Wisdom
Wisdom reflects how attuned you are to the world around you and represents perceptiveness, intuition, and willpower.
What Wisdom Does
Wisdom affects your character's awareness and mental resistance:
- Spell Attack Bonus: Clerics, Druids, and Rangers add their Wisdom modifier to spell attack rolls.
- Spell Save DC: Wisdom-based spellcasters use Wisdom to determine their spell save DC.
- Passive Perception: Your passive Perception score equals 10 + your Wisdom (Perception) modifier.
- Initiative (Optional): Some DMs allow using Wisdom instead of Dexterity for initiative.
Wisdom Skills
Five skills rely on Wisdom:
- Animal Handling: Calming domestic animals, keeping a mount from spooking, intuiting animal intentions
- Insight: Determining true intentions of a creature, reading body language, detecting lies
- Medicine: Stabilizing dying companions, diagnosing illnesses, recognizing poisons
- Perception: Spotting, hearing, or detecting the presence of something using your senses
- Survival: Following tracks, hunting wild game, guiding through wilderness, predicting weather
Wisdom Checks
A Wisdom check might reflect an effort to read body language, understand someone's feelings, notice things about the environment, or care for an injured person.
Common Uses
- Getting a gut feeling about what course of action to follow
- Discerning whether a seemingly dead or living creature is undead
- Spotting hidden doors, traps, or creatures
- Following tracks or navigating wilderness
- Sensing that someone is lying to you
Example Difficulties
| DC | Difficulty | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | Easy | Notice an obvious detail or hear sounds through a door |
| 15 | Medium | Spot a hidden creature or determine someone's mood |
| 20 | Hard | Find a well-hidden secret or see through a clever disguise |
| 25 | Very Hard | Notice nearly invisible details or sense powerful illusions |
Spellcasting and Wisdom
For Clerics and Druids, Wisdom is the most important ability score:
- Spell save DC = 8 + proficiency bonus + Wisdom modifier
- Spell attack