At the start of 2020, I decided to make the switch from Pathfinder to D&D. While the d20 fantasy games weren’t a go-to for me, there seemed to be more Adventure’s League games at my Friendly Local Game Store than Pathfinder Society games. And, at the time, I wasn’t sure if the launch of Pathfinder 2 would create a schism in the Society community. Then, things happened and gaming at my FLGS wasn’t available.
With online play becoming the new normal, I was able to reconnect with some of my Chicago friends and join a Pathfinder 2 campaign. Shortly after that my co-workers began to play D&D 5e online and we started a game. Jumping back and forth between two systems that shared the same roots would occasionally find me incorrectly calculating the wrong action for the current game, but this was usually minimal and easy to correct.
Except when it came to skills. And especially for the rogue and ranger classes.
I had a long hiatus from the d20-based systems. I played AD&D 2nd edition a lot in the 80’s and early 90’s but found interest in other games and systems, never expecting to return to standard fantasy gaming. The closest I came to playing D&D 3e/3.5 was through computer RPGs like Neverwinter Nights.
One of the things I noticed when switching to D&D 5e was that there were less than 20 skills and no room for custom knowledge skills. I thought, at the time, this was a good thing. AD&D 2nd Edition had an exceedingly large collection of skills by the end of its shelf life–possibly more skills than the game needed. Streamlining is usually something I prefer.
There’s a balance to streamlining skills. Characters shouldn’t feel homogenous and any the skill list should encompass what the game expects characters to do. 5e’s social skills work well in this respect but, playing a rogue, there was a lack of any sort of thievery/burglary skill. I was, and am, still surprised by this. Discerning traps and picking doors was the hallmark of the class, making any type of rogue an important part of the group. Finding traps was now part of the “Investigation” skill, which I could understand. However, lockpicking, was now a Dexterity check with bonuses not easily tracked on a character sheet (short of writing in the margins) based on proficiency/expertise and tools.
I was further confounded by 5e’s design choices when I attempted to create a heist-style, no combat, one-shot. It took very careful character creation to have distinct flavors of characters and I relied heavily on flavor text and background notes to differentiate the characters. However, in play, flavor text rarely mattered because one rogue, mechanically, was practically the same as the next.
As characters reach 3rd level, players are given the opportunity to pick a more defined path (an Archetype) for their characters. While this does help define a character’s specific role, many times a skill is hidden behind a stat check, not a skill check. This feels especially true for the two classes that were largely skill-driven in earlier editions: Rogue and Ranger.
It’s not that I feel stat checks with bonuses are a mechanically wrong way to do things, but I do think this “sometimes skill, sometimes stat” approach gives 5e a very muddled feeling in play. That Acrobatics and Athletics are specific skills but lockpicking and most thievery “skills” have become stat or feature-based will be a head-scratcher for me as long as I play. I’ve read a few opinions that 5e should have dispensed with skills entirely and, given how gameplay feels with historically skill-heavy classes, I don’t disagree with those opinions. Pathfinder 2e has its own skill issues, but they don’t, for me, have the level of detriment to play as D&D 5e’s.
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