Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Slight of Hand

I noticed you can get Slight of hand proficiency many ways including a Ranger who chooses Urban Tracker as their favored enemy. You can pick it up with Urchin or Charlatan backgrounds. A few items give it also...
My question is does it stack?

No, it doesn't stack.

In tabletop getting a proficiency in a skill you already have gives you a freebie pick of another. But thats not included in bg3.

Really missing this feature from BG3. You certainly don't NEED the skills, because, well you could finish the game with no proficiencies. But it feels bad to waste all the skills with how often they overlap, when you're trying to roleplay a character. Often forces the most effective choices to be weird unintuitive meta background, subclass and feat selection.

For example, don't take Deception or Performance as a Bard, or Charlatan or Entertainer backgrounds, because you'd like to just pick up Actor to take your Charisma from 17 to 18 and get free Expertise in them.

Or, don't pick Sage background for a Knowledge Domain Cleric even if you want to focus on Arcana and History, because you'll get free expertise in those from Blessings of Knowledge.

And, granted this is super niche, but hear me out I was playing a Shadowheart run where I wanted to multiclass into a Gloom Stalker Ranger with the Sanctified Stalker Archetype to really drive the Dark Justiciar theme through. But that Religion proficiency is wasted on the Acolyte background!

Is slight of hand a sign language version of Vicious Mockery?

Getting something like Proficiency or Advantage or Resistance multiple times does nothing in D&D5.

For example if you make Karlach a Wildheart Bear Barbarian, during the rage she still only has resistance to fire damage, but not immunity, or that she would only receive 25% damage from fire, or anything like that.


But you can stack Proficiency by picking Expertise, which indeed gives you double Proficiency bonus on a skill.

With no guarantee of completeness:

- Rogue level 1 and 6 as well as Bard level 3 and 10 can pick Expertise for two skills on each occasion, i.e. both end up with 4 experises

- The Actor feat gives you Expertise in both Deception and Performance

- Rock Gnomes get Experitse in History

- Knowledge Domain Clerics can pick expertise of 2 out of 4 skills: Arcana, History, Nature, Religion

So you can make a Gnome Rogue(6)/Bard(3)/Knowledge Domain Cleric(1) and have 9 Expertises, which is half of the skills you can have. If its a lore Bard, you also get 8 Proficiencies (4 from Rogue, 1 from multiclass Bard, 3 from College of Lore), too. Though since Rogue and Bard can only pick Expertise in skills they have Proficiency in (which applies neither to the Actor feat nor to Rock Gnomes nor to Knowledge Domain Clerics, who all gain Proficiency together with Expertise), you really would only get 4 more skills you still have proficiency in.

Great Info Thanks All!

One more source of expertise that I can think of, but its an act 3 spoiler:

Its actually 11, I somehow forgot to also consider you can also take Actor as feat, too, despite having listed it before.