Disadvantaging Skill Checks - How D&D2024 Wants to Tell You How To Play
I made a tweet, as I am wont to do, in response to a picture of Wizards of the Coast’s changes to the new D&D character sheet (which, I think we’re calling 2024? 5e2024? D&D2024?[1]). Initially, I gave a standard vague answer, but I think it’s worth discussing here (in a long-form blog) why and how we use character sheets as tools and how that flow influences play.
The Context
On the left is the extant sheet, on the right is the new sheet.
My tweet stated:
For a long time in Action Paths discussions I used D&D 5e's sheet as a way to help exploratory players understand the options available to them in fictional ways. I hailed it as an excellent tool for onboarding.
This change rips that away for, as far as I can tell, no gain.
And I was responding to this tweet by @ThinkingDM.
D&D's new character sheet fell into a common trap.
Grouping skills by ability is bad design.
It's easier to find information searching 1 box, not 5.
New players don't know what skill matches what ability. You know what they do know? The alphabet. Sort skills by alpha.
And I was asked a great question by John of @RuleXero.
Just musing, but is there an argument that this associates skills more explicitly with their associated attributes, which are (maybe?) prompts for connecting with how the character is doing what they're doing in the fiction?
And I answered in my signature style at the time: asking questions that I thought would lead John to satisfying and valuable answers. Games are funny little things that respond better to interaction than didactic teaching.
Interesting question. Associates for who, and under which conditions? eg, the new player, the old player, when trying to resolve a thing they have already done, when trying to look for something to do, etc?
But…just a few days later, I worry that it’s sometimes difficult for someone to confirm their own thinking/answers, and so I’ve written this to give some guidance against which someone may want to “check their work” when approaching those questions. This is guidance, not prescription—curiosity, not commandment.
The Question
The point of contention is that the 2024 character sheet removes the alphabetical list of skills and instead places them under subheadings based on the Attribute of which that skill is an “aspect” (PHB2014, p174[2]).
John’s question was well expressed: Does this move to (geographically) associate skills explicitly with their attributes act as a prompt to connect how the character is doing what they’re doing in the fiction?
The question is asking me, in the context of my tweet, Action Paths, and the tweet I was quoting, if there’s a specific moment in play when associating skills under attributes is better than having a freeform skill list. Of course, there is (because games are rad as hell), but maybe not John's example of a player trying to connect actions with fiction.
The Intended Interaction
Let’s talk about skill checks because that’s where these skills are used [3]. A skill check consists of four interactions, which we’ll use the IIEE[4] lens to break out necessary details:
Intent - A player has a desired outcome in mind for the game’s fiction or the game’s mechanics
Initiation - The character takes some form of action toward achieving that goal
Execution - We determine how that action interacts with mechanical structures
Effect - We determine how those mechanical interactions generate fiction to move the story forward (and create space for the next Intent).
So, for a skill check:
Intent - The player wants to know what the scrawled arcane sigil means.
Initiation - The player describes their character, tracing the sigil with their fingers, looking for patterns from the long-dead languages that make up spells and wards.
Execution - The GM calls for an Intelligence (Arcana) check with a DC of 15. The player rolls a 14 and adds their bonuses for 17: A success.
Effect - The GM describes the player’s character recognising a glyph that belongs to some forgotten language or another meaning “noise” or “calamity”, and from there, they can take some educated guesses at other sigils and build out the meaning: There’s an arcane ward ahead that will explode with poison if the characters make too much noise.
In this IIEE format, the character sheet is only called on during a specific time: Execution. The player only needs to review this sheet to determine the Character-Construct’s [5] influences on Execution (in this case, Ability score and proficiency). In this case, WotC’s setup for 5e2024 works just fine. Because the way it’s communicated to the player is through the language they’ve established on the sheet: “Intelligence (Arcana)—first look for Intelligence, then for Arcana.
This is, we can assume, the design intent. 5e’s text is unambiguous that one does not make a Skill Check. Instead, players make an “Ability Check”, sometimes modified by a skill’s proficiency. Thus, this change makes all the sense in the world.
However, to answer it against John’s question: Does it help to connect what the character is doing mechanically with the fiction? No. Because the player isn’t looking to the sheet as part of defining what the character is doing in the fiction (That’s II, and the player doesn’t look to their sheet until the first E, Execution). They’re grouped like this because they’re called for like this. This sheet isn’t designed like this to make it easy for a player to engage the sheet; it is designed this way to make it easier for the player to reference the sheet when they are told to.
