My Take on 5E Non-combat Skills

I want to encourage my players to try things they're unsure of, and then problem solve from the outcome to try something new, and then deal with that resultant outcome etc.. This simply doesn't happen when players think of their 4 proficient skills as a gospel or a permission slip to try things. I've seen a group sit around and discuss who has the highest possible roll for something before attempting it, and often deciding on actions based purely on whether their character sheet said they could. To mitigate this kind of mental min/maxing, I think I have come up with a skill system for 5E that will be interesting, engaging, and rewarding to players. 

So there's 2 parts to skill usage outside of combat, for me. 

Firstly - A player decides on a course of action for their player and describes what they want to attempt. 

At this point, I'm not concerned with "well what skill do I use." I'm just worried about getting a clear and canon action from the character, "I want to roll stealth." is meaningless to me, "I'd like to crawl under a bush closer to this guy so I can listen in on him." is exactly what I want to hear, even if they mean the same thing. 

At this point I go one of three routes, Yes, No, or Maybe...

Yes - I want players to feel comfortable with skills their character has picked up through questing, especially since I plan to reward my players with skills as often as I do magic,  So whenever a player brings up a reason they think they can "just do" something. Usually this is something as simple as "I say "______" to the guy."  or as complex as "So knowing what I do about the banners of the land from the six months we spent with Sir Galahad being trained as swordsmen, what kind of reputation do these guys have?" Anything that is simpler, faster, and more rewarding to simply "Say Yes." will be handled in this way, 

Small aside --- A lot of times this is how I will want to handle enemy HP, minions having "1 hp" boils down to answering every "I hit him!" with "Yep, he died." and then describing the heinous end this poor mook has just met at the hands of a raging barbarians great axe. I think a lot of times this creates a much quicker pace to the action of the game and allows for scarier minions as well as making bigger / level appropriate creatures feel somehow larger, as sudddenly "I hit it!" is answered with a casual "Yes you did, anything else?" and the character suddenly realizes this isn't another minion.  

No - While I want players to be able to explore their options this also means giving them realistic and consistent consequences, as well as sufficient warning of these consequences. If you try to leap the 30' wide bottomless pit as a dwarf who can't even run 25' in a round, let alone clear a 30' gap in half plate + gear, my answer is going to be "Bjorn the Bright knows he couldn't clear half that gap, let alone the whole thing, try something else." If Bob insists that Bjorn tries to clear it anyway because there's no other way then one of two things has happened.

Thing 1 --- I've put Bob in some kind of stupid ass situation where he has no clear options, this means I have failed and should realign Bob with a helping hand moving forward, that doesn't mean "Bjorn clears the Gap," but it might very well mean "Bjorn the Bright, who graduated top of his class at cleric school has a pretty good memory and he remembers that there is a 35' long plank back down the hallway, but he'll have to deal with some kind of obstacles to get to it."  Hopefully this gives Bjorn some means of moving forward. 

Thing 2 --- Bob is trying to insist on attempting things his character simply cannot do, the consequences of his insistence will then play out honestly. Bjorn will leap less than half the pit, his heart will sink as he feels himself rapidly losing forward momentum, then he plunges down... and down... tears your character in half and down... 

Maybe - This is pretty much the only time I actually care about rolling dice, because really, this is the only reason we have dice in an RPG, but maybe kind of covers a few different areas, in my mind.

Combat is a series of maybes... "Do I hit him?" maybe.. roll for it. "Okay I hit him! Does he die?" maybe... roll about it. "CR-CR-CR-CRITCAL!!!" oh dang. He dead as fuck my dude. A kobold and a dragon fight are the same questions but with longer maybe loops between beginning and conclusion.

It also kinda fits into the area of like "I give a speech to rally a few of the local villagers to take up arms, do any of them join us?" Well... the initial answer is going to be one maybe, "Maybe, roll to see how good of a speech you give," 

--- CAVEAT --- I don't actually give a shit what the dice say if the player themselves gives me a bad ass rallying speech for the villagers, if a player can explain why someone would come to a conclusion, or gives me a very convincing lie about something. Basically any reason I have to instantly turn a Maybe, into a Yes. You get the idea. 

