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“You can perform an acrobatic stunt, keep your balance while walking on narrow or unstable surfaces, slip free of a grab or restraints, or take less damage from a fall.”
Acrobatics as Mechanics.
Let’s look at the mechanical abilities that Acrobatics gives you.
Acrobatic Stunt: this is a direct link to page 42, and the most mechanically “open” use of Acrobatics. Think of something cool to do and the DM tells you how hard it is to do.
Balance: Can you stay upright on an unstable surface? This use of Acrobatics answers that. I don’y know if anyone really uses this directly, but it is heavily implied in many contexts.A GM could use the mechanics with terrain effects for an encounter based on treacherous and unstable ground.
Escape From a Grab: You’ve probably used this a lot in combat. An uncommon use though, is:
“You can also make escape attempts to get away from other immobilizing effects,as directed by your DM.”
Creative players can stretch this to leverage their acrobatics in interesting places; Creative DMs can create fiendish hooks based around this.
Escape From Restraints: When you get to the essence, this is just another version of escape from grab. In this though, the grab is more static but also heightened in difficulty to escape. The same permutations apply here.
Reduce Falling Damage (Trained Only): If you’re trained in Acrobatics you use this on reaction to fall. This use is specific enough that its permutations are obvious and situational. It does have some extensions and uses in the other lenses however.
Acrobatics as Platform
What activities tie easily to Acrobatics? I’ll enumerate a few here, but I’m sure you can think of more.
Street Performer/Entertainment: They did take out the “Perform” skill, but that doesn’t mean that you can use Acrobatics to perform for others. A pplayer could make a little extra money between adventures thi way, or could use this as part of a cover identity to distract or infiltrate.
Cat-burglar: Acrobatics is one of the core suite of skills for the achetypical cat-burglar. Combined with Stealth and Thievery, Acrobatics covers the delicate balancing and wire-walking typically of such illicit activities.
Pilot: For aerial machines, the skills acquired from training in acrobatics are a natural fit for steering any nimble flying device. Your character is manuevering a hang glider off a cliff, lithely darting over and under through dangerous terrain, using acrobatics as a base. It’s a little unconventional, but is still within bounds.
Acrobatics as Sense
Your skill becomes a metaphor for the world when you dedicate yourself to it. Acrobatics as metaphor could be broken down, then, in multiple ways. Is life a tightrope to be carefully walked? Is life an obstacle to vaulted? There are a lot of ways Acrobatics can be interpreted, but the ground floor is this: If clever traversal or movement matters in a scene, the master Acrobat perceives it for “free”.
Our master acrobat walks into a scene and sees instantly how it can be quickly and cleverly traversed. Leap to the table, on to the chandelier, then over to the balcony by way of aerial somersault; As a GM, if traversing the scene is important to the scene, you want to give some of that information to the player outright. This is the player’s reward for making a master acrobat; when it is relevant to a scene, he or she sees her own special version of the scene before them.
Acrobatics as Social Skill
An acrobatic knows all sorts of interesting people: pilots, freerunners, performers, cat-burglars, scouts, spies. In its context as a social skill, Acrobatics is similar to Streetwise but with one important diference. Where streetwise can get you contacts who will work with you, contacts through Acrobatics are never assumed to just give you the information. Acrobatics as a skill might lead you to more acrobats of similar skills, but whether you get what you need from them is going to take some other action (Streetwise can be used to “find” the contact and some of the information).
Using acrobatics socially might mean that you know where to contact the city’s free-runners, but convincing them to take the dangerous job you are offering is going to require very smooth talking on your end. With streetwise you might have just known the right person to talk with.
Hope you enjoyed that breakdown of Acrobatics! Next up: Athletics.
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A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
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I love the idea of using acrobatics as entertainment, but what about other forms of entertainment that don’t have associated skills, like music or art?