However, there is one significant case where a player may look at their sheet before stating their fictional approach (Initiation), though I’m not sure it helps them either:
The Silent O and New Players
The IIEE structure I mention is purely heuristic if we consider Action Paths. It describes a narrowing, a funnelling, of diegetic fiction into a narrow band of resolution mechanics and then allows it to bloom and broaden back into narrative again. Heuristic play supports players who are a) well-oriented to the game state in front of them and b) have a solid understanding of the options available to them (and their cause and effect).
(If either of these is not self-evident to you, I ask you to consider: How does a player who doesn’t understand what’s going on develop an intent? And if Intent requires a desired game state to change to, and Initiation requires an active method to make that change, how does a player build that without an awareness of what “actions” they can take?[6])
When players do not feel oriented to the game state, they require a way to collectively or collaboratively make sense of (or, pointedly, “sense make”) the situation into something that fits in their head: This is orientating. Orientation tends to fall outside the IIEE resolution structure[7], and thus, I would propose that IIEE is incomplete. Instead, I would posit the flow of play to be OIIEE, beginning with Orient (or Orientate, as one may prefer)[8].
If we imagine the orienting player, a new player, someone who has not yet developed even an intermediate mastery of D&D 5e, what do they do upon coming to a problem they don’t know how to solve? They look to their sheet for solutions. They ask the game to define their option set. My favourite version of this is from the Community D&D episode where, after character introductions, the party is immediately beset by six goblins. Donald Glover’s Troy looks to his sheet and says, “I attack using my (beat) Additional Notes.”
In that case, framing skills as subsets (“aspects”) of Abilities defines the player’s set of inputs wholly through their ability scores.[9] Building an understanding of a strategy set is as much about rejecting as it is about adding, So a player who sees “Charisma -1” may dismiss the whole bucket (that bucket being “Charisma Skills”) without looking down the list to see if maybe they did want to conduct one of them. This zooms players in on their core competencies, reducing the chance that new players will be expressive or dynamic. Instead, because I have INT+3, when I need to solve a problem, I always look down the INT tree first.
I believe this creates the wrong kind of problem-solving approach in players: The focus on “high number means I get what I want” and not “high number means I get the best results possible for the method I employ”. A great example is “intimidating someone into telling us the truth”. An intimidated party is far more likely to tell you what you want to hear, disconnecting the player’s Intent from their Initiation, leading to an unsatisfying Effect. Bucketing based on success rather than Intent means players are thinking about fiction in a way that is more likely to be boring or unsatisfying.
This is the “First-Fit” approach to TTRPG orientation, and it’s a curse. We should actively look for ways to give players compelling deviations from their first expectations. If the Wizard always uses Arcana, the Fighter always uses Athletics, and the Bard always uses Persuasion, regardless of the fictional terms or stakes at hand, the game becomes unsatisfying or boring.
Players who read alphabetically down the list don’t perceive it as one list. Instead, each time they read a line, they either slot it into their option set or reject it. Unlike the First-Fit PHB2024 setup, however, each list item is independent, so they can’t assume that just because they found that “athletics sounds pretty good and I have a +3 there, but acrobatics has a -1” they cannot assume that the next skill will not be better than Athletics. Therefore, they scan through the whole list. This is a “Best-Fit” analysis.
A Best-Fit analysis provides us with the option to be surprised. Because the player is scanning line items (not just “INT -1, so I’ll avoid whatever is underneath this”), they are considering them as (contextual) items, as verbs, not just as Character-Construct numbers-toward-success. So, the player can stumble upon Performance and say, “Whoa, I was going to do Animal Handling, but Performance is way more interesting'“ “. For this reason, we must take care of how we choose to orient new players and which touchstones we should focus on.
Designing for the Disoriented
We begin redesigning by reverse engineering Wizards of the Coast's goals. That requires two assumptions: first, that the alphabetical list was not fit for purpose, and second, that the Grouped-By-Ability system was designed to be fit for that purpose/goal. In which case, I’d assume that the alphabetical list meant new players were (or it felt like they were) taking too long to look for their Best Fit.
We don’t want a long Best-Fit, but we don’t want players to define their options only by success or failure. So, if we take a step back and look at our OIIEE framework, we can figure out WHEN these new players were performing Best-Fit, and we can design to minimise that time expenditure. New players are looking around O and the first I: Orientation and Intent. They’re trying to build an idea of what threatens them and how they can respond to it.
