What should being proficient in a skill unlock (see assumption!)

[PhoenixPhyre]

Assumption: In this setting, sufficiently advanced training is indistinguishable from magic. And "sufficiently" is gated on proficiency (more specifically, non-ability-score modifier, so including expertise).

I'm in the process of writing up a system for "skill tricks"--non-spell[1] things that people can learn as long as they are either (a) the right level (for ones tied only to an ability score) or (b) have the appropriate level of proficiency (as measured by proficiency bonus including any multipliers, for things that are tied to more specialized areas).

These could be either combat or non-combat. Both are welcome.

Note: in this system, there's a non-spell-slot (but not at will) rate limiting resource involved. So don't worry about at will vs spell slots.

These should be comparable to spells, as follows:


Required Proficiency
Required level
Corresponding Spell Level


+3
5
1st, 2nd or weak 3rd


+4
9
4th or weak 5th


+5
13
6th or weak 7th


+6
17
7th or 8th[2]



[1] Not interacting with counterspell, dispel magic, AMF, etc. Having their own DCs (8 + the relevant ability score + proficiency). Not "spell-like", but certainly what 3e would call extraordinary or supernatural.

[2] Not doing 9ths, because 9ths need rethinking most of the time. All the spell levels could be lower as appropriate if there's a nicely thematic effect.

[LibraryOgre]

Feeling an Earthdawn vibe (pleased).

I think your general idea is pretty good, but I might go a bit simpler: The spell level you can emulate is equal to your proficiency bonus, and governed by level. So, a 1st level character can manage 1st level spellish feats (+2), and can manage 2nd level spellish feats at 3rd (+2).

This locks mundane training out of 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells, but here's where the fun begins: Expertise.

Without expertise, skill magic starts falling behind spell magic after 5th level; you can still do it, but you won't get 4th level skill magic until 9th, 5th until 13th, and 6th until 17th. WITH expertise, it keeps up throughout (because of the level-locking of spell levels).

It's more intuitive (for those who are familiar with 5e), and it self-scales.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Feeling an Earthdawn vibe (pleased).

I think your general idea is pretty good, but I might go a bit simpler: The spell level you can emulate is equal to your proficiency bonus, and governed by level. So, a 1st level character can manage 1st level spellish feats (+2), and can manage 2nd level spellish feats at 3rd (+2).

This locks mundane training out of 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells, but here's where the fun begins: Expertise.

Without expertise, skill magic starts falling behind spell magic after 5th level; you can still do it, but you won't get 4th level skill magic until 9th, 5th until 13th, and 6th until 17th. WITH expertise, it keeps up throughout (because of the level-locking of spell levels).

It's more intuitive (for those who are familiar with 5e), and it self-scales.

But I specifically do not want to simply emulate spells. Because that reinforces the "everything cool is a spell, and spell-casters have access to all the cool things natively; everyone else has to struggle for it" attitude I find so obnoxious.

I want different things. They may be similar in power to spells, but they shouldn't just be "you cast <spell>".

[LibraryOgre]

But I specifically do not want to simply emulate spells. Because that reinforces the "everything cool is a spell, and spell-casters have access to all the cool things natively; everyone else has to struggle for it" attitude I find so obnoxious.

I want different things. They may be similar in power to spells, but they shouldn't just be "you cast <spell>".

I understand; spells were the easiest thing to hang them on, but I tried to use "spellish" and "skill magic"... something that you can do by dint of training, following the existing spell level guidelines, but not the same as spells.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I understand; spells were the easiest thing to hang them on, but I tried to use "spellish" and "skill magic"... something that you can do by dint of training, following the existing spell level guidelines, but not the same as spells.

Ahh. Misunderstood then. Yeah. I may reconsider the exact breakpoints, but that's more about guiding the conversation in this thread than a system requirement.

------------

I'll note that the system this is designed for is...not exactly the same as 5e. It's built on the same framework/SRD, but it does things like

* Create a unified set of resources everyone has (Stamina and Aether, respectively) and uses for them
* Removes spell levels entirely (spells costs aether instead), but chops off spell effects qua spells at roughly 5th level, with higher things being "legendary effects" that behave more like Mystic Arcana.
* Reworks most of the classes.

But that's somewhat secondary to this, since I think the basic idea could be implemented in 5e stock.

