Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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This is a good point, to the OP. FYI 99% of the stuff you will encounter in a real D&D game is not printed in any book. Here's just a list of things off the top of my head of things I have encountered as a player or have run as a DM for my players:
- A glowing magic crystal that works as a steering wheel to control a whole building that can teleport across planes. (required an Arcana check, a Nature check, or a straight Charisma check to use)
- Using those fishing nets on a long pole to try to catch some trouble making teenage pixies (required an Acrobatics check).
- Realizing that the party has been transported forwards in time (required a straight Intelligence check, or a Nature check)
- Jumping from one motorcycle (sorry Devil's Ride) to another in Descent to Avernus to then Shove a demon out of the drivers seat (required an Acrobatics check followed by an Athletics check).
- Making a convincing argument in the Court of Contract Appeals in Hell (this was a skill challenge culminating in an Intelligence (Persuasion) check)
- Quickly placing several items into slots in a puzzle door before a group of living statues could get to them and attack (I asked for an Intelligence (Acrobatics) or Intelligence (Sleight of Hand) check to place all 3 keys in a single Action)
- Teaching a bunch of townsfolk how to build wooden spike barricades before the goblin horde returned (this was Wisdom + Carpentry Tools or Wisdom + Survival against a harder DC)
- Grappling onto then trying to tame a flying reindeer (this was a combo of Athletics checks, Animal Handling checks, and Strength saving throws).
- Convincing a captor that we would never break, and the only way he'd make a profit from us was to send us to the gladiator pits (this was an Intimidation or a Constitution (Persuasion) check).
- Running into a burning house to searching for a way to reach some trapped people without getting too badly burned (this was Acrobatics)
- Trying to quickly launch lifeboats while the ship they were on was in the act of sinking (this was Acrobatics) they had another option of jumping overboard and trying to swim to one of the lifeboats which was Athletics, or of trying to read the waves and dive off and be carried away by the waves using Survival.
- Figuring out how to drive a submarine before we crashed into the ocean floor (this was Investigation or Survival).
- Figuring out an NPCs motivations then appealing to those motivations to convince them to help us (this was Insight then Persuasion with a very low DC)
- Realizing that one enemy was mind-controlling another enemy to direct it what to do and why they were doing that (this was Insight or Arcana)
- Reviving some assassins that had been sedated by a colony of Mychonids after fleeing when the party defeated them (this was Medicine or Nature), then it was Intimidation to get those assassins to cooperate and reveal who had hired them.
Why is this a strict binary? You've never been on a surface where you might or might not fall, and have to fight to keep your balance?
No that is not how the rules in D&D work. Most things you try to do have some chance of success and some chance of failure. It is not the case that either you get hit by a Fireball or you don't, multiple different outcomes can happen if you are in the area of a Fireball, and which one happens is determined by the dice via a saving throw. It's the same if you try to do something. If you try to descend tilted stone safely you might managed it (Successful Acrobatics), or you might not (Failed Acrobatics), but you could also not try to descend safely and end up all scratched up, or you could try brace yourself against the walls and resist sliding down (Successful Athletics) but you might fail and twist your ankle in the process (Failed Athletics).
Fishing for pixies: shouldn't that be a dex save for the pixies, as per the net rules? (At least in 2024 rules).
Jumping between motorcycles: Considering the rules have no 'inertia' or 'momentum', i'm pretty sure you just dismount one motorcycle and mount the other one (spending all your movement - half to dismount, and half to mount). If Acrobatics can let you jump from one motorcycle to another without spending movement (or spending less), then it allows you to bypass the mounting and dismounting rules, which is changing the rules. That's a generalizable mechanical benefit. If you still had to spend all your movement, then you should never have needed to make the acrobatics check, because you can just do it.
Pushing demon off: At least in 2024 rules, that's a push action, not an athletics check. (Or you could just hit them with, say, a warhammer when you have mastery in it).
Spiked wood barricades: This was a skill check, really?
