You gain proficiency in any combination of three skills or tools of your choice.
Skilled: Jack of All Trades
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
The jack of all trades, master of none; a character whose entire identity is being proficient in a bunch of things. Skilled is the feat you take when that’s the feel you want. Three skills (or tools, if you’re feeling feisty) can up your odds of success fairly substantially in three varying areas you’d want to be better in. At tables where it's you, a rogue, and your buddies the fighter and wizard, this is probably a decent pickup to empower the whole group. At tables with more characters or with more skills, Skilled starts to feel redundant, and chips away at each member’s feelings of uniqueness.
Skills are the baseline way the game sets up characters to be unique. A wizard with arcana is going to make the arcana checks when strange magic sigils start turning up, while the barbarian with athletics is going to lift the massive stone door open for just long enough to let the group slip by. Mechanically, it's just adding a proficiency bonus to an ability score modifier. If only one person is making a check at a time, it defaults to the player with the highest total. This means for the majority of checks, the group isn’t going to need more than any one character with a given skill proficiency. There are only sixteen skills in the game total, and with a party of four, you will have at least sixteen skill proficiencies. Sometimes you’ll want to overlap with athletics, stealth, and perception, but for the majority of other skills, an optimized party is probably at its best when all characters are covering a set number of remaining skills
This leaves Skilled being kind of tricky to use. On one hand, it can offer you a bonus to three skills the party may lack (in small groups specifically), but you then have to weigh if that’s worth versus just having somebody with a higher ability score modifier make the check. If you’re a druid, with a +3 wisdom and a +0 charisma, getting proficiency in intimidation, performance, and deception may never offer a larger modifier than the bard’s natural charisma. This narrows Skilled’s usefulness down even further to just work on characters with both a decent (or the highest in the group) ability modifier relative to the skill while nobody else has that proficiency. If you’re starting to think there are next to no characters that fit in that bucket, you’d be right. You’re likely taking proficiency in skills you already have a good modifier in: rogues with stealth, druids with animal handling, paladins with intimidation. It will be rare that this opens up new opportunities you didn’t already have access to and that will increase the party’s best modifier to the skill by at least one.
Tool proficiencies, specifically if you’re using the Xanathar’s Guide to Everything toolkit rules, does make this feat substantially better. Getting access to feature-like abilities with this does turn it into a nifty pickup for characters looking to stay in the realm of the mundane, yet empower their exploration means a bit while also grabbing a common skill they’re lacking like stealth or perception. It doesn’t revolutionize Skilled and make it suddenly invaluable, but it does make it a consideration. If you aren’t using those tool kit rules, though, Skilled is at its best suspect, and usually just going to be worse than a +1 modifier to skills your character heavily relies on. That’s just an ability score increase.
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