[sithlordnergal]

I actually like this idea. You could eventually become skilled enough in, say, Athletics that you can easily climb vertical surfaces at half speed without making a check, and having a hand free, or effectively gain the benefits of having a Swim speed.

And while I know you want to avoid emulating spells, but I feel like some parts should be emulated. for example, if you become skilled enough in Nature or Survival, you basically gain the ability to apply the to enrich the land, like when you cast Plant Growth for 8 hours, or a high enough Arcana gives you the effects of Identify

[LibraryOgre]

Ok, then, let's look at the skills and what they should do... you might also consider some tool proficiencies as having special options, too.

Athletics
You transcend jumping into actually flying
Able to breathe underwater
Walk on ceilings, or even just brachiate through the trees.

Acrobatics
Super hero landing!
Sprinting the high wire
Basically, Prince of Persia

Sleight of Hand
Remove increasingly improbable objects (normal people do rings; I removed his underwear)
Pluck thoughts from people's heads

Stealth
Invisibility is obvious. What about straight-up intangibility?
Move back in time; you were always there, they just didn't notice.

Arcana
Unlock the magic inside normal things

History
Know things that are forgotten... reading long-dead languages, for example
Psychometry; pick up an item and learn its history and use

I might think about others later.

[Khosan]

I know you don't want spell equivalents, but Insight and Perception lend themselves towards certain Divination-like effects. Detect Thoughts, Locate Object, See Invisibility, etc. It's hard not to go immediately to those, but I'll give it a shot.

A low level Insight proficiency could be used to grant the user Advantage on an attack or skill check (or maybe a personal Bardic Inspiration) against a specific person. A little empathy and understanding towards others can go a long way in getting you what you want. Even if it's stabbing them.

At a medium level, maybe the user can replace any d20 roll with an Insight check. Got a crap Dex save? Well, you had a hunch that caster was going to throw a fireball so you preemptively hid behind this wall.

At a high level, after rolling a d20 for something, you can swap out the result of that roll for your passive Insight. Reading people is as easy as breathing at this point and you don't even need to think to process that information. You know how people are going to act before they do and you're already reacting to it.

I'm a bit stumped on what a Perception proficiency would provide. Part of that is just the difficulty of differentiating it from spells. My first few ideas were basically just Scrying or Locate Object but with less range and fewer restrictions. Divination just covers too much of that design space.

Best idea I had was something along the lines of being able to substitute your AC with your Passive Perception. It'd kinda suck without investing in either Alert or Expertise, but it's basically all I got.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I should be clearer, I guess.

I don't want "you cast <spell>." Having the same effect (or a very similar effect) to a spell is fine. But I don't want it to be coupled to the spell entry itself. Especially for the higher-rank effects, since a lot of those are changing anyway.

[Anymage]

Just some off-the-top-of-my-head ideas for cool things you could do with arbitrarily high skills. Cribbing heavily from Exalted and 3.5 epic skills;

Athletics: Increase various movement speeds. Jump so far so as to practically fly (possibly combined with the last one for some truly prodigious combat movement jumps). Various feats of superhero feats of strength that are nifty looking all on their own, including smashing through/breaking/throwing just about anything in your way.

Acrobatics: Pass through impossibly small spaces. Walk normally along anything, including objects that otherwise couldn't hold your weight, liquids, non-horizontal surfaces, and at the highest levels/costs even things like smoke or clouds. Negate increasing amounts of fall damage. Possibly moving fast stand up (without the movement cost) and/or ignoring opportunity attacks into acrobatics skill tricks.

Sleight of Hand: Pickpocket increasingly larger objects, potentially up to PC size or larger (allowing you to cause another character to disappear and be hidden based off of your roll). Making it so that people including the victim can't notice the object's absence until they would specifically interact with the it. Opening a lock with a quick wiggle followed by a sharp tug. Somewhere in the Sleight of Hand/Thieves Tools/Stealth general area, you might even want to include a Passwall effect to allow entry into otherwise impossible areas.

Stealth: Increasingly high levels of disappearance and invisibility are their own rewards. Although Stealth and Perception will have to remain in balance, as equal Stealth and Perception scores should treat each other equally whether those scores are first level nonproficient, or 20th level expertise.

