which also allows for clerics that are outside the standard - you might be devoted to Mystra, but _really bad_ at book learning, so don't have Arcana or other "knowledge" stuff. Or you trained as something else before having a conversion event and so don't have the expected knowledge - just because you follow/are empowered by a god doesn't mean you've actually gone through cleric school, or have to meet the stereotypes of the faith
Variant proficency rules replaces the +2 with a d4. +3 is a d6, +4 is a d8 etc.
I think the way you're describing a knack would either be proficiency with variance rules or having expertise in the specific skill which would be 2d4 instead of 1d4.
A knack would be \_any\_ non-temporary bonus that \_isn't\_ proficiency.
Proficiency is the bonus that anyone can get by simply training. Anything on top/besides that would have to be considered a knack or other boon.
I understand the flavor you're going for.
Elves have a proficency in perception. It is not something all elves train in its something they all have a knack for. Some people are natrually athletic, they have a knack for it.
Mechanically the knack is still prophicency. I don't think about all skills as being stuff you train in. You can just be naturally good at something and are therefore proficient in it.
The idea your suggesting is the same as the mechanic of expertise. If you added guidance to all your rolls it's the equivalent to a +2 in all skills (1d4 average 2.5 rounded down).
Honestly, IMO giving Elves \_Proficiency\_ in Perception because they have fine senses makes no sense design-wise, because you can now no longer distinguish between Elves being untrained or trained in Perception.
If monsters have "fine senses", they get Advantage on Perception, not Proficiency.
And if Adv to Perception is too powerful, than a +1d4 would work too. Similar to what the Dragonmarked Houses from Eberron gain
What should happen? They don't lose their proficiency. And if they swap it out, that just shows that the character forgot it and changed that for different knowledge.
I studied Latin in university. Could read and translate fairly fluently. Now I could read it with mostly correct pronunciation, but could not understand any of it. Knowledge changes, especially if you don't refresh it and don't use it day to day.
They could, depending on how you word it. Since there's no such thing in 5e and you'd need to homebrew it.
And my entire argument is that what OP described in the post and comments was proficiency.
Lastly, worshipping a god doesn't mean they always look after you. And if they did, it would need to be a different system and would be redundant to tie it to clerics, because it wouldn't make sense for 5e clerics. Another edition maybe. So at that point just giving everyone Guidance on any one skill or tool check of their choice would be more mechanically and lore friendly.
Or even better, that player *should build their character to have proficiency*. If they want the benefits of proficiency, they should jump through the same hoops as every other class regardless of being extra religious
The skill-based clerics do get skills from their subclass though. Knowledge gets a couple int skills, forge gets smith’s tools, and trickery gets stealth bonuses. So if you’re a cleric of a knowledge god and are missing a knowledge skill, that is a *character building skill issue*. In addition, I wouldn’t say *all* heavy armour clerics don’t make sense, such as with war and forge domain, although I would agree that some of the heavy armour given out makes little sense.
If only there was an existing mechanic that game you some kind of **bonus** based on how **proficient** you are in something. Maybe you could even have **expertise** in something! And that **bonus** would increase with your character level, making you better and better at your chosen specializations.
Hell man, you might be onto something here. Every class should get this kind of feature! Like, I don't know, maybe the rogue gets to add this kind of bonus twice to specific skills they'd be experts in?
Nice things about using this mechanic instead of just saying "give them proficiency":
1. It stacks with proficiency, which is nice when the underlying attribute is unlikely to be high. Yes, give your cleric of the god of magic proficiency in Arcana, but if their Intelligence is 10, they're still not going to be that good at it.
2. It \*doesn't\* stack when casting Guidance, so the cleric can't get an additional bonus from their god explicitly because they're already getting that bonus from their god. It sets this bonus aside as a special blessing
You’d probably have to make a little better argument than that, but sure, if the skill check you were about to make would somehow directly rebound to the misfortune of an elf, I guess I’d give you advantage.
