Proficiency/Tool

Tool Proficiency

Tool proficiencies measure your aptitude with certain tools and objects, and your overall skill, knowledge, and ability with these implements. As with skill proficiencies, a check is most often called upon by the DM, but may be requested by the PC if they feel they're knowledge associated with these implements can be used in a certain challenge.

Below is each tool proficiency listed, describing their use and giving an example of what one can use the tool for. Note that there are a multitude of options and possibilities not described here that still apply to each and every tool. When and how is done in conversation between DM and player.

List of Tool Proficiencies

Alchemist's supplies

• Alchemist's supplies include two glass beakers, a metal frame to hold a beaker in place over an open flame, a glass stirring rod, a small mortar and pestle, and a pouch of common alchemical ingredients, including salt, powdered iron, and purified water.
• Alchemist's supplies enable a character to produce useful concoctions, such as acids, alchemist's fire, antitoxin, oil, perfume, or soap.

• Possible Activities
  • Purification. Your knowledge of alchemy enables you to purify water that would otherwise be undrinkable. As part of a long rest, you can purify up to 6 gallons of water, or 1 gallon as part of a short rest.

Cartographer's Tools

Cartographer's tools consist of a quill, ink, parchment, a pair of compasses, calipers, and a ruler. With cartographer's tools you can create accurate maps to make travel easier for yourself and those who come after you. These maps can range from large-scale depictions of mountain ranges to diagrams that show the layout of a dungeon level.

• Possible Activities
  • Craft a Map. While traveling, you can draw a map as you go in addition to engaging in other activity.

Beautician's Supplies (Disguise Kit)

This kit of skin care, personal care, fragrance, cosmetics, make-up, hair dye, and small props lets you care for, accentuate or change the appearance of the face or body.

Beautician's supplies can be used to cleanse, replenish, exfoliate and protect skin and hair or to enhance one's appearance, such as with makeup and perfumes.

• Potential Activities
  • Create Disguise. You may use your Beautician's supplies to create a visual disguise, which may aid in attempts to adopt a false identity.
    • Examples include making you look more fearsome, whether you want to scare someone away by posing as a plague victim or intimidate a gang of thugs by taking the appearance of a bully or enhance an audience's enjoyment of a performance, provided the disguise is properly designed to evoke the desired reaction.

Brewer's Supplies

Brewer's supplies include a large glass jug, a quantity of hops, a siphon, and several feet of tubing. Brewing is the art of producing beer. Not only does beer serve as an alcoholic beverage, but the process of brewing purifies water. Crafting beer takes weeks of fermentation, but only a few hours of work.

• Potential Activities
  • Potable Water. Your knowledge of brewing enables you to purify water that would otherwise be undrinkable. As part of a long rest, you can purify up to 6 gallons of water, or 1 gallon as part of a short rest.

Calligrapher's Supplies

Calligrapher's supplies include ink, a variety of papers and parchments, pens and quills, seals and sealing wax, gold and silver leaf, and small tools to sculpt melted wax to into a seal.

Calligraphy treats writing as a delicate, beautiful art. Calligraphers produce text that is pleasing to the eye, using a style that is difficult to forge. Their supplies also give them some ability to examine scripts and determine if they are legitimate, since a calligrapher's training involves long hours of studying writing and attempting to replicate its style and design.

• Potential Activities
  • Decipher Treasure Map. This tool proficiency grants you expertise in examining maps. You can make an Intelligence check to determine a map's age, whether a map includes any hidden messages, or similar facts.
  • Forgery. As part of a short rest, you can produce a forged document no more than one page in length. As part of a long rest, you can produce a document that is up to four pages long. Your Intelligence check using a forgery kit determines the DC for someone else's Intelligence (Investigation) check to spot the fake.

Carpenter's Tools

Carpenter's tools include a saw, a hammer, nails, a hatchet, a square, a ruler, an adze, a plane, and a chisel. Carpentry enables a character to construct wooden structures. A carpenter can build a house, a shack, a wooden cabinet, or similar items.

• Possible Activities
  • Fortify. With 1 minute of work and raw materials, you can make a door or window harder to force open. Increase the DC needed to open it by 5.
  • Temporary Shelter. As part of a long rest, you can construct a lean-to or a similar shelter to keep your group dry and in the shade for the duration of the rest. Because it was fashioned quickly from whatever wood was available, the shelter collapses 1d3 days after being assembled.

Cobbler's Tools

Cobbler's tools consist of a hammer, an awl, a knife, a shoe stand, a cutter, spare leather, and thread.

Although the cobbler's trade might seem too humble for an adventurer, a good pair of boots will see a character across rugged wilderness and through deadly dungeons.