Flying Reindeer: pretty obviously played in 2014 rules, as the grapple rules have changed. Legit for handle animal though, and explicit in the core rules. This is absolutely what a player would expect to use that skill for.
Burning House: This feels like it should have been a save or take fire damage, based on how other similar effects work. There's a whole bunch of similar spell effects that you'd get laughed at for suggesting you could make an acrobatics check instead.
Quickly launch lifeboats: I would not have expected this to be an Acrobatics check. Athletics, if anything. Of course, I wouldn't expect a medieval ship to have lifeboats, either, but maybe it was a modern setting?
I mean, a lot of the ones I don't mention feel like pretty straight up 'i expect this skill to handle this situation'. But all the acrobatics ones either feel like you're bypassing actual mechanics in a way that should be generally useable in other situations, or not actually acrobatics at all.
Using acrobatics to cross a space is just like using athletics to climb. There are three common situations:
All outcomes are binary - either success or fail.
The movement rules define moving through space. So either you are moving down this sloped stone in some defined way, or you're falling. In either way, the rules dictate the outcome.
If you're saying Acrobatics allows a different outcome not covered by the normal rules, then Acrobatics is allowing you to break the rules on a skill check. And the way in which it does that should be generally applicable. But first you need to properly define the problem.
And you figure out which by figuring out how a person not using any skill navigates the terrain. If they just tumble down the slope, it's falling, and they should take fall damage.
Now we've quantified the mechanical benefit acrobatics is giving you. But... the rules nowhere provide for that benefit. This is allowing acrobatics to break the rules. And any such use you come up with for acrobatics is going to be allowing you to bypass some rule that governs movement in some way, if for no other reason than acrobatics allowing you to traverse space in a way you normally can't do is, by definition, making an exception to the general movement rules. This is tautological.
(I certainly agree it should allow you to break the rules like that. But it shouldn't be unique to that slope - acrobatics should always let you do that).
There's also partial success, incomplete failure, Pyrrhic victory, winning by losing...
Even if you're just talking about the D&D rules, there's also degrees of success and failure allowed. Not to mention crits.
But the lack of a pure binary in D&D or real life is irrelevant to the slope example. Success lets you descend in a controlled manner. Failure does not. The skill check is the price of admission, but you still have to move.
One of the many things you seem to be unwilling to get is that there is not a single way to interpret every situation in D&D. Even if you can construct some interpretation to not use Acrobatics that's sort-of based on the rules, that doesn't make it the only interpretation, nor even the most natural one.
And you're going to some pretty strained lengths at times, all because you have decided that, because Acrobatics has few situations where the rules explicitly call for a check, it's not useful, and you will bend the rules and smash verisimilitude to argue it.
Of course I'm talking about the D+D rules. And there are no crits outside attacks. You either make the DC, or you don't. (Degrees of success is just multiple separate binaries).
If success lets you descend in a controlled manner, and failure means you fall, then why only that example? If I suggested this was a general feature of acrobatics in all falls (reduce fall damage and avoid falling prone), you'd tell me the rules didn't say that. Lack of predictability kills versimillitude more than anything I've argued.
Think of this from the position of a player. If there's few certain use cases for a skill, why would they take it? The player is going to be asking 'what will this do for me?' If it's entirely at the whim of the DM, it's unknowable to the player, and that devalues it as a choice.
And players deserve predictability in how the rules interact with their character. If sometimes a fall allows an acrobatics check to mitigate the fall, and other times it does not, versimillitude is destroyed, because the player cannot predict the behavior of the world from their interactions with it. We're back to best case scenario being you can convince the DM to break the rules for you on a skill check. ('You just let me roll acrobatics to mitigate a fall two sessions ago. Why won't it work now?')
