Epic House Rules: Talented Checks

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House rules can make your D&D games more epic. If your game features lots of ability checks, and your characters use their skill and tool proficiencies all over the place, this new Talented Checks house rule can speed up your game, make your characters feel more like competent heroes, and make it easier to run mystery and social intrigue adventures. Let’s talk about Talented Checks!

Talented Checks

This house rule is short and sweet. Let’s start by stating it plainly here, and then we’ll dive into the nuances, interactions, and side effects this rule has as it echoes throughout the rest of the D&D rules. Here’s the house rule in its entirety:

If you’re proficient with a skill or tool, you automatically succeed on ability checks using that proficiency if the DC of that check is equal to or lower than 10 + your modifiers that apply to that check.

This is a fairly simple house rule, but it can have a massive impact on how your D&D game runs. It’s well-suited to social intrigue or mystery stories (like Waterdeep: Dragon Heist or adventures like The Styes in Ghosts of Saltmarsh), or any other adventure in which characters are expected to make a lot of checks.

This house rule even has uses in dungeon-crawling tales like Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, since it makes each class’s identity in the dungeon even more distinct. If a fighter has proficiency in Athletics, giving them the ability to automatically succeed on easy Strength (Athletics) checks lets their player feel like a competent action hero—which is the core of their class. Likewise, rogues can confidently pick locks that aren’t too beyond their skill, and wizards can comfortably succeed at Intelligence (Arcana) checks to decipher magical secrets, making them feel like all that studying they did in Candlekeep was worth something in the long run.  

Passive Checks vs. Talented Checks

Most D&D players are at least passingly familiar with passive checks—particularly the most common type of passive check, a passive Wisdom (Perception) check. Your passive Wisdom (Perception) score is listed on your character sheet, and that value is equal to 10 + all modifiers that normally apply to the check, such as your Wisdom modifier and your proficiency bonus (if you’re proficient in the Perception skill).

Talented checks use the same formula as passive checks for determining success and failure, but they work differently. Here are some distinctions to keep in mind if you’re using this house rule.

Passive checks are always on; talented checks aren’t. When you enter a room in a dungeon, you automatically succeed at any Wisdom (Perception) checks that have a DC equal to or lower than your passive Wisdom (Perception) score. Even though a talented check can automatically succeed, you still need to actively choose to make an ability check.

You need to be proficient to make a talented check. Anyone can make a passive check. For instance, you still have a passive Wisdom (Perception) score even if you aren’t proficient in the Perception skill. Your passive score in that case is equal to 10 + your Wisdom modifier. Talented checks, however, can only be made by people who are proficient with the skill or tool being used. This helps protect the usefulness of characters that have invested resources into mastering a certain type of skill or tool.

Not all checks are passive checks, but any check can be talented. The rules of D&D aren’t clear on what checks can or can’t be passive. By the rules, any combination of ability scores and proficiencies can be made “passive,” but the only ones that are called out specifically by the rules are passive Wisdom (Perception) and passive Intelligence (Investigation)—the latter only shows up in the [feat]Observant[/feat] in the Player’s Handbook. That’s why those two passive scores are the only ones that appear on the D&D Beyond Character Sheet. If you want to make any other skill passive, you need to talk with your players (or ask your DM) and make it clear that’s what’s happening.

That’s not the case with talented checks. If you use this house rule, you’re making a clear statement to your players that if you’re proficient with a skill or tool, you can simply choose to succeed on easy checks using those proficiencies.

What about Reliable Talent?

Reliable Talent is a rogue class feature that allows you to “treat a d20 roll of 9 or lower as a 10” whenever you “make an ability check that lets you add your proficiency bonus.” This house rule is essentially expanding Reliable Talent to all characters, but with less dice rolling. This is only a problem if your game reaches 11th level and you have a rogue in your party; they’ll need to receive another mechanical bonus to replace the one that this house rule has essentially given to everyone.

A fine replacement for Reliable Talent is the bard’s Jack of All Trades class feature, which allows you to add half your proficiency bonus to any check that you wouldn’t otherwise add your proficiency bonus to. Even though its function is different, replacing Reliable Talent with Jack of All Trades as the rogue’s 11th-level class feature fulfils a similar role of improving their odds of success when making ability checks.

What about Temporary Proficiency?

Some class features, like the Knowledge Domain cleric’s Channel Divinity: Knowledge of the Ages feature, temporarily grants you proficiency with a skill or tool. Given a strict reading of the rules, this house rule allows you to make a talented check as long as you are proficient with a skill or tool; there’s no stipulation that you must always be proficient, just that you must be proficient when you make the check. This house rule certainly makes Knowledge Domain clerics better, but I don’t think it makes them particularly overpowered.

As with any house rule, it’s incumbent upon you and your table to work with your players and Dungeon Master to modify the rules to suit your needs.

What about Xanathar’s Guide to Everything?

Xanathar’s Guide to Everything gives Dungeon Masters and players a great deal of specific guidance on how to use tool proficiencies in fun and useful ways. Some of the fun of using these tool proficiencies relies on the tension of the dice; will you succeed at forging a signature with your calligrapher’s tools, even with its high DC? This house rule doesn’t make it more likely for characters to succeed at incredibly hard checks, but it does make it a guarantee that they’ll succeed at the easier checks, since they have to be proficient with a particular tool in order to attempt some of these specialized checks in the first place. I don’t think that this causes any problems, unless you really enjoy the uncertainty involved in possibly failing easy checks.

Xanathar’s also gives guidance on making downtime activities exciting. Some of these downtime activities involve making ability checks to determine how well you succeed at a certain activity. For instance, committing crimes while in town requires you to choose a DC, and then make several checks against that DC. If your characters just want a little bit of easy cash, it could become boring if they choose a DC that they can automatically beat using a talented check. Removing the risk of failure could make checks like this rote and mundane.

On the other hand, it’s up to you to decide if this is a bad thing or not. Your party may have a little more gold than usual, but what’s wrong with that? If one of your character is a master thief who just wants a reliable cash flow, let them live out the fantasy of pulling off a string of flawless low-profile capers week after week. But you’ve seen enough heist movies to know they’ll eventually want more, right? Thieves in movies, plays, and TV shows have massive egos and poor impulse control; they’re always looking for something bigger, badder, and shinier.

If this house rule causes crime (or whatever your players’ go-to downtime activity is) to become routine, try upping the ante yourself. Drop hints about the “Grand Diamond of Cormyr” being put on display in the Waterdeep Metropolitan Museum for a tenday only in one month’s time. This isn’t just a standard crime; this is a crime with DCs of 30 across the board. The characters are going to need to do a lot of legwork to rig these checks in their favor, and talented checks won’t help them here.

Do you have any questions about this house rule? How would you use it in your D&D games? And do you have any house rules of your own? Let us know in the comments!

Special thanks to @ThinkingDM for his thread about passive skills, which inspired me to revise and expand my original draft of this house rule.

  

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James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and the Critical Role Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, a member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his fiancée Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.

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