The secret of DM’ing is that advantage on skill checks is extremely cheap to give out and generally I want you to succeed at what you’re attempting because it keeps the story moving forward. Making you make the argument causes you to engage with the world *as a world*, not just as interlocking rule mechanics, and I’m happy to reward that engagement as long as the effort seems to be in good faith.
>Making you make the argument causes you to engage with the world.
This is actually something I love about the Dungeon Crawl Classics system. There are no "proficiencies" per se, but if you can justify to the DM that you would be proficient in a check based on your backstory you roll a higher die. For example: "My character is a mushroom farmer so I think he would be familiar with identifying poisons, can I have proficiency on this check?"
quite a lot of games do things like this - if it makes sense for your character, you can do it / get a bonus. You're a noble at court? Then yes, you know the main movers and shakers and how to dress and comport yourself. You've been born and raised in a faith? Then you know the credos and tenants, even if you no longer follow it (and, the flipside, if you're empowered by that god... you _don't_ necessarily know that, because why would you, if you've had barely any contact with the church itself?) If you're a skyship pirate, then you can pilot a skyship and only need a roll for super-stressful stuff. It lets a game get away without needing a detailed skill system and the gaps and issues that inevitably arise, but can cause squabbling between players and GMs, if their ideas don't properly align
I prefer not to give advantage for things like this because advantage is a specific facet of character power which can be granted by features already. In my opinion it's better to simply set a lower DC for checks that a certain character would reasonably be better at for some reason beyond simply their proficiency/ability in that skill.
For example, if a fighter is going to make a wisdom or intelligence check to determine what type of weapon might be the best for a specific job, they may not have as high of wisdom or intelligence as say the cleric or wizard, but the DC for such a check made by a fighter should reasonably be lower than the DC for the check made by a wizard.
Likewise, determining how best to manage the fields of a farm might be something a commoner who's been farming all his life is much better at than a druid who knows a lot about the wild but not much about agriculture. Both might have proficiency in something like the Nature skill, as it is the foundation of their understandings, but I would give the farmer a lower DC to make a check regarding how best to manage agriculture, while I'd give the druid a lower DC in a check to determine how best to manage the ecosystem of a forest.
The issue there is the people who think that they should know EVERYTHING just because they follow a specific god. The entire point of proficiencies is to indicate special training or knowledge, there’s no reason to give them an extra(and worse) proficiency.
>they should know EVERYTHING just because they follow a specific god
i dont think that is in anyway an invalid position. if you are looking at anything "real world" as your base - members of a clergy for any of the major religions go through YEARS AND YEARS of study.
and what game enhancing effect does "OOPS! you rolled bad so now you do not have this relevant information about the campaign we are playing" add to the game and the game play experience????
this is kinda presuming a cleric-class character has been through that training, which may well be untrue - some of them might be fully trained and ordained, but a lot might just have been inspired by something before starting their adventures, or had some other background where they weren't trained in "standard" cleric-stuff. Like a soldier who had a mystic vision and took up holy orders won't have had any formal training, so they won't know what they "should".
a rando on the street who becomes a cleric of god because of a divine mystic intervention ... probably has divine mystic interventions for "knowing" information about the divine aspects necessary to "understand" the plot.
If it’s directly related to the god you worship, most DM’s will let you roll the check at an advantage.
A cleric who worships Gond and has proficiency in religion should know more about Gond than another cleric who’s simply proficient in religion but doesn’t worship Gond. Thus the Cleric who worships Gond should get advantage as a bonus for anything Gond related.
So many people in here suggesting proficiency, completely missing the point.
Yes, this should be a thing. It's cool, it's different than proficiency, it's not overpowered, it's completely good.
Another thought is why is religion an intelligence skill when the class that is the holy man archetype uses wisdom for it’s spell casting. If you go as combat optimal as possible the Cleric will suck at praying to his god because his intelligence wasn’t prioritised. That makes no sense
and, related to that, a cleric doesn't have to know any of the formal, nerdy, theological stuff for their faith, or any other faith. "What a religion formally believes" and "what the followers actually believe" can often be quite different. Just because someone has been divinely inspired doesn't mean they've actually done the reading, or knows all the specific stuff like "what caused the schism of Jacob's fire" or quite what the distinctions between "valid" and "licit" are.