Knowledge skills: These should be tied to magic, somehow. Knowledge based characters tend to be good for knowing enemy weaknesses, communicating with various things, knowing how to get into historically important places (including relevant traps), knowing what items do, etc. Maybe good teachers, too. Aside from the Identify ability and maybe Tongues (although that's harder what with languages being separated from knowledge skills), none of those are things you do heroically in the moment. Thus your fallback should be the other shtick of knowledge characters, being the ones to pull out ancient tomes and using them properly when you absolutely need a magical solution.

Investigation: Psychometry. Retrocognition. Bonuses to Perception and Sense Motive when you can leverage environmental clues. Unfortunately the main thing that appeals to players who would want to invest in Investigation is being Sherlock Holmes, and that's tricky to build into your system. Either you have to give the player a fair amount of narrative control themselves (including the miniscule clues they leverage to their overall conclusion), or you have to build in specific miniscule clues for those players as well as hints as to what those clues mean.

Animal Handling: Talking to animals. Influencing the attitudes and behaviors of animals and animal-like creatures, even ones that would be otherwise hard to interact with. (Combat trained by enemies or even magically conjured.) Gaining enhanced performance from/giving buffs to animals you're working with. A small touch of overlap with Investigation, being able to notice disturbances in animal behavior that foretell bigger events.

Insight: 100% accurate lie detection, up to mind reading. Potentially combat bonuses, from being able to read your opponent's tells better. Knowing alignment and similar deeply held beliefs.

Medicine: Healing. Potentially knowing how to aggravate a situation or cause harm that looks entirely natural. Maybe increased damage from knowing bodies well enough to know where to strike for maximum harm, but putting "hit harder" under the healing skill would feel rather off.

Perception: See Stealth. Superhuman sensory acuity and being able to counter stealth are plenty. Maybe countering darkness or otherwise allowing one sense to be compensated for by others.

Survival: Outdoorsiness and being able to survive environmental hazards. High levels can up that to surviving even more extreme levels of environmental hazard (an active volcano, negative energy plane, etc.) or resisting elemental damage used as a deliberate attack.

Cha skills: "superhumanly influential" should give plenty of ideas all on its own.

[Atranen]

I've got two reactions to this idea.

First: Love it! Skills need to have more guidance and explicit mechanisms for affecting the world. The power level of PCs now is heavily dictated by what the GM feels is plausible and at what DC, and the experience can vary a lot. Specific effects are a great way to fix this.

Second: Wow, that's a big system to overhaul. Coming up with a different set of effects for each skill, and various power levels, is similar in scope to rewriting all of the spells. There's a lot that can go wrong in the execution.

Is the idea to keep it as generic as in your post--"GM, keep in mind skilled characters should be able to accomplish tasks on the order of X for Y resource"? Or to have a library of specific effects?

The first, setting effect and cause through negotiation with the GM, has an interesting implementation in Whitehack (an OSR game). It works well but the experience varies substantially from table to table.

[KorvinStarmast]

Assumption: In this setting, sufficiently advanced training is indistinguishable from magic. And "sufficiently" is gated on proficiency (more specifically, non-ability-score modifier, so including expertise).

I'm in the process of writing up a system for "skill tricks"--non-spell[1] things that people can learn as long as they are either (a) the right level (for ones tied only to an ability score) or (b) have the appropriate level of proficiency (as measured by proficiency bonus including any multipliers, for things that are tied to more specialized areas).

These could be either combat or non-combat. Both are welcome.

Note: in this system, there's a non-spell-slot (but not at will) rate limiting resource involved. So don't worry about at will vs spell slots.

These should be comparable to spells, as follows:


Required Proficiency
Required level
Corresponding Spell Level


+3
5
1st, 2nd or weak 3rd


+4
9
4th or weak 5th


+5
13
6th or weak 7th


+6
17
7th or 8th[2]



[1] Not interacting with counterspell, dispel magic, AMF, etc. Having their own DCs (8 + the relevant ability score + proficiency). Not "spell-like", but certainly what 3e would call extraordinary or supernatural.

[2] Not doing 9ths, because 9ths need rethinking most of the time. All the spell levels could be lower as appropriate if there's a nicely thematic effect.OK, I am traveling on Thursday, I will have time to ponder on this and get back to you. Lots to cogitate on.

