Skill Tricks are an exciting new way of customizing your character, allowing you to perform such cinematic effects as swinging across a chasm hanging from a whip, leaping off a warhorse while swinging a sword, jumping and running up a wall, and other similar actions popular in movies but until now unsupported in the D&D rules.
The four types of skill tricks are interaction, manipulation, mental, and movement. Each type focuses on a different subset of skills. While any character can learn tricks of any type, members of certain classes favor particular types of tricks (whether due to the class’s skill list, the character’s areas of expertise, or both).
- Interaction: These skill tricks influence social interaction between PCs and NPCs. They typically rely on skills used in those situations, such as Deception, Persuasion, and Perception.
- Manipulation: A manipulation skill trick depends on the character’s manual dexterity to perform some act of legerdemain. Such tricks use skills that employ similar talents, including Slight of Hand and similar activities.
- Mental: These tricks pit the mind and senses of the character against an opponent. Mental tricks focus on skills such as Concentration, History, and Insight.
- Movement: As the name suggests, movement tricks typically involve the character physically moving from one location to another. They use skills that come into play during movement, such as Acrobatics and Athletics.
LEARNING SKILL TRICKS
You can learn any skill trick, as long as you meet the prerequisite and can afford to expend the downtime required to learn. If you later no longer meet the prerequisite for a skill trick, you can’t use it again until you once more qualify (though you need to relearn it).
Your total skill tricks cannot exceed one-half your character level (rounded up). Certain features allow your character to exceed these limits. If you choose to replace any skill trick with a new one by simply learning the new one as required. However, any replaced skill trick will need to relearned fully as if you never knew it, should you wish to use it again.
You can learn a skill trick only once; you either know it or you don’t.
USING SKILL TRICKS
Typically, performing a skill trick is either part of another action or an action in itself. Each skill trick’s description specifies what sort of action, if any, is required.
A skill trick usually either requires a successful skill check to pull off, or it “piggybacks” on a skill check you’re already making. For example, the Extreme Leap trick functions only if you’ve already succeeded on a DC 20 Athletics check (or DC 10 with a running start) to make a horizontal jump; it doesn’t require a separate Athletics check. Exceptions to this general rule are noted in the skill trick descriptions.
Using a skill trick does not provoke attacks of opportunity unless its description specifically states that it does (or it involves an action that would normally provoke attacks of opportunity, such as moving out of a threatened square).
TRICK DESCRIPTIONS
The skill tricks your character can learn are presented alphabetically and follow the format presented below.