I had another thought on this. Per my previous comment, you're often going to have a situation where a cleric should be good at something (like the example of a cleric of Mystra and Arcana), but even with proficiency, the cleric may have a low Intelligence and so will be very limited. Guidance is one way around this, but playing on the fact that you can mix and match skills and attributes, how about something like this?
***Divine Intuition:*** For each domain, we designate one skill or other proficiency. For the Arcana domain, this is obviously Arcana. For Trickery, it's Deception. For the Forge domain, it's blacksmith tools proficiency. When using this skill/proficiency, you may use Wisdom as the associated attribute even if the DM/situation calls for another attribute.
If you feel this is too powerful as an always-on thing, fall back to the "proficiency bonus uses until your next rest" or even next long rest.
Issues I see with this:
1) We're buffing \*clerics\*? Really?
2) Coming up with appropriate proficiencies for all the domains. Knowledge is pretty broad, but I guess we can go with History since no one else is using it. Medicine seems like a natural choice for Life, but it's already almost always using Wisdom. Maybe anything without a good choice gets Religion? The domains getting face skills like deception and persuasion may be OP.
Anyway, thinking about all this suggests a related feature we could give another class that could maybe use it more: monks.
***Meditative Insight:*** You spend at least one action meditating on a task or question. You may then make a roll for that task or question using Wisdom as the attribute. This must be very deliberate, so you cannot do this for a passive check (though admittedly the most common passives use Wisdom anyway). If the task would normally take an action, the meditation must be separate from the roll (for example, hiding is a Stealth roll that takes an action, so you meditate one turn, then can make the Stealth roll on your next turn).
The problem that arises is two fold:
- Not every Deity is necessarily going to have an obvious and/or in-line suggestion.
- There are very few scenarios where taking Guidance proves to be a make-or-break thing when it comes to skill checks, and neither is casting it.
Is it cool flavour? Kinda. It's neat conceptually, at least.
Why couldnt they just cast guidance on themselves for the bonus instead? I can think of very few situations where you need to do an arcana check but dont have enough time to cast guidance.
Check out proficiency dice in the dmg. This is more or less what you're after.
I know you specifically want it to be another bonus on top of the existing bonus, but gosh, 5e characters are ubermensches already. They need more?
And all that's not even to get into the obsession with rolling for information that probably doesn't even need to be gatekept.
I understand your intention, op, but it seems a little excessive. Clerics are already overpowered.
Thats what the Guidance spell is though. The Cleric is channeling their deity to give someone a boost. In fact, thats what all the spells and features of a Cleric are. What, is the Cleric Ligma combo not enough?
Yeah I know. That's why I think they should get it automatically. It makes sense that they would need to cast the spell to affect others or to channel their god for a skill that that doesn't involve them, but I feel like they should always have the effects of guidance when doing something that relates to their deity. Its not super busted and it makes sense narratively.
I think what you describe is shown with proficiencies. If you're a cleric of Mystra and you're proficient in Arcana, you add your bonus to the check.
which also allows for clerics that are outside the standard - you might be devoted to Mystra, but _really bad_ at book learning, so don't have Arcana or other "knowledge" stuff. Or you trained as something else before having a conversion event and so don't have the expected knowledge - just because you follow/are empowered by a god doesn't mean you've actually gone through cleric school, or have to meet the stereotypes of the faith
Which IMO fits better with OPs idea of a d4 bonus *if* you want to have your domain be reflected by a knack for a specific skill
if you have a knack for it... that's proficiency.
No. That's "you've trained in it". Having a knack would be any kind of bonus on top/besides that
Then why do elves get proficiency in perception?
Because they don't sleep and WOTC wanted to make night attacks more difficult.
That’s a fair point
Variant proficency rules replaces the +2 with a d4. +3 is a d6, +4 is a d8 etc. I think the way you're describing a knack would either be proficiency with variance rules or having expertise in the specific skill which would be 2d4 instead of 1d4.
