Abilities, Proficiency, and Skills

In D&D 5th edition, abilities and proficiency provide the basic building blocks of a character. They tell you what you are naturally good at and provide a baseline for your competence. Skills then layer on top, giving you the chance to shore up a weakness or specialize in a specific area. Overall, I think the system works well.

But on the other hand, I keep going back to the this:

There's something appealing about having relatively few numbers on a character sheet. In theory, D&D 5e should have pretty simple character sheets. You need to know your six ability bonuses and your proficiency bonus. In practice, the character sheets defaulted to a 3e approach and treated skills as if they could have wildly different values. To be fair, the design supported that, but as the rogue design showed I'm tackling that by simply increasing some class's proficiency bonus.

I'd like to try the following approach:

Abilities each have two numbers, a bonus and a proficient bonus. The rules then tell you to either make an ability check, or a proficiency ability check.

Your bonus is your bonus as seen in the game, a number ranging from -5 to +5. Your proficient bonus is that bonus plus your proficiency bonus.

Potentially useful side effect - some classes could use different proficiency bonuses for different abilities. I'm not sure that's a good idea, but it's something that this approach allows for.

So what does that mean for various parts of the game? I think it makes things easier to understand:

• A cleric's spell save DC is 8 + their proficient Wisdom bonus

• When attacking with a melee weapon, use your proficient Strength bonus if you are proficient with the weapon, or your nonproficient bonus if you are not.

• For saving throws, always use your proficient bonus. Random fact - saves in 5e don't work as intended. Monster DCs were meant to be assigned to reflect a monster's toughness or danger, not based on its proficiency and abilities. In fact, monsters were never intended to use the proficiency system. DCs were supposed to be designed against nonproficient ability bonuses.

• Skills could then be given a text box on a character sheet, with the player listing the skills they have in alphabetical. When the DM asks for a check with a skill, check your skill list. If you have the skill, use your proficient bonus. Otherwise, use your nonproficient bonus.

I do think that this approach means that I need a term other for nonproficient for the bonus that doesn't include proficiency. Maybe base? So, you'd have a base Strength bonus and a proficient Strength bonus.

In any case, I think this adds flexibility to the skill system while decluttering the character sheet. I think this is also easier to teach, based on my experience in explaining the 5e way of doing things over the past 13+ years.

Damn I can't believe I just typed that last sentence and its true. I ran the first 5e sessions in January of 2012, if I remember right. Not that those had proficiency bonus, a relatively late addition to the design.

Bonus Story Time

I ran a bunch of Old School Essentials in 2024, a remake of the old school Basic/Expert D&D. One of those games was one shot for a group of people who had only played 5e, were all in their 20s, and had never played older versions of D&D. They really loved how simple and easy the rules were. Admittedly, I was there to smooth over their questions about saving throws and how rolls worked.

The biggest surprise was how easy they found descending AC. I created pregen characters and had taken the time to put an attack matrix on each character sheet. That matrix gave them the number they needed to roll to hit each AC. They really liked that they could roll a die, look at the table, and announce an AC without doing any math.

It reminded me that the presentation on the character sheet plays a huge role in making a game work. The OSE approach, with AC that gets better as it goes lower and a giant table to reference for attacks, actually works very well if a player has all the math done for them ahead of time and presented as a table with two rows - one for AC, and one for die rolls. It gets awkward when you have to do math and look at a giant table that lists all the character classes at all levels, but the character sheet experience worked great.

It was a good lesson for a TTRPG designer. User interface can make a mechanic soar in play.