't really defined in a narrative context, they are a mechanical bonus. A high intelligence with no arcana skill for example is the same thing as an arcana proficiency with a low intelligence, their is nothing to distinguish these two things.
For example if you have no Arcana skill proficiency but have an 18 Intelligence (+4 bonus), you actually know more about Arcana than a 1st level character with a skill proficiency but lower intelligence, for example a 10 Int with a skill proficiency you would have at 1st level a +2 bonus.
Without governance over usage and specific representation of what proficiency means or how it impacts the narrative, it basically just boil down to a generic ability score roll and its just a question of what bonuses you get (ability score modifier and/or proficiency bonus).
I'm not suggesting the system was better whole sale, meaning that I understand that there were issues with the implementation of the design, but I still hold that class-cross class skills as a concept could have been improved and would have given us a better result.
With skills in a class system, in order for the narrative purpose of classes to make sense and for the role of skills to make sense their have to be a couple of things that govern their use.
1. Classes as experts should be a concept included in the game. The Wizard and Sorcerer for example should have an advantage in skills like Arcana over a Barbarian or Rogue. This makes narrative sense and that should be reflected in the mechanics in my opinion. This is a trope, but its one that defines fantasy, in a word, we expect this to be true and so it should be.
2. Skill expertise should have some impact on when a skill can and can't be used. A person who is not trained in survival should not be able to get "lucky" and suddenly, magically know how to be an expert survivalist just because the dice landed in their favor. You either know something or you don't, if you don't you cannot even make the attempt or at the very least the outcome should reflect your expertise.
For example a 10 Int Barbarian with no proficiency should not be able to make an Arcana roll to determine the origins of an Arcane Rune... There is nothing about their class, intelligence level and training that would suggest they know anything about magical runes, but as it is in D&D today, they could roll a 20 effectively be an expert on the subject.. While an 18 Int Wizard with Arcana proficiency might look at a Rune, roll a 1 and be dumbfounded by it.
To me the absence of of addressing that is a real problem as it effectively breaks the suspension of disbelief and disconnects the narrative concepts built into classes and skills.
The 3.5e system certainly had its issues, but there were clear requirements and restrictions that defined the fantasy and while I would certainly make a far more improved and streamlined implementation to get this effect in 5e, abandoning this concept entirely I think was a mistake, its resulted in a very generic and narratively disconnected skill system.
So I don't disagree, I am an experienced 20+ yr DM so I have the tools to approach the game this way, but if I was brand new coming in then I would not know that these where possibilities, that is my fear, that in 10 years time the majority of DnD players and DM's will be playing the game the way it is in the book because they don't know any better. It will have become more and more generic, and the materials made for it will also flow that way because that is the players Wizards has got because of it's new system.
There is nothing here that is even remotely risky, or innovative, or new. Nothing that makes us go, wait, that's different. As another poster answered it is all just Beige, lots and lots of Beige, and beige is good, if you have the ability and skill to know how to accentuate it, how to use colour and accesseries to make it better. But, if you don't then you will think that Beige is what is normal.
If any argument for or against a system starts "an experienced DM/Player will be able to work around this" then the system is fundamentally flawed from the outset. It is asking for a someone new to understand an inherent truth that is not defined in the books.
is this the new DMG?