I would never even think to attempt acrobatics to slide down that stone in a RAW game, not because a lack of creativity, but because the rules don't care about my creativity when they have clearly defined outcomes for things like falling. I'm going to be climbing down, because it will take no check and I know that's how the game world works. Declaring otherwise stupid actions on the hope the DM will give you a skill roll you can make to succeed is not a recipe for long character lifespans. And needing to be given a list of options by the DM for how to navigate a hazard, because things never works predictably, is lame beyond belief.
And as a DM, i strive to make my world predictable. Acrobatics (and several other skills) in my game has a list of maneuvers with DCs, and the players get that emailed to them before session zero, well before they ever create their character. (And if a player comes up with a use that feels appropriate and generalizable, it goes on the list.) But that's well into houserule territory, as virtually every use of Acrobatics that has been proposed in this thread is.
To quote from a great artistic work:
By definition if the spectrum of results/outcomes exceeds two, it's not binary.
The situation in the example is not a normal fall; it's a slope that a sufficiently capable character can navigate.
Dude, you argued that jumping from one hell motorcycle to another should be done by getting off and walking between the two.
I took acrobatics on my monk because I expected to be approaching problems by running, jumping, tumbling, etc.
I will create the use cases.
If the specific situation presents an opportunity to attempt to mitigate the fall, you can attempt to use them. "Can I grab the branches?" "Can I try to hit the gelatinous cube?" etc.
Your creativity is the point of the game. It is part and parcel of the rules.
It's a slope any character can navigate with the climbing rules, no skill check needed.
Because that's how the rules says it works.
Strict RAW.
It's not totally clear to me why you have to get off your motorcycle in the first place. You can make an unarmed strike push, or hit the 'dare'-devil with a warhammer, from the other motorcycle.
The game has no concept of momentum or inertia or velocity that carries across turns. Crawford is on record as saying that if you make a jump farther than you have movement, you stop at the end of your movement and then fall to the ground. The jump doesn't continue into your next turn. No velocity.
Can you houserule that? Sure. But it's a houserule. It's not how the rules actually work. That's just the weird physics of the DND rules.
But okay, let's say you're playing in a game where acrobatics lets you successfully jump between mounts in a way that isn't strictly equivalent to dismounting one and mounting the other.
What is it that acrobatics is doing differently than just dismounting and mounting normally?
Please describe 3 use cases and what the mechanical benefits are for them.
If you were DMing and one of the players wanted their character to do a backflip, how would you respond?
Any sufficiently widespread magic is indistinguishable from technology.
The second funniest thing to make a D&D party do is explain morality
Try your hand at the Ultimate Skill Build Challenge!
I probably nitpick and scrutinize too much
Just do a backflip to do a backflip? With proficiency (and even without, so long as a decent dexterity): Automatic success, they did a backflip. Congrats? It's pure style, why would i have someone roll that?
That would be limited to your climb speed.
I've previously quoted the difference between a saving throw and an ability check directly from the rules. But more informally, a saving throw is a mechanic which represents an immediate self-preservation reflex which occurs when something undesirable happens to you. In contrast, a DM can call for an ability check when a creature attempts to do something.
The situations that you've described above all make sense for the saving throw mechanic. In addition, those things all call for a saving throw because that's how they were written.
Note again that typically the DM simply decides which skills can be applied to an ability check based on the particular situation that is happening. If for some reason you are more interested in published examples, you can find them all over the place in various official adventure modules. For example, in the very first adventure that was released for 5e, The Lost Mine of Phandelver, there was a dungeon that involved a pit trap. The text for the adventure suggests some possible solutions that the players might come up with for moving past this area, including: "A successful check also reveals narrow ledges on the north and south sides of the pit. A creature attempting to skirt around the pit using one of these ledges must succeed on a DC 10 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check."
That's just one example from among an infinite number of possibilities for when calling for an Acrobatics check might be appropriate.
Again, typically the mechanical benefit is that being proficient in a skill gives you a higher probability for success when attempting to do something that has a chance to succeed and also has a chance to fail. There are an infinite number of possible scenarios and creative solutions which can create situations like this.
