Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks Help with stealth stat (new to series)

So I'm a new player and am trying to play a Wood Elf Rouge but when I go to choose my Background and hover Stealth under Criminal or Urchin where it says "Skills - Deception(Criminal)/Sleight of Hand(Urchin), Stealth" it says "-1 to Stealth Checks" which I don't want. This doesn't seem to happen for every other Race and Subrace, they all say "+5 to Stealth Checks". Some more information that might help: if I select Elf>High Elf>Criminal/Urchin and hover Stealth it will say +5, but then if I switch Subrace to Wood Elf and go back to the Background tab, Stealth will say +5 like it should until I select a different background and then it will go back to being -1. If I try to start as Elf>Wood Elf>Criminal/Urchin it will not say -1 in place of the +5, i.e. I can't do this in reverse. So my question is, is this a bug or is there something I'm missing? Thanks for reading and sorry if it's confusing. lmk if you need clarification.

This would be a bug, most likely caused by the fact that Wood Elves innately get proficiency in Stealth as a racial bonus, meaning Stealth proficiency from a Background does nothing. So the game likely messes up when trying to show what the actual modifier is (Since you cannot stack proficiency. It's a binary thing, you either have it or you don't. The only thing that stacks with it is Expertise which is something Rogue and Bard get to provide twice their proficiency bonus to a skill)

The actual way that skills work is they're primarily influenced by your attributes, with a bonus if you have a proficiency in them (Equal to your proficiency bonus which is +2 until level 5 when it becomes +3 and then at level 9 it becomes +4 and with Rogue/Bard's Expertise it becomes +4, +6 and +8 respectively)

Whatever your associated attribute modifier is will be the main source of skill, in this case for Stealth it will be based on your Dexterity score modifier (+1 per 2 Dexterity above 10 and -1 per 2 Dexterity below 10). So unless you're making your Wood Elf Rogue with 8 Dexterity, they will not have a -1 modifier to their Stealth skill (Most likely you have 16-17 Dexterity as it's Rogue's primary stat, so that would be +3 which combined with your +2 Proficiency bonus would be the +5 you're seeing outside of this bug)

You must be special, as I don't have it. My Wood Elf has the correct +5 displayed.

Thanks for the help! So basically I should choose any other background than Criminal/Urchin so that I don't waste a proficiency "slot"?

No one ever said I wasn't

Ideally, yes.

Something like Charlatan would likely fit well, with it also providing Sleight of Hand in addition to its inspirations being tied to things a typical Rogue character might naturally want to do, much like Criminal and Urchin albeit in a slightly different way (Criminal tends to favour outright murder and theft. Urchin tends to favour pickpocketing and helping children. Charlatan favours deceiving others and using tricks to steal things)

However, any background would be fine (Rogue is naturally able to pick all the skills it would normally want as class proficiencies making the background proficiencies much less important) so you can pick whatever, with either a focus on acquiring as many proficiencies you feel are valuable for your character (Between background, racial and class proficiencies you can get quite a few as a Rogue), going with a background that provides more of a thematic playstyle with its inspirations or simply going for a background that is easy to obtain all inspirations for (Such as Folk Hero, whereby doing basically any quest will grant one)

Sounds good. I'll be starting my play through today with full confidence. Thanks again!

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