While doing some monster design work this weekend, I wondered: what’s the baseline for the number and type of skills for 5e monsters? I know that Perception and Stealth are very well-represented, but just how well? Here are the percentages of monsters that possess each skill, broken out into monsters, beasts, and NPCs. Might be off by a percentage point or two here or there because I didn’t double-check the counts carefully, but it’s accurate enough to let me draw some conclusions. I just used the Monster Manual for these counts.
SKILL PERCENTAGE MONSTER BEAST NPC Acrobatics 0 0 5 Animal Handling 0 0 0 Arcana 6 0 10 Athletics 3 2 14 Deception 8 0 24 History 3 0 10 Insight 9 0 10 Intimidation 2 0 10 Investigation 1 0 5 Medicine 0 0 14 Nature 0 0 14 Perception 54 46 24 Performance 1 0 0 Persuasion 4 0 24 Religion 3 0 14 Sleight of Hand 0 0 5 Stealth 37 25 14 Survival 3 0 5
For monsters and beasts, you can see that Perception and Stealth are very well-represented, with about 50% of monsters having Perception, and about 30%ish having Stealth. Part of the reason that Perception and Stealth are so common is that they are virtually the only skills available to creatures with beast-like intelligence, but they’re also common across the board among smarter monsters.
If you’re designing monsters, it seems that you can scatter Perception around willy-nilly. Some creatures, like the mastiff, get Perception because their stories involve them having sharp senses, and some just have them because they do. For instance, I’m not sure why smoke mephits have Perception but steam mephits don’t.
Besides Perception, the other skills are “story skills.” If a monster’s descriptive essay suggests that it should be a good liar, it has the Deception proficiency; if it’s a priest, it has the Religion proficiency, and so on. There’s not really a math requirement that a monster needs certain skills in order to function correctly in combat.
Stealth is pretty common because the story “I like to sneak up on you” just happens to be a very common monster story. Other skills are much rarer just because other monster gimmicks are not as universal, with Deception and Insight the next most common at around 8% and 9% among monsters. And there are a number of skills that get no representation at all among monsters: Acrobatics! Animal handling! Medicine! Nature! Sleight of hand! And Investigation and Performance only have one or two monstrous practitioners each, which I rounded up to 1%. Among NPCs, skills are more plentiful and more evenly-spread out, as befits a selection of stat blocks that largely represent NPC versions of character classes.
So that’s a quick tally of what skills are common… now, how many skills does each creature get?
It varies a lot. While higher-CR monsters tend to have more skills, there are plenty of big tough monsters – especially bruiser types – with no skills at all, including the kraken, tarrasque, demilich, balor, and pit fiend, so it’s definitely not a necessity for a tough monster to have any skills at all. Smarter monsters tend to have more skills. Most monsters have a maximum of four skills. The two exceptions I noticed are the mind flayer and the spy, which have six skills each.
If you want to design the most typical monster possible, though, give it two skills — and make them Perception and Stealth.
I would expect survival of the fittest monsters, those who are perceptive of their surroundings and can sneak up on prey.