Here's an example:
DM: You are standing at the bank of the river. This portion of the river is relatively narrow, but it is too far for you to jump across. The current here contains dangerous rapids. You see a boulder a bit more than half-way across the river which just barely sticks up out of the water -- the current regularly splashes over the top of this boulder so it is extremely wet.
Player: Is the boulder close enough so that I could jump onto it?
DM: With a running start you could jump onto that boulder, but the landing zone is quite small, and you suspect that it's very slippery.
Player: I take a running start and jump to that boulder with the intention of hopping from there to the other side of the river.
DM: Ok, make a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check.
I think that the above train of thought is highlighting another common misconception about the rules where the general answer is: D&D 5e (and 5.5e) doesn't work like that.
There are other systems, including prior editions of D&D where there was something fundamentally different about a creature that is proficient in a particular skill vs a creature that is not proficient in that skill. That is not the case in 5e / 5.5e.
Although some DMs choose to play like this, by rule, there really is no such thing as . . . Are you proficient in that skill? Then you can do it. Are you not proficient? Then you cannot do it. Instead, in 5e and 5.5e EVERY character CAN try to do EVERYTHING. The only difference is that being proficient in a relevant skill increases your probability for success.
For example, if your proficiency bonus is +2 and you are NOT proficient in the relevant skill, then you might have a 60% chance for success in whatever it is that you are attempting, depending on your ability modifier and the DC for the check and so on. On the other hand, if you ARE proficient in that skill, then you have a 70% chance for success. That's it. That's what the skill proficiency does for you. That's the mechanical benefit.
The concept of "using" a skill is kind of a misnomer. Instead, a certain skill might apply to what you are attempting to do, and you are either proficient in that skill or you aren't which changes the calculation for your ability check. But, for example, you can be proficient in a skill and actually be worse at the attempted activity than one of your other party members that is not proficient in that skill. The skills don't actually DO anything. They just increase your probability for success for activities where that skill can be applied.
If you can move on that space, it's just difficult terrain according to the rules (too narrow for the creature). If you can't move on that space normally, then acrobatics is giving you a mechanical benefit that the rules do not provide for it. The main rules should say 'Acrobatics allows you to move into a smaller space than you otherwise could'.
For something that's supposed to be triggered when the player does something, the actual trigger is 'the DM or module provides you a use for it', not what the player does.
Why is it an acrobatics check and not a dex save? Or alternately, why can't you use acrobatics on a Grease spell if you can use it here for the exact same purpose? I certainly agree slippery surfaces is the prime use case based on the PHB description of acrobatics, the problem is every example with an actual DC of a slippery surface in the rules is a dex save.
The other problem with these situations is the DCs, being set by writer/DM whim, tend to scale to (at least assumed) player capability rather than actual difficulty. The same river rock that was DC10 at level 1 will be DC 20 by level 10, just to make it possible for the character with acrobatics to fail. At which point, if nobody takes acrobatics, at least if its the DM setting the difficulties, the tasks will stay the same difficulty because the chance of failure remains 'reasonable'. Non-advancement becomes superior to advancement (because you didn't waste your resources on the ability, and because the rest of the party doesn't fall behind).
Can you generally ignore the climb rules with an acrobatics check? If not, why here? Where do the rules let you do that? (Or are we ignoring the fall damage and landing prone?)
How is it not immediately obvious that some rule is being bypassed by acrobatics here, in a way that none of you would accept as a general, player-initiated and planned for ability of the skill every time that rule came up?
I think other people already answered this sufficiently, but I would rather have one Athletics skill that might sometimes be a Strength (Athletics) check and sometimes be a Dexterity (Athletics) check.
Okay, I think I misunderstood your earlier post. I suppose having the rules spell out "When you want to stand from prone, you can either use half your movement or use a bonus action and make a DC 15 Acrobatics check" wouldn't be terrible. But that's also a pretty easy thing for a DM to decide on the fly.
DMs can't break the rules because DMs are the rules.