Maybe also covers things like "I rolled a 19 performance, so how many villagers join us as militia?"
For these kinds of things, I think I prefer to work in % and D4s, so if I was super prepared and knew there were... 200 fighting fit villagers and you rolled a 19 I might roll a % and fiddle with it until I found a comfortable number.. *Rolls 29* Alright so.. 50 people, give or take, step forward, including 6 women, and a pair of young twin boys who couldn't be older than 11, the villagers have no real weapons, and they're poorly trained, the demons will be here the moment the suns purifying rays pass beyond the horizon, now what do you do? 

If I'm not super prepared, and this is some random Bullywug, shantytown in the middle of nowhere I might decide on a number of D4 based on roughly the total population, for a small village with say < 100 people I'd probably roll 2d4, maybe more if the village had some kind of warrior tradition, probably 1d4-1 for bullywugs. 

Secondly - The system I want to use to resolve maybe actions, "Proficiency Dice"

So this is where I want to get mechanics specific, or more accurately, I want to bash the 5E skill mechanics off with a large rock, and then frankenstein graft my own deeply flawed version of skills into the 5E system. So in place of "Proficiency" in 5E I think I want to use a "Proficiency Dice Pool" 

"Proficiency" in the context of this new skill system, is just saying the same as saying "It doesn't cost me anything to add my proficiency die to this specific thing." or, more accurately

"If you can convince me there's a reason your character SHOULD be good at this action, you can add 1 free proficiency die"

Whether its remembering banners, hitting someone with his great axe, or leaping across that 30' wide pit, if you can explain why your character should be good at this, I'll give you the die. "So knowing what I do about the banners of the land from the six months we spent with Sir Galahad being trained as swordsmen, what kind of reputation do these guys have?" Great question, roll a quick Wisdom check to see how much you remember about that, "K, I'm gonna spend a die to add a d4 to that, does that training with Galahad give me proficiency?" Yeah, so you don't have to subtract the die. (I kind of think it's important to declare die usage first, and then haggle about whether your proficient, just to sort of... mitigate the "I am proficient at stealth, so I should stealth." thought process)

If you can't convince me that you SHOULD be good at that, but you know you NEED to be, then you spend the die. Even the knight in full platemail can be sneaky sometimes, the difference is that sneaking is harder for the knight full plate, it requires way more effort, (spending dice) where as the halfling rogue is reliably sneaky (doesn't cost to spend 1 die) and can push himself to be even sneakier if he needs (spending dice on top of free one).

So the way it would work, when it all comes together is at 1st level you would start with a "proficiency pool" of 2d4, anytime you would roll a D20 to resolve some kind of "Maybe" you can spend a proficiency die from your pool to add that die to the D20 roll. You could technically spend all your dice on a single roll, if you wanted to. At each of the levels 5/10/13/17 you are given the choice of increasing the die size of your entire pool by one step, (D4>D6>D8>D10>D12) or Increasing the size of your pool by one die, (2d4, 3d4, etc) 

4 Skills as Loot Ideas--- 

You spend 3 months with the elvish mystics, learning the arts of herbology and healing plants. You also learn a small bit about elvish customs 

---You can get your free die on any roll you can reasonably claim you learned about. 

You spend a year, apprenticed to Bjorn the Bright, one of the best dwarven armorers around. Most of your time is spent destroying your own "Subpar" work, but you also learn a number of things about armoring, and smithing. 

---You can get your free die on any roll you can reasonably claim you learned about. 

---Dice Spent to Sunder someones armor are rolled as a die higher

You spend 2 long months practicing and sparring your ass off, trying to master the polearm techniques of the Lizardfolk. You are dismayed to find that many of their techniques make use of the polearms reach to bully smaller creatures. 

---You can get your free die on any roll you can reasonably claim you learned about. (If already proficient roll at 1 die higher) 

--- Whenever you set a polearm to recieve a charge from a small sized creature you may do an additional D6 of damage

You spend several weeks as a drow slave, during which time you were probably poisoned a half dozen times and learned a thing or two about drow

---You can get your free die on any roll you can reasonably claim you learned about. 

---Dice Spent to Resist Poisons are rolled as a die higher

****I HAVE NO IDEA IF I WANT TO USE THESE DICE IN COMBAT YET****