In Dungeons & Dragons, not all skills were created equal. Each is intended to be of moderately-equivalent value to a player character, so that there are no completely-wrong choices to be made at that phase of character creation. Sadly, this isn’t entirely true. Of the skills presented in the Player’s Handbook, some stand out simply by virtue of their availability:
| Cleric | Fighter | Paladin | Ranger | Rogue | Warlock | Warlord | Wizard | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acrobatics | – | – | – | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Arcana | ● | – | – | – | – | ● | – | ● |
| Athletics | – | ● | – | ● | ● | – | ● | – |
| Bluff | – | – | – | – | ● | ● | – | – |
| Diplomacy | ● | – | ● | – | – | – | ● | ● |
| Dungeoneering | – | – | – | ● | ● | – | – | ● |
| Endurance | – | ● | ● | ● | – | – | ● | – |
| Heal | ● | ● | ● | ● | – | – | ● | – |
| History | ● | – | ● | – | – | ● | ● | ● |
| Insight | ● | – | ● | – | ● | ● | – | ● |
| Intimidate | – | ● | ● | – | ● | ● | ● | – |
| Nature | – | – | – | ● | – | – | – | ● |
| Perception | – | – | – | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Religion | ● | – | ● | – | – | ● | – | ● |
| Stealth | – | – | – | ● | ● | – | – | – |
| Streetwise | – | ● | – | – | ● | ● | – | – |
| Thievery | – | – | – | – | ● | ● | – | – |
Acrobatics, Bluff, Nature, Perception, Stealth, and Thievery are all only available to two classes. For each of these (aside from Nature), the only classes that have the skill available fill the “striker” role in a party. In a typical four or five-character adventuring party, you probably won’t have more than one or two characters filling the same role, so failing to train one of these skills would leave your party short a potentially-valuable skill.
By contrast, Heal, History, Insight, and Intimidate are available to five classes each. It would be difficult to put together an effective multiple-role party without having every one of these skills available. These, then, would be good skills to just presume a party is going to be reasonably good at. E.g. out of five player characters three or four of them probably have Heal available, and one or two of them probably have it trained. This makes placing a somewhat difficult Heal DC into an adventure a pretty darned reasonable thing for a DM to do.
What should we take away from this? If you’re a player, kindly make sure you’re covering the skills your party needs you to be covering; you cannot expect your Wizard to be intimidating any more than you should expect your Paladin to be sneaky. If you’re a DM concocting a clever skill challenge, try to think of ways that the more commonly-available skills may come in handy, and whether you should set the bar high or low.
Because I’m such a nerd, I decided to treat this as a puzzle of sorts: make a reasonably-balance four-person adventuring party that has every skill trained by somebody. This was my first solution:
| Cleric | Fighter | Rogue | Wizard | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acrobatics | – | – | ● | – |
| Arcana | – | – | – | ● |
| Athletics | – | ● | – | – |
| Bluff | – | – | ● | – |
| Diplomacy | ● | – | – | – |
| Dungeoneering | – | – | – | ● |
| Endurance | – | ● | – | – |
| Heal | ● | – | – | – |
| History | – | – | – | ● |
| Insight | ● | – | – | – |
| Intimidate | – | ● | – | – |
| Nature | – | – | – | ● |
| Perception | – | – | ● | – |
| Religion | ● | – | – | – |
| Stealth | – | – | ● | – |
| Streetwise | – | – | ● | – |
| Thievery | – | – | ● | – |
This was without any extra feats or racial abilities (like Humans’ ability to get an extra class skill, or the Eladrin cross-class skill). I rather appreciate that rolling with an old-school Fighter / Thief / Cleric / Magic User setup is skill pretty viable in the new system.
This is an interesting analysis BurrowOwl. However, the skills issue is an even more muddy affair than indicated simply by the spread of skills.
For one, the Cleric (and sometimes even the Fighter) is a better trapfinder than a Rogue!
A Rogue’s [general] lack of WIS makes them sub par Perception users. While CHA Rogues, Paladins and Warlocks make the best Diplomats, or liars in the case of Bluff.
For another, everyone needs Athletics as it seems to do everything you need to do!
For this reason many characters in the groups I play in and run multiclass into Warlord or Ranger (even if they don’t want to) to get trained Athletics, plus a bonus ability… which makes the multiclass feat vastly superior to the Skill Training feat.
There’s also the skill crossover to consider… in general Bluff can substitute for Diplomacy and Intimidate can trump the two of them (with possibly bad consequences)… Acrobatics can (in some circumstances) substitute for Athletics… while Arcana/Religion/Nature can be used in place of Perception to detect some traps.
You are correct in your conclusion that the 4 “traditional” classes make a good balanced party. However, other classes can also cover multiple bases, for example the Swordmage (from the Forgotten Realms Book) covers Acrobatics and Arcana, so is actually better than a Rogue at finding (and disarming) certain magical traps and can use Acrobatics (and some teleportation powers) to substitute for Athletics… and there is no other class that can match the Bard for diplomacy!
I’ve always found as a DM, that the “skill” to skill challenges is letting players use their skills creatively. Let them substitute skills, provided they can justify the change. Of course many players just can’t do this… for them the “balanced skill party” is the optimal setup.
All excellent points there, PGC. Mostly I was approaching this from the perspective of looking for some broad basic competence for the party, and ruminating on which skills a DM is most justified in leaning heavily on when creating and running challenges. This is rather a different process than trying to completely optimize a party’s effectiveness with a given skill or subset of skills.
A Cleric should absolutely be the go-to guy on Wisdom-based skills that we normally associate with thieves, provided you’re talking about mid-to-high level or some feats have been invested in it (skill training and jack-of-all-trades come immediately to mind, multiclassing is an obvious route here too). This also means that with a Perception-trained Rogue or Ranger in the party along with a Cleric you are likely to have two or more characters with at least 4 + 1/2 level on Perception checks. This helps even out the “crap, I rolled a 2” flukey nature of dice. If the Ranger doesn’t spot the assassin sneaking up on you, hope that the Cleric will. This applies to other class-and-skill combinations just like you describe.
Having multiple potential go-to skills is certainly something that should be kept in mind. When concocting a skill challenge, there should be more than one way to approach the problem, sometimes only rather subtle differences; as you suggest, Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidate all basically fall under the heading of “talk your way through it.” That said, a DM should know that it’s more likely that multiple characters will be proficient at Athletics and Endurance than Acrobatics. If you make a skill challenge hinge on that skill, you may be setting your players up for failure.
Setting the players up for failure is a valid option, of course. As long as it takes the game somewhere interesting and fun.