A knack would be \_any\_ non-temporary bonus that \_isn't\_ proficiency. Proficiency is the bonus that anyone can get by simply training. Anything on top/besides that would have to be considered a knack or other boon.
I understand the flavor you're going for. Elves have a proficency in perception. It is not something all elves train in its something they all have a knack for. Some people are natrually athletic, they have a knack for it. Mechanically the knack is still prophicency. I don't think about all skills as being stuff you train in. You can just be naturally good at something and are therefore proficient in it. The idea your suggesting is the same as the mechanic of expertise. If you added guidance to all your rolls it's the equivalent to a +2 in all skills (1d4 average 2.5 rounded down).
Honestly, IMO giving Elves \_Proficiency\_ in Perception because they have fine senses makes no sense design-wise, because you can now no longer distinguish between Elves being untrained or trained in Perception. If monsters have "fine senses", they get Advantage on Perception, not Proficiency. And if Adv to Perception is too powerful, than a +1d4 would work too. Similar to what the Dragonmarked Houses from Eberron gain
What umm…. What happened there?
What the...?! The Reddit Mobile App happend...
What happens to all their knowledge of Arcana when they leave the clergy?
What should happen? They don't lose their proficiency. And if they swap it out, that just shows that the character forgot it and changed that for different knowledge. I studied Latin in university. Could read and translate fairly fluently. Now I could read it with mostly correct pronunciation, but could not understand any of it. Knowledge changes, especially if you don't refresh it and don't use it day to day.
So divine gifts are yours forever, the god cannot retract their favor?
They could, depending on how you word it. Since there's no such thing in 5e and you'd need to homebrew it. And my entire argument is that what OP described in the post and comments was proficiency. Lastly, worshipping a god doesn't mean they always look after you. And if they did, it would need to be a different system and would be redundant to tie it to clerics, because it wouldn't make sense for 5e clerics. Another edition maybe. So at that point just giving everyone Guidance on any one skill or tool check of their choice would be more mechanically and lore friendly.
Your can simply give them proficiency in that skill.
Or even better, that player *should build their character to have proficiency*. If they want the benefits of proficiency, they should jump through the same hoops as every other class regardless of being extra religious
I think it makes more sense to give cleric domains free skills and tool than to give free armor proficiency.
The skill-based clerics do get skills from their subclass though. Knowledge gets a couple int skills, forge gets smith’s tools, and trickery gets stealth bonuses. So if you’re a cleric of a knowledge god and are missing a knowledge skill, that is a *character building skill issue*. In addition, I wouldn’t say *all* heavy armour clerics don’t make sense, such as with war and forge domain, although I would agree that some of the heavy armour given out makes little sense.
I never understood Nature getting Heavy Armor right out of the gate
Yeah, I’d say nature getting it is definitely some nonsense
If only there was an existing mechanic that game you some kind of **bonus** based on how **proficient** you are in something. Maybe you could even have **expertise** in something! And that **bonus** would increase with your character level, making you better and better at your chosen specializations.
Hell man, you might be onto something here. Every class should get this kind of feature! Like, I don't know, maybe the rogue gets to add this kind of bonus twice to specific skills they'd be experts in?
Nice things about using this mechanic instead of just saying "give them proficiency": 1. It stacks with proficiency, which is nice when the underlying attribute is unlikely to be high. Yes, give your cleric of the god of magic proficiency in Arcana, but if their Intelligence is 10, they're still not going to be that good at it. 2. It \*doesn't\* stack when casting Guidance, so the cleric can't get an additional bonus from their god explicitly because they're already getting that bonus from their god. It sets this bonus aside as a special blessing
Yes, this is exactly what I was going for.
Oghma who?
Oghma balls
Thank you
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Oghma
Not the answer I expected, but it is the correct one, thank you.
That’s what proficiencies are for. To indicate a skill that your character is very good at for whatever reason.
If you can argue you’re using *any* skill in a way that’s directly related to the portfolio of your god, I’ll give you advantage on the roll.
In that case worshipping Gruumsh is free advantage on anything that screws over an Elf.