• Possible Activities
  • Craft Hidden Compartment. With 8 hours of work, you can add a hidden compartment to a pair of shoes. The compartment can hold an object up to 3 inches long and 1 inch wide and deep. You make an Intelligence check using your tool proficiency to determine the Intelligence (Investigation) check DC needed to find the compartment.

Cook's Utensils

Cook's utensils include a metal pot, knives, forks, a stirring spoon, and a ladle. Adventuring is a hard life. With a cook along on the journey, your meals will be much better than the typical mix of hardtack and dried fruit.

• Possible Activities
  • Prepare Meals. As part of a short rest, you can prepare a tasty meal that helps your companions regain their strength. You and up to five creatures of your choice regain 1 extra hit point per Hit Die spent during a short rest, provided you have access to your cook's utensils and sufficient food.

Engineering Kit

The engineering kit contains wrenches, hammers, a handful of screw drivers, a few slabs of iron, a torch, and an assortment of screws, nails, nuts, bolts, springs, and cogs, as well as ink, a quill, paper, magnifying lenses, calipers, rulers, protractors and a scale.

An engineering kit is used to design and draw up inventions and ideas, to then put those designs into practice through creation. With it you can manufacture complicated devices, inventions and other items.

• Possible Activities
  • Repair. You can restore 5 hit points to a damaged mechanical object for each hour of work. Depending on the complexity of the design, you may have to roll a Intelligence (Engineering) check, decided by the DM.
  • For any object, you need access to the raw materials required to repair it. For metal objects, you need access to an open flame hot enough to make the metal pliable.

Glassblower's Tools

The tools include a blowpipe, a small marver, blocks, and tweezers. You need a source of heat to work glass. Someone who is proficient with glassblower's tools has not only the ability to shape glass, but also specialized knowledge of the methods used to produce glass objects.

• Possible Activities
  • Identify Weakness. With 1 minute of study, you can identify the weak points in a glass object. Any damage dealt to the object by striking a weak spot is doubled.

Healer's Supplies

This kit of Healer's Supplies is a leather pouch containing bandages, salves, splints and a handful of various components for different remedies, like herbs, mosses and other ingredients.

Healer's Supplies are used by those trained in medicine to treat illnesses and injuries, often through prolonged treatment and care. With the use of such a kit along with cunning hands, they can prevent both festering wounds diseases from worsening, and might even cure them.

• Possible Activities
  • Decontamination. Provide long-term care to poisoned or diseased creatures. When a poisoned or diseased creature is cared for by you, they may every three days re-roll the contested roll that caused their illness using your Intelligence (Medicine) or Wisdom (Medicine).
    On a success, the poison or the disease is cured. Depending on the illness, some afflictions may be too difficult to cure.
  • Treatments. You can ease the suffering of one injured creature during its short or long rest. While spending Hit Dice to recover hit points during the rest, the creature can choose one of the dice and change it to the maximum value of the die.
    Additionally, during a long rest the creature may roll two extra Hit Dice as part of the long rest.

Herbalist's Tools

An herbalism kit includes pouches to store herbs, clippers and leather gloves for collecting plants, a mortar and pestle, vials and several glass jars. Proficiency with this kit allows herbalists to create remedies and potions like antitoxins, additionally it lets you identify, safely collect and apply herbs.

• Possible Activities
  • Identify Plants. You can identify most plants with a quick inspection of their appearance and smell.

Jeweler's Tools

Jeweler's tools consist of a small saw and hammer, files, pliers, and tweezers. Training with jeweler's tools includes the basic techniques needed to beautify gems. It also gives you expertise in identifying precious stones.

• Possible Activities
  • Identify Gems. You can identify gems and determine their value at a glance.

Leatherworker's tools

Leatherworker's tools include a knife, a small mallet, an edger, a hole punch, thread, and leather scraps.

Knowledge of leatherworking extends to lore concerning animal hides and their properties. It also confers knowledge of leather armor and similar goods.

• Possible Activities
  • Identify Hides. When looking at a hide or a leather item, you can determine the source of the leather and any special techniques used to treat it. For example, you can spot the difference between leather crafted using dwarven methods and leather crafted using halfling methods.

Mason's Tools

Mason's tools consist of a trowel, a hammer, a chisel, brushes, and a square.

Mason's tools allow you to craft stone structures, including walls and buildings crafted from brick.

• Possible Activities
  • Demolition. Your knowledge of masonry allows you to spot weak points in brick walls. You deal double damage to such structures with your weapon attacks.

Navigator's Tools

Navigator's tools include a sextant, a compass, calipers, a ruler, parchment, ink, and a quill. Navigator's tools lets you chart a ship's course and follow navigation charts. Proficiency with navigator's tools helps you determine a true course based on observing the stars. It also grants you insight into charts and maps while developing your sense of direction.

