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While your character’s ability scores represent their raw talent and potential, skills represent their training and experience at performing certain tasks. Each skill is keyed to one of your character’s ability scores and used for an array of related actions. Your character’s expertise in a skill comes from several sources, including their background and class. In this chapter, you’ll learn about skills, their scope, and the actions they can be used for.

A character’s acumen in skills can come from all sorts of training, from practicing acrobatic tricks to studying academic topics to rehearsing a performing art. When you create your character and as they advance in level, you have flexibility as to which skills they become better at and when. Some classes depend heavily on certain skills—such as the alchemist’s reliance on Crafting—but for most classes, you can choose whichever skills make the most sense for your character’s theme and backstory at 1st level, then use their adventure and downtime experiences to inform how their skills should improve as your character levels up.

A character gains training in certain skills at 1st level: typically two skills from their background, a small number of predetermined skills from their class, and several skills of your choice granted by your class. This training increases your proficiency ranks for those skills to trained instead of untrained and lets you use more of the skills’ actions. Sometimes you might gain training in a specific skill from multiple sources, such as if your background granted training in Crafting and you took the alchemist class, which also grants training in Crafting. Each time after the first that you would gain the trained proficiency rank in a given skill, you instead allocate the trained proficiency to any other skill of your choice (except for Lore skills, which can only by allocated to other Lore skills).

Key Ability

Each skill is tied to a key ability. You add your modifier for this ability to checks and DCs when using that skill. For example, skulking about the shadows of a city at night with Stealth uses your Dexterity modifier, navigating the myriad personalities and power plays of court politics with Society uses your Intelligence modifier, and so on. The key ability for each skill is listed on Table 4–1: Skills, Key Abilities, and Actions on the Skill Actions page and also appears in parentheses following the skill’s name in the descriptions. If the GM deems it appropriate for a certain situation, however, they might have you use a different ability modifier for a skill check or when determining your skill DC.