For almost 3 years now I’ve been primarily running and playing the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. During that time I’ve complained about my dislike for the skill system and recently I decided to spend some time thinking it through and write up some thoughts.
As is often the case, the act of thinking and writing helped me realise I’ve just been approaching things incorrectly. I realised that 5th edition is actually the first tabletop role playing game I’ve played without an explicit skill rank system and it has taken me all this time to stop thinking in terms of skill ranks.
I often struggled with, both as a GM and as a player, the lack of “trained” skills. In 5th edition players make an ability check and if they happen to be proficient in a relevant skill or tool (and have the tool to hand) they can apply their proficiency bonus to the ability check. Thus; if your party encounter strange magical runes requiring an Intelligence check to decipher, there’s no reason the Barbarian can’t make such a check as well as the Wizard. It then falls on the player and GM to determine how the Barbarian knows, should their check succeed.
In play I often found it jarring when, for example, the scholarly Wizard rolled low and the Barbarian rolled high on an Intelligence (Arcana) check – and the Wizard was therefore less knowledgeable in an arcane situation.
However when I stopped thinking in terms of skill ranks and trained vs. untrained I realised there are three ways to reduce this jarring feeling:
- No check – if you want the Wizard to decipher runes and not the Barbarian, just tell the Wizard when he investigates.
- Higher DC – this won’t help the Wizard when he rolls low, but if the DC is >20 it’s going to be very hard for a character with a low relevant ability and no proficiency bonus to beat that DC.
- Some kind of house rule making skills required for various checks.
In terms of house rules one idea I had is to require proficiency in a skill in order to make some checks. That way the DC needn’t be particularly high, and therefore there’s flexibility to ensure a large possibility of success, whilst still “protecting” areas of knowledge for characters proficient in particular skills and increasing the satisfaction of having chosen the right skills.
It should be pretty easy for a DM to adjudicate such things on the fly, but a reasonable guideline might be something like:
Skill checks with a DC of 15 (Moderate) or higher require proficiency with the skill to attempt.
The more I think about it though the more I expect I’ll be embracing ideas one and two when running my game. Rolling dice is fun but we don’t need to do it for every drop of knowledge and if the prize is really worth it a high DC check makes success all the more enjoyable. A good motto would probably be not to ask for rolls unless failure is interesting or the stakes are high – I aim to follow that motto in my games from now on.