D&D 3.5 Mechanics Deep Dive: Skills

By Luke D. Published Updated

Skill Checks and Critical Successes

In Dungeons & Dragons, there's one thing everyone knows about, even people who've never played a single second of D&D: critical success and failure. Yes, rolling a natural 1 or a natural 20 is something everyone's seen at least one meme about and understands the power of. Except, in the case of skills in 3.5.

Skills, and "checks" on a wider note, don't care if you rolled a 1 or a 20 on the die, they only care about the total result. Now, some may see this as a negative. After all, rolling a natural 20 to critically succeed on something that you're counting on is a real spike of adrenaline. However, I see it as a perfect mechanical representation of what the roll is for, which is a character's literal skill. If your character is good enough at hiding, it doesn't matter that you have a 5% chance of rolling a 1, they're likely to sneak past the average unobservant passerby. Similarly, if your character isn't a natural two-faced liar, they may find it difficult to bluff their way into a fortress even 5% of the time when their player rolls a 20.

Taking 10 and Taking 20

Not every skill check even requires a roll in the first place. Sometimes you can do what's called taking 10 or taking 20, which is basically pretending you rolled a 10 or 20 on the die respectively for your skill roll. You can do this whenever you are not distracted or threatened, in the case of taking 10, and whenever you have about two full minutes to spend with no distractions, threats, or penalties for failing the skill, in the case of taking 20. Essentially, if you have spare time, you can measure twice and cut once, failing a few times in the process. This saves you time and stress in real life, but also just feels very in-character to play out: "Yeah, give me a couple of minutes, I gotta pick this lock."

Aid Another

Aiding another is another option to boost your likelihood of success. If you and another character perform the same kind of skill check and roll 10 or more on your check, you can help them out, granting an untyped +2 bonus to their check.

Depending on the action and how you bring this up to a DM, you can give insane bonuses to the resulting check. Say your party is trying desperately to convince someone to let you all into a city, so the bard rolls Diplomacy as the party face, then the rest of the party all roll to aid him in his attempt. If this is a party of five and the other four all succeed in aiding another, that's a +8 bonus that stacks with all other bonuses the bard may have for Diplomacy, including ranks, Charisma, circumstance bonuses, racial modifiers, spells, and so on. Aid Another can be one of those tricks of the trade that you bring out only on special occasions if you don't want to catch a Dungeon Master's Guide to the skull.

Skill Ranks

Skills in 3.5 also have a unique system compared to a lot of other D&D-like skill systems, which is that you get points that you can distribute as you please amongst your selection of skills. The way the points work is that you may buy into skills from your chosen class on a 1:1 ratio of points to ranks, and you may buy into other skills, called cross-class skills, on a 2:1 ratio of points to ranks.

You can buy a number of ranks in a skill up to your character level +3, or half that for cross-class skills. These ranks determine not just whether you can use certain skills, which may be trained-only, indicating that you need at least half a rank to use them, but also provide a bonus to your skill checks for each rank.

Synergy Bonuses

It's worth noting that you get rewarded for putting ranks into multiple skills inherently, and not just because you're getting the bonus to the skill check from the ranks. In 3.5, skills often come with a synergy bonus, which kicks into effect at 5 ranks. Some synergy bonuses only apply in specific situations, but a bunch of them just give you an untyped +2 bonus to some other skill. It doesn't sound like the biggest deal in the world, but +2 is the difference between success and failure more often than you know, and it's basically just free bonuses.

Skill Tricks

There's also a lesser-known option for using skill points called skill tricks. These are basically mini-feats that you can acquire by spending 2 skill points, if you meet the prerequisites. By default, you can't learn more than one skill trick at any given level, and your total skill tricks cannot exceed one-half your character level, rounded up.

These skill tricks can be wildly useful for the modest cost they carry. Some examples include cheating action economy by standing up from prone as an immediate action and not provoking an attack of opportunity, using Sleight of Hand to conceal the fact that you're casting a spell, denying attacks of opportunity, counterspells, and even social penalties for casting in public, or, even crazier, using a Spot check to make your next attack count as a touch attack, ignoring armor, shield, and natural armor bonuses completely!

I actually cannot recommend enough that, if you have points to spare in your build, you take a peep at the skill tricks selection of Complete Scoundrel. There's genuinely an option for every character, and probably more than one for plenty.

How High Can Skill Bonuses Get?

Skills can reach asinine levels, even relatively early on if you really want to boost the power of a small selection of skills. Later on, you can really pump up a swath of skills if you're using a skill monkey class like Rogue or Factotum with decent Intelligence. Let's see what we can do at certain level thresholds.

At level 1, with basically any character, you can have 4 ranks in a skill, 18 in the key ability score, meaning a +4 modifier, and the Skill Focus feat, which provides an untyped +3 to a specific skill, for a total of +11 at level 1. For opposed skills like Bluff or Diplomacy, this is a massive advantage over NPCs who may not have any ranks in the opposing skill, with only middling ability scores in the first place.

At level 5, with basically any character, you can have 8 ranks in a skill, 18 in the key ability score, meaning a +4 modifier, and the Skill Focus feat providing an untyped +3 to a specific skill. Now we also have gold to spend, as at 5th level it's expected that you'll have around 9,000 gp. A masterwork tool for 50 gp provides a +2 circumstance bonus to performing a given skill. If you have a lenient enough DM or good enough rules-lawyering skill in real life, you can attempt to convince them to allow you to buy a +10 masterwork item made by a smith with the Master Craftsman class from Dragonlance at five times the cost, for 250 gp total. You can buy a wand of Guidance of the Avatar for 4,500 gp, giving a +20 competence bonus on a single skill check within one minute of casting the spell, or the cheaper version would be a wand of Wieldskill for 750 gp, giving a +10 competence bonus for one minute. With all of these combined, you're looking at a total of +45 in a skill if you want the premium setup, and +27 for the modest setup. I'd recommend going modest unless this skill is your character's main goal, for example, Truespeaking for a Truenamer.

I could keep going, but beyond this it's more of the same. These values are generically available for any skill in the game, and they're before you apply skill-specific effects that boost them even further.

Some Skill-Specific Spell Buffs

Some of those specific spell buffs include, but are not limited to:

There's also a million different class features, items, and feats that grant bonuses here or there, but I won't list them all here.