Proficiency Dice! D&D5E Animated Skillbook

Optional rules on proficiency and skills! D&D 5E dungeons and dragons!

[ornu]

I'm good at knowing monster lore, so I got to roll two dice and fail twice as hard. After all, everyone knows that direbears are very friendly and love it when you steal their honey.

[Shadowrunner]

The existential dread in that face when he said 'I could play another RPG for a bit' was too legit.

[Tarzard]

The proficiency doce thing reminds me of the pathfinder mobile game that I liked to play for a few years, nothing like rolling 5 dice to hit a monster as a barbarian. Very satisfying.

[Greywander]

For negative traits, instead of giving disadvantage or subtracting proficiency (which would make you get worse at higher levels), you could use a concept I came up with that I call "deficiency". The idea was that in addition to choosing skills that you were good at, you'd also choose skills that you were bad at. As for how it works mechanically, it's pretty simple: you actually do add your proficiency bonus to the roll, but you also have a -8 penalty. This makes "deficiency penalty" a perfect mirror to proficiency, going from -6 at 1st level to -2 at 17+. It has the same penalty range as subtracting your proficiency bonus, but the scaling is backwards so that the penalty becomes less severe at higher levels instead of more severe.

[ascapedgoat]

I think the most appealing aspect of proficiency dice is the ability to revamp certain abilities around it.

For example: Replacing the flat Rage damage bonus with a Rage Damage *Die, * allowing it to be added to more things like initiative or intimidate checks. Not to mention, it’ll make brutal critical and even better feature.

[KiloCharlie]

One proficiency mechanic I loved (and IDK how easy this would be to port over to D&D) is from 1e Hc Svnt Dracones. You have IIRC 4 main skill groups (IIRC grouped by stat) and assign one of 4 different dice to it. So the stuff you're strongest in, you're rolling the mighty D12, but for your weak skills, you're down to a D6. And since it's a dice pool system (a-la World of Darkness) that D6 has only 1 passing result, but those D12s are a 50/50! Very interesting to denote what you're supposed to be good and bad at IMO

[GabrielMaciel-trkl]

I like how self aware you were at the end of the video. Doing all this wacky changes in 5e so it feels fresh instead of just playing some other systems.

[madmanwithaplan]

Hey zee if you haven't heard of it through the breach is a nice breath of fresh air at my rpg table. It uses a deck of cards instead of dice meaning that a lot of tension can build in a session if players get a lot of low or high flips. Cause even subconsciously youll realize that if you've been having low flips that just means they're gone from the deck and the highs are in the deck somewhere. You cant be unlucky all night. Anyway its a ton of fun and id recommend you give it a look through if your interested in mythical dystopian cthulu horror westerns

[patriciaschonrock]

“First ask your dm” a vary good place to start. Glad you included it

[CasaiAgicap]

Background proficiency is basically 13th Age. Instead of skills you have backgrounds that are unique to your character.
If you're playing Batman, you might have a background in World's Greatest Detective, and so if you're looking for a hidden door you can say to your DM "well given I'm the World's Greatest Detective, can I add that to my roll to find this door?", but you can also do that to, say, interrogate an NPC.
It's a really neat system and makes it feel like your character's story is important.

[chasunity]

I use the proficiency dice in one of the games I run. My players really like it. I do want to point out when using proficiency dice you do still have to refer to the normal table for some abilities that say things like "do this x number of a times a day = to half your proficiency bonus". Also, i just run npc/monsters as is, no rolling extra dice for them.

[JJRodriguez]

An early morning release. Great way to start the day.

[sammayes]

That realization before the ad *lol*

Love your stuff zee! Can’t wait to see more!❤

[kilo]

Grim Hollow adds a "Profession Die" to certain checks based on your background (Advanced Backgrounds.) It's a neat way to keep things fresh!

[Dragon]

My favourite variant is backporting a PF2e feature to 5e; Normal proficiency bonus works as normal, but then there is also Expert, Master and Legendary. Each step adds +2. The levels where everyone gets to progress some of their skills, and Rogue getting it far more, needs some tweaking, but it actually slots into 5e really well.

You could also replace +x items with this model of progression by applying it to weapons or armour I guess.

[TheCGMcKenzie]

Dungeon Crawl Classics uses the background proficiencies for the closest thing it has to skill checks, and it works pretty well. "Tell me why you should be better at this task than an average person in this world" makes it way less rules heavy and helps keep the players thinking about the world instead of just the numbers. In DCC, backgrounds are rolled randomly, so you still have left and right bounds baked into the options.

[ViolentRetribution]

The self-deprecation in the closed captions for every 'variant' in the video is a hilarious touch. Zee ahead of the curve as always.

[Ariamaki]

The excellent system behind the game Godbound uses a mechanic very similar to #3 as shown here: You're good at the things implied by your Facts. The difference being that Godbound uses Facts as a universal collection that covers everything from backgrounds to skills to some things that (for lesser mortal heroes) resemble feats or subclasses, and you get more of them as you level. This makes Facts a lot more flexible and properly shows growth and training when compared to 5e's very minimalist and narrow static backgrounds.

[dannydumlet]

"Maybe I could play a different RPG a bit" *me eyes glowing red swinging the Pathfinder core rules book like a hammer*

[drewvehmeier]

I'll have to watch this a couple times cuz I don't quite understand how or why what you are proposing, but the animation and humor always makes me smile. So thank you Zee! Please keep it coming!