Secondary Skills

Presented here are lose rules for all the flavor skills that aren't part of 4th edition D&D: the craft and profession or trade skills, riding, sailing, forgery, performance, or any other skill that may add flavor to your characters.

These secondary skills can be useful mainly for providing another dimension of detail to characters, or, as a DM, if you intend the players to be involved in some skill challenges that go beyond the primary skills. For example, you might introduce the secondary skills Navigation (Int) and Sailing (Dex) in a swashbuckling adventure and make them available to the players. You could then put the players through skill challenges or even shipboard combat encounters that gave the players an opportunity to use these skills.

Characters may chose a number of secondary skills based on their class, or alternatively, they can get training in as many secondary skills as are appropriate to their backgrounds. Around 2 or 3 skills seems right for most PCs, with NPCs getting more or fewer depending on their class (look for NPC classes here in a later article).

Training in a Secondary Skill, much like a primary skill, gives the character a +5 bonus to rolls involving the skill.

Possible Secondary Skills include:

• Craft (choose an object type to craft) (Int, Dex, or Str)
• Profession (choose a profession to be skilled in) (Could be any attribute)
• Navigation (Int or Wis)
  
• Sailing (Dex)
  
• Riding (Dex)
  
• Engineering (Int)
  
• ... or any other skill as deemed appropriate in conjunction with your DM....