Feeling an Earthdawn vibe (pleased). *grin* Yes.

And I think this whole approach does indeed make 'expertise' shine in a different way than it now does.

[MoiMagnus]

Required Proficiency
Required level
Corresponding Spell Level


+3
5
1st, 2nd or weak 3rd


+4
9
4th or weak 5th


+5
13
6th or weak 7th


+6
17
7th or 8th[2]



Nice idea !
Here are my incomplete suggestions, I will edit my post latter to add more ideas:

Strength
Athletics

Climb on => you can "grapple" creatures bigger than you. Contrary to the regular grappling, this does not restrain their movement as you are instead climbing on them. They cannot attack you (though they still can try to break the grapple) and you have an advantage to attack them.
Mid-air jump => unlimited concentration-free pseudo-flight by repeatedly jumping on air (or water, ...) like the double-jumps of videogames.
Superstrength => can carry and throw things up to a metric ton with two arms, or 1000 pound per arm (same max as telekinesis). They maintain their structural integrity (so don't break appart because of their own weights) while you do so.
Superhaste. During combat, you get two turns per round (roll a d10 instead of a d20 for initiative, and you play at that initiative AND that initiative +10). Outside of combat, you are simply twice as fast to move and do actions.


Dexterity
Acrobatics

Riposte => you can make attacks of opportunity against anyone that attacks you (including ranged and/or magical attack, assuming they are in reach of your melee weapon), excluding attacks of opportunity against you.
Freedom of movement (personal)
Reaction => Immediately move half your movement speed, but your movement speed is halved next turn. This can allow you to move out an area targetted by a spell such as fireball.
You can temporarily become incorporeal (like a ghost, so immunity to most non-magical damage and possibility to go through creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain)

Sleight of Hand

Third hand (so mage hand ++, including yielding and attacking with a weapon)
Turn your clothes (or body?) into a Bag of holding while you wear them.
Limited forward time travel of small objects: can send a small object into the near future.
Limited backward time travel of small objects: can send borrow a small object from the near future, in which case you are under a Geas-like compulsion to ensure that you indeed send back in time what you receive (paradoxes do not destroy the universe, they just hurt you). Causal loops are forbidden, meaning there must be a way to obtain the object you borrow from the future that doesn't rely on you using time travel (you can't get a key from the future and send that key back in the past with no way of getting access to the original).

Stealth

When you are part of a group using Stealth, one member of the group can replace their result by yours minus 5. (e.g. you at 27 and them at 18 and 6 => you at 27 and them at 18 and 22)
Apathy or "void telepathy" => Your spirit/soul is invisible. You cannot be detected by telepathy or anything that detect sentient beings. Spells see you as an object and not as a creature (you are still considered living, like some kind of tree)
?
Your movement speed is multiplied by 10 as long as no one observes you. You might need a Stealth check to temporarily being unobserved if you are under constant scrutiny. As a byproduct, you always know if you are observed or not.


Intelligence
Arcana

Detect magic
You recognize the spell you see being cast or the magic they detected. You use passive Arcana +5.
?
?

History

Identify
Tongues (constant ability)
Can find extraplanars that are old allies and/or indebted with one's family/kingdom/etc and the way to call them (as if casting planar ally)
?

Investigation



Nature



Religion




Wisdom
Animal Handling

Find familiar or steed
?
?
?

Insight

Detect thought
?
?
?

Medicine



Perception

Minor precognition => cannot be surprised
Intuitive ballistics => can predict how an object/projectile will move if nothing interfere => ranged attacks have a disadvantage against you and you can "catch things" easily.
?
?

Survival




Charisma
Deception

Suggestion
You can cast "fake spells" that are identical copy of any spell you either know how to cast, or took the time to study in depth with someone who knows how to cast it, with the exception that the spell has no actual effect. The spellcasting itself is real, so is a valid target for counterspell. Other than the action cost, this casting is free (e.g. the spell components used are not actually consumed)
?
?

Intimidation

Command
?
?
?

Performance



Persuasion

[Joshthemanwich]

I would definitely let characters with a stealth proficiency literally "Hide in Shadows" with a system like this. Maybe high level Athletics could allow an "overland running" like the overland fight spell, but on the ground.

[Kane0]

Would this thread be helpful?

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?637718-Skill-Tricks-for-Martials