Part of an ongoing series of 5e Rules notes.

Skills and Abilities … 5e has a system that interestingly modular, providing for a lot of flexibility, and occasional confusion.

5e has also given terminology a big stir, so sometimes folk (especially those coming from earlier editions, homebrews, or variant systems) get a little mixed up as to what’s being referred to as what. So forgive me if I digress a bit first …

Everything starts with Abilities

Abilities are your five primary statistics (and some people still refer to them as your stats):

• STRength, measuring physical power
• DEXterity, measuring agility
• CONstitution, measuring endurance
• INTelligence, measuring reasoning and memory
• WISdom, measuring perception and insight
• CHArisma, measuring force of personality

Everything you as a character can do stems from or is primarily influenced by these stats. (And, just to start there, I remember back in the good old days when they were a bit more nonsensically ordered STR, INIT, WIS, DEX, CON, and CHA — so D&D has shown a bit of rational evolution there.

Your level as a Player Character in each of these Abilities is from 3-20, though, depending on how you build them at character creation, it’s rare you’ll start off above 18.

Based on the level of the Ability, you get an Ability Modifier:

Score	Modifier
1	-5
2-3	-4
4-5	-3
6-7	-2
8-9	-1
10-11	+0
12-13	+1
14-15	+2
16-17	+3
18-19	+4
20-21	+5

In many ways, the actual Ability Score is meaningless; it’s the resulting Modifier that ultimately impacts the game mechanics, as modifying D20 die rolls associated with that Ability. Indeed, many character sheets emphasize the Modifier vs the Score (which begs the issue of why, aside from legacy / nostalgia reasons, we still need the Ability Score itself any more … but that’s a change for the next edition).

You could (and some systems can) run quite neatly with just these Abilities dividing up all your capability into six buckets. But since the golden days of D&D, people have wanted a bit more.

Skills!

Those Abilities are a bit broad for the level of tactical and adventuring crunchiness that D&D players consider the sweet spot.  So long ago, lists of skills were developed that people could specialize in through some mechanic, influenced primarily by the Ability they are associated with.

So, for example, Sleight of Hand is a very different skill than, say, Acrobatics. Both are clearly associated with the Dexterity (“measuring agility”), but you can easily think of someone who would be mediocre at one but dazzling in the other.

The normal 5e Skill list is alphabetical, but you can also break it out by the Abilities they traditionally align with:

Strength

• Athletics

Dexterity

• Acrobatics
• Sleight of Hand
• Stealth

Intelligence

• Arcana
• History
• Investigation
• Nature
• Religion

Wisdom

• Animal Handling
• Insight
• Medicine
• Perception
• Survival

Charisma

• Deception
• Intimidation
• Performance
• Persuasion

(There are no Skills based on CONstitution.)

The modifier on the D20 roll for any given skill starts with the modifier for the Ability it’s associated with. You can also have special Proficiency in a given skill (usually from your Class, or from a Feat, or even from a Race), which means you add your Proficiency Bonus in.

So with the character in question, when they make an Acrobatics roll, they roll a D20, add in their DEXterity Ability Modify (+1), and then (because it’s checked off as a Proficiency), their Proficiency Bonus (+2) — 1d20+3.

Mixing and Matching Abilities and Skills

You will almost never see a Skill written in official material like this:

Athletics

Instead, it will be written as

Strength (Athletics)

But why? Doesn’t Athletics imply Strength?

Not necessarily.

There are a couple of ways of looking at this. You are actually always rolling these checks on an Ability — this is a STRength check, this is a CONstitution check, this is an INTelligence check, etc. The Skills listed are only to help you narrow down which Ability you are rolling (“Oh, I’m trying Sleight of Hand, so this is going to be a DEX-based roll) or to indicate a specific proficiency in the technical aspects of what is essentially a Sub-ability, a Skill.

But sometimes that technical training and experience of a Skill can be applied to different Ability at its base. Let’s say you have been thrown overboard from a ship by pirates, and you need to swim to an island you can barely see in the distance.

Okay, well, clearly, Athletics is going to be the technical Skill set. But what the Ability is is what actually matters. This isn’t a race across the pool where STRength is the deciding factor. This is going to be all about endurance … so you’re going to be using CONstitution as the active Ability.

So, yes, you will be rolling Constitution (Athletics). 

To use the character sheet bits above, you’ll make a roll of 1d20 + 3 (CON modifier) + 2 (Proficiency Bonus for Athletics), for a 1d20 + 5.

(Yes, yes, the character in question has the same STRength and CONstitution, which means the die roll is the same in this one particular case, but I hope you see the point.)

So, yeah, sure, STRength normally powers Athletics, and WISdom makes sense with Perception … but it doesn’t have to be that way. The rules treat those as the default. If you can make a cogent argument for it to the DM, you can use any ability to power a skill, such that the skill roll becomes:

1d20 + (the chosen Ability modifier) + (your Skill Proficiency Bonus)

(If you are using a VTT like Roll20, you’ll have to calculate this manually, but it’s pretty easy.)

This is both good story-tellilng — using the appropriate Ability for a given test — but it’s also something the the Players can use to their advantage (leaning into their stronger Abilities) or the DM can use to mix things up a bit.

As another example, from the PHB, you usually use CHArisma as the basis for your Intimidation rolls — bringing your force of personality to play in beating down their resistance. But if you’re some savagely-strong looking barbarian, maybe you just show your target how you can snap them in half as easily as this thick log waiting to go into the fireplace, with a Strength (Intimidation) roll.

Your intent here is still to intimidate, but rather through word and body language (CHArisma), you’re using force of sinew (STRength). But Intimidation as a skill has its own goals and techniques; if you have proficiency in them, you should be able to use them different ways.

Indeed, I can easily imagine other types of intimidation —

• Intelligence (Intimidation): showing off your vast knowledge to cow a sage
• Constitution (Intimidation): demonstrating how nonchalant you are standing in a bed of coals to shake your torturers
• Dexterity (Intimidation): plucking flies out of the air to daunt some fellow thieves.

Yes, you could argue in that last case what you are really doing is Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) — but it’s not, because your purpose in the scene is not actually to catch flies, but to completely unnerve the person you are engaged with, to break their will and intent: thus Intimidation.

This Reddit thread has some other fun examples. If you’ve got a high CONstitution, you could argue for using it with a variety of non-CON-associated Skills:

• Constitution (Deception): You jump into near-freezing water, but want to convince the others to Come on in, it’s fine, no, no, not cold at all, do you see me shivering?
• Constitution (Sleight of Hand): You have the duke’s large signet ring hidden in your mouth, but the guards are checking everyone. Can you swallow it without anyone noticing?
• Constitution (Animal Handling): Wrangling … that damned … cat … who is very liberal … with use of … teeth and claws …

Not all combinations are easy to think of examples for (Strength (History) … maybe something about how you were the only person back at the monastery strong enough to get Abbot Shang’s Book of Exceedingly Great Dimensions down from the shelf to study from it). But figuring out a way to lean a higher Ability into a Skill roll can give you a real boost … if you can talk the DM into it.