• Possible Activities
  • Sighting. By taking careful measurements, you can determine your position on a nautical chart and the time of day.

Painter's Supplies

Painter's supplies include an easel, canvas, paints, brushes, charcoal sticks, and a palette.

Proficiency with painter's supplies represents your ability to paint and draw. You also acquire an understanding of art history, which can aid you in examining works of art.

• Possible Activities
  • Painting and Drawing. As part of a short or long rest, you can produce a simple work of art. Although your work might lack precision, you can capture an image or a scene, or make a quick copy of a piece of art you saw.

Potter's Tools

Potter's tools include potter's needles, ribs, scrapers, a knife, and calipers. Potter's tools are used to create a variety of ceramic objects, most typically pots and similar vessels.

• Possible Activities
  • Reconstruction. By examining pottery shards, you can determine an object's original, intact form and its likely purpose.

Sewing & Weaver's Tools

Sewing & Weaver’s tools include thread, needles, and scraps of cloth. You know how to work a loom, but such equipment is too large to transport.Sewing & Weaver’s tools allow you to create cloth and tailor it into articles of clothing.

• Possible Activities
  • Craft Clothing. Assuming you have access to sufficient cloth and thread, you can create an outfit for a creature as part of a long rest.

Smith's Tools

Smith's tools include hammers, tongs, charcoal, rags, and a whetstone.Smith's tools allow you to work metal, heating it to alter its shape, repair damage, or work raw ingots into useful items.

• Possible Activities
  • Repair. With access to your tools and an open flame hot enough to make metal pliable, you can restore 10 hit points to a damaged metal object for each hour of work.

Surgeon's Kit

The Surgeon's Kit contains scalpels, scissors and saws, grasping forceps and tweezers, surgical needles and thread, tourniquets, dressings and bandages, and finally a few vials of alcohol and a face mask.

Surgeon's kits are used by those healers and doctors with both deft hands and a deep knowledge of anatomy. Skilled users of the Surgeon's kit may use it for a multitude of actions, from dissections and harvesting, to surgeries.

• Possible Activities
  • Dissection. You use the surgeon's kit to perform an autopsy for post-mortem research and examination or dissect and harvest parts of a creature. Depending on your familiarity and the size of the subject, and the circumstances of the operation, this takes between 1d4 hours and 10d4 hours.
  • At the end of a dissection, you can make either a Wisdom or Intelligence check adding your Surgeon's Kit Proficiency bonus, to determine the cause of death or earlier health of internal organs, increase your anatomy knowledge of the creature in question and harvest safely organs of interest.

Tattooist's Tools

This kit comes in a sturdy briefcase and contains a variety of various colored inks, needles, and medical supplies needed for sterilization. The kit may also include a sketchbook filled with original tattoo designs or magical templates that the artist may find on their journeys.

Tattooist's Tools are needed to create any tattoos, whether they have magical properties or not. Each set initially contains a variety of ink colors.

• Possible Activities
  • Identify Technique. When looking at a tattoo or tattoo design, you can determine the style and source of the tattoo and any special techniques used to create it. You can often also determine a tattoo's purpose, whether it be of tradition or aesthetics.

Tinker's Tools

Tinker's tools include a variety of hand tools, thread, needles, a whetstone, scraps of cloth and leather, and a small pot of glue.

A set of tinker's tools is designed to enable you to repair many mundane objects. Though you can't manufacture much with tinker's tools, you can mend torn clothes, sharpen a worn sword, and patch a tattered suit of chain mail.

• Possible Activities
  • Repair. You can restore 10 hit points to a damaged mundane object for each hour of work. For any object, you need access to the raw materials required to repair it. For metal objects, you need access to an open flame hot enough to make the metal pliable.

Thieves' Tools

Thieves' tools include a small file, a set of lock picks, a small mirror mounted on a metal handle, a set of narrow-bladed scissors, and a pair of pliers.

Perhaps the most common tools used by adventurers, thieves' tools are designed for picking locks and foiling traps. Proficiency with the tools also grants you a general knowledge of traps and locks.

• Possible Activities
  • Set a Trap. Just as you can disable traps, you can also set them. As part of a short rest, you can create a trap using items you have on hand. The total of your check becomes the DC for someone else's attempt to discover or disable the trap. The trap deals damage appropriate to the materials used in crafting it (such as poison or a weapon) or damage equal to half the total of your check, whichever the DM deems appropriate.

Woodcarver's Tools

Woodcarver's tools consist of a knife, a gouge, and a small saw. Woodcarver's tools allow you to craft intricate objects from wood, such as wooden tokens or arrows.

• Possible Activities
  • Craft Arrows. As part of a short rest, you can craft up to five arrows. As part of a long rest, you can craft up to twenty. You must have enough wood on hand to produce them.