Complete Guide to the Acrobatics Skill in D&D 5e
For how often players take this skill, Acrobatics might be the most overrated of all 5e skills. The PHB gives exactly one major use for Acrobatics: balancing. It also lists that your DM might call for an Acrobatics check when you attempt to do flips, dives, rolls, and somersaults, but when was the last time you did any of those checks in this game? Inevitably, you tried to flip over a table once, rolled a nat 1, fell on your face and wasted your whole turn. Just walk around the table.
There is one additional use for Acrobatics, and this one might actually come up occasionally. When using your action to escape from a grapple, you can use either Athletics or Acrobatics to make the check, allowing for Dexterity based characters to escape from grapples just as easily as Strength based ones. Keep in mind that this applies for monsters as well when we are attempting to grapple them, but I wouldn’t be too concerned as only 58/2624 printed monsters are proficient in Acrobatics.
So is it worth it to take this skill proficiency? Honestly, no. Balancing does not come up often at all, and when it does there are often ways to circumnavigate the problem. Players get grappled occasionally, so for Rogues and Monks this might be worth considering if you have more skill proficiencies than you know what to do with. Spellcasters do not need this to escape grapples, every spellcasting class has better ways to escape a grapple than relying on winning the skill check. Stop taking this skill, it’s basically worthless unless your party is a traveling circus group. Actually, that sounds like a sweet campaign idea…
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