In this case, we don’t group skills by Ability (because who was looking under WIS for Animal Handling anyway), but instead by use-case. We put the things you’ll use when trying to convince someone next to the other things you’ll use when trying to convince someone. We put the investigative/orientation skills together. We put the escalatory event-generating skills together. Then, players can bucket based on their desired outcome, and then the choice becomes not “Which do I have the biggest number in?” but “Which best leans toward the result that I want?”.
So, instead of:
Acrobatics
Animal Handling
Arcana
Athletics
Deception
History
Insight
Intimidation
Investigation
Medicine
Nature
Perception
Performance
Persuasion
Religion
Sleight of Hand
Stealth
Survival
We have[10]:
Orientation
- Perception
- Investigation
- Insight
Special Knowledge
- Arcana
- Nature
- Religion
- History
- Medicine
- Survival
Social
- Intimidation
- Persuasion
- Performance
- Deception
Movement and Impact
- Athletics
- Acrobatics
- Sleight of Hand
- Stealth
Animal Handling
- Animal Handling (because fuck Animal Handling)
That’s just without rewriting the skills names. Give me an actual design shot, and we could cut something up much better. And sure, there are times when Deception isn’t social, or you’re using Arcana for something that isn’t special knowledge. I understand these use cases. But I would suggest that a) even then, you know roughly where to find them, reducing scan time, and b) I wasn’t trying to design the perfect Skill System; I was trying to meet D&D 5e 2024 where it’s at with the “legacy” names and reverse-engineered goals of design. We’ve met the design goals there and done it in 30 seconds with no playtesting because we chose to understand how players use the system ahead of them.
So, to answer your question, John: is there an argument that this associates skills more explicitly with their associated attributes, which are (maybe?) prompts for connecting with how the character is doing what they're doing in the fiction?
No. Attributes do not define fictional action, so the association does not contribute.
No. Even if it did for elder players, it would do that at the cost of the players with the most difficulty (disoriented, new).
No. If that were WotC’s design goal, we would have at least defined one version better than their choice for almost no cost.
No. It has been written as a reference document, not a play document (at least in this section). They designed it to flow with a player being told where to look, not a player making decisions.
I assume that Wizards of the Coast have determined that their primary way of onboarding players is through them being told what to do (by mimicking APs, listening to an experienced DM, etc). So, the 2024 character sheet has been designed to be perfectly usable while someone else tells you what to roll.
Footnotes:
[1] None of them are great. The fact that they didn’t use 5.5e or 6e is another reminder that WotC design decisions are often driven by fear of customer alienation rather than a desire to present an artistic vision
[2] As per the 2014 tag, I’m working off the first-to-fifth printings of the PHB before incorporating the errata.
[3] I assume this is self-evident. Yes, I know places in play use skills that are not checks. I encourage the reader to consider the impacts on those play flows in their own time. I assume that they will be very similar to Skill Checks.
[4] IIEE = Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect. More info can be found here
[5] The Character-Construct is specifically “The character as seen through the lens of mechanics.” Many character elements don’t make it to character sheets (or where they do, they don’t impact play). Defining it by the “Character-Construct” means we’re specific about focusing on mechanical interactions. For more on understanding the different spheres of the game and how they interact, I recommend “The Invisible Rules of Role-Playing” by Marcus Montola (2009).
[6] This is an ongoing problem in RPG discussions, particularly when some of the more….assertive heads get involved. There’s an assumption that “Oh, the player just says what they want to do” or “The player acts as their character would”, without considering what information or skills the player requires to perform those steps. Assuming that “any player can just create intent and initiation” ignores a subset of players and the design intent inherent in skill lists. Deciding “what to do” is a skill.
[7] When IIEE is brought to bear on Orientation (“I rolled a 17 perception, what do I see?”), the results are usually underwhelming or deviate from the narrowing-into-blossoming flow of IIEE. The resulting narrative is clunky without proper Orientation to frame intent or initiation. This is where OSR/NSR tends to have the leg up, where Orientation demands the II steps: You can’t roll to perceive a room in Mothership. Instead, you have to narratively play through what you search and how. A model that is useful, though not without its own weaknesses.
[8] I know that we’re not “making models” in Indie games any more, but I will, from here on, be referring to it as OIIEE until I find a better acronym. I welcome you to use it, as we often neglect context-building as a part of play.
[9] Yes, obviously things can be done that don’t require ability scores or endogenous permission, but they aren’t framed by the game (in this case, the sheet), and therefore aren’t part of the Endogeny, but rather the Diegesis, and so out of scope for this.
[10] Out here redesigning 3.5, apparently.