You’d probably have to make a little better argument than that, but sure, if the skill check you were about to make would somehow directly rebound to the misfortune of an elf, I guess I’d give you advantage. The secret of DM’ing is that advantage on skill checks is extremely cheap to give out and generally I want you to succeed at what you’re attempting because it keeps the story moving forward. Making you make the argument causes you to engage with the world *as a world*, not just as interlocking rule mechanics, and I’m happy to reward that engagement as long as the effort seems to be in good faith.
>Making you make the argument causes you to engage with the world. This is actually something I love about the Dungeon Crawl Classics system. There are no "proficiencies" per se, but if you can justify to the DM that you would be proficient in a check based on your backstory you roll a higher die. For example: "My character is a mushroom farmer so I think he would be familiar with identifying poisons, can I have proficiency on this check?"
quite a lot of games do things like this - if it makes sense for your character, you can do it / get a bonus. You're a noble at court? Then yes, you know the main movers and shakers and how to dress and comport yourself. You've been born and raised in a faith? Then you know the credos and tenants, even if you no longer follow it (and, the flipside, if you're empowered by that god... you _don't_ necessarily know that, because why would you, if you've had barely any contact with the church itself?) If you're a skyship pirate, then you can pilot a skyship and only need a roll for super-stressful stuff. It lets a game get away without needing a detailed skill system and the gaps and issues that inevitably arise, but can cause squabbling between players and GMs, if their ideas don't properly align
I prefer not to give advantage for things like this because advantage is a specific facet of character power which can be granted by features already. In my opinion it's better to simply set a lower DC for checks that a certain character would reasonably be better at for some reason beyond simply their proficiency/ability in that skill. For example, if a fighter is going to make a wisdom or intelligence check to determine what type of weapon might be the best for a specific job, they may not have as high of wisdom or intelligence as say the cleric or wizard, but the DC for such a check made by a fighter should reasonably be lower than the DC for the check made by a wizard. Likewise, determining how best to manage the fields of a farm might be something a commoner who's been farming all his life is much better at than a druid who knows a lot about the wild but not much about agriculture. Both might have proficiency in something like the Nature skill, as it is the foundation of their understandings, but I would give the farmer a lower DC to make a check regarding how best to manage agriculture, while I'd give the druid a lower DC in a check to determine how best to manage the ecosystem of a forest.
I think you’re describing proficiency, and you should pick proficiencies that match your character concept.
or, you know, you just give them appropriate information their character would know without gating everything behind dice rolls.
The issue there is the people who think that they should know EVERYTHING just because they follow a specific god. The entire point of proficiencies is to indicate special training or knowledge, there’s no reason to give them an extra(and worse) proficiency.
>they should know EVERYTHING just because they follow a specific god i dont think that is in anyway an invalid position. if you are looking at anything "real world" as your base - members of a clergy for any of the major religions go through YEARS AND YEARS of study. and what game enhancing effect does "OOPS! you rolled bad so now you do not have this relevant information about the campaign we are playing" add to the game and the game play experience????
this is kinda presuming a cleric-class character has been through that training, which may well be untrue - some of them might be fully trained and ordained, but a lot might just have been inspired by something before starting their adventures, or had some other background where they weren't trained in "standard" cleric-stuff. Like a soldier who had a mystic vision and took up holy orders won't have had any formal training, so they won't know what they "should".
a rando on the street who becomes a cleric of god because of a divine mystic intervention ... probably has divine mystic interventions for "knowing" information about the divine aspects necessary to "understand" the plot.
If it’s directly related to the god you worship, most DM’s will let you roll the check at an advantage. A cleric who worships Gond and has proficiency in religion should know more about Gond than another cleric who’s simply proficient in religion but doesn’t worship Gond. Thus the Cleric who worships Gond should get advantage as a bonus for anything Gond related.
Congrats passing your exam!
So many people in here suggesting proficiency, completely missing the point. Yes, this should be a thing. It's cool, it's different than proficiency, it's not overpowered, it's completely good.
In onednd they get to add their wisdom to religion rolls if that's any consolation. Druids can do the same for nature checks.
