You have honed your proficiency with particular skills, granting you the following benefits:
Increase one ability score of your choice by 1, to a maximum of 20.
You gain proficiency in one skill of your choice.
Choose one skill in which you have proficiency. You gain expertise with that skill, which means your proficiency bonus is doubled for any ability check you make with it. The skill you choose must be one that isn't already benefiting from a feature, such as Expertise, that doubles your proficiency bonus.
Skill Expert: Hold My Beer
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
When 5e was first conceived, one of the major goals was shrinking the numbers from the enormous modifiers of 4th and older editions. Gone are the +20s of 3.5, now is the time of +5s to +7s being the high modifiers for huge chunks of the game. Expertise was a simple way to balloon those numbers up again; given to rogues and bards, the idea was to give those classes specifically a way to showcase how they were the best at skill checks.
With expertise locked to two classes, all of the other classes never really had tools to showcase how good they were when it came to doing their class’s specific thing. Enter Skill Expert: now, if you’re a barbarian that wants to be the arm wrestling champion (and subsequently the best grappler on the planet), you can take an incredibly cheap feat that gives you any +1 to an ability score you’d like, a bonus skill proficiency, AND doubles your proficiency bonus in your athletics.
I think of all the feats printed outside the PHB, Skill Expert is the one the game needed the most. It was always wild to me that a wizard would need to dip into rogue just to have a way to grow as a scholar through expertise in arcana. Now, so long as you have some odd ability score you care to improve, you have a natural way to grow the skills you care about most. With Skill Expert, everyone can show off how amazing their character is in their lane. Rangers can tame the toughest dinosaur with expertise in animal handling. A cleric whose whole identity revolves around vigilance and duty can have a perception score so high you don’t even need to take Observant to get that feeling of always watching. A fighter who’s a loosely themed private investigator can actually show off their expertise in investigation; it's all just a feat away. With variant human, ANYONE can show up at 1st level with a character whose whole deal is being really good at one particular skill; I think that’s a net positive for the game.
It's not flashy, but it gives you a lot to justify taking it. If your goal is to be the best at a specific skill within the party, so long as you have a single ability score you want to turn up to even from odd, this feat is easy to take and gives you exactly what you want. This, in my mind, should just replace the Skilled Feat. Instead of making one character good at everything, you have tool to make a character GREAT at one thing, which is exactly where you probably want your character to be.
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