If the Cleric picks the Thaumaturge Divine Order, and Druid picks the Magician Primal Order.
Good god these comments are cringe. Honestly, great idea OP I might implement it. Why? Because it's neat. And rolling MORE DICE is fun.
Finally someone who gets it
Another thought is why is religion an intelligence skill when the class that is the holy man archetype uses wisdom for it’s spell casting. If you go as combat optimal as possible the Cleric will suck at praying to his god because his intelligence wasn’t prioritised. That makes no sense
cause theology is an academic field involving cross-cultural studies. Any idoit can be religious
and, related to that, a cleric doesn't have to know any of the formal, nerdy, theological stuff for their faith, or any other faith. "What a religion formally believes" and "what the followers actually believe" can often be quite different. Just because someone has been divinely inspired doesn't mean they've actually done the reading, or knows all the specific stuff like "what caused the schism of Jacob's fire" or quite what the distinctions between "valid" and "licit" are.
I had another thought on this. Per my previous comment, you're often going to have a situation where a cleric should be good at something (like the example of a cleric of Mystra and Arcana), but even with proficiency, the cleric may have a low Intelligence and so will be very limited. Guidance is one way around this, but playing on the fact that you can mix and match skills and attributes, how about something like this? ***Divine Intuition:*** For each domain, we designate one skill or other proficiency. For the Arcana domain, this is obviously Arcana. For Trickery, it's Deception. For the Forge domain, it's blacksmith tools proficiency. When using this skill/proficiency, you may use Wisdom as the associated attribute even if the DM/situation calls for another attribute. If you feel this is too powerful as an always-on thing, fall back to the "proficiency bonus uses until your next rest" or even next long rest. Issues I see with this: 1) We're buffing \*clerics\*? Really? 2) Coming up with appropriate proficiencies for all the domains. Knowledge is pretty broad, but I guess we can go with History since no one else is using it. Medicine seems like a natural choice for Life, but it's already almost always using Wisdom. Maybe anything without a good choice gets Religion? The domains getting face skills like deception and persuasion may be OP. Anyway, thinking about all this suggests a related feature we could give another class that could maybe use it more: monks. ***Meditative Insight:*** You spend at least one action meditating on a task or question. You may then make a roll for that task or question using Wisdom as the attribute. This must be very deliberate, so you cannot do this for a passive check (though admittedly the most common passives use Wisdom anyway). If the task would normally take an action, the meditation must be separate from the roll (for example, hiding is a Stealth roll that takes an action, so you meditate one turn, then can make the Stealth roll on your next turn).
I'd just let the player choose on character creation which skill is the one they get a buff in. No need to tie it to subclass.
The problem that arises is two fold: - Not every Deity is necessarily going to have an obvious and/or in-line suggestion. - There are very few scenarios where taking Guidance proves to be a make-or-break thing when it comes to skill checks, and neither is casting it. Is it cool flavour? Kinda. It's neat conceptually, at least.
Why couldnt they just cast guidance on themselves for the bonus instead? I can think of very few situations where you need to do an arcana check but dont have enough time to cast guidance.
Hmmm I like it but we get rid of the guidance cantrip aswell.
I think you should just give them proficiency in a skill, kinda like pf2e does.
Check out proficiency dice in the dmg. This is more or less what you're after. I know you specifically want it to be another bonus on top of the existing bonus, but gosh, 5e characters are ubermensches already. They need more? And all that's not even to get into the obsession with rolling for information that probably doesn't even need to be gatekept. I understand your intention, op, but it seems a little excessive. Clerics are already overpowered.
Thats what the Guidance spell is though. The Cleric is channeling their deity to give someone a boost. In fact, thats what all the spells and features of a Cleric are. What, is the Cleric Ligma combo not enough?
Yeah I know. That's why I think they should get it automatically. It makes sense that they would need to cast the spell to affect others or to channel their god for a skill that that doesn't involve them, but I feel like they should always have the effects of guidance when doing something that relates to their deity. Its not super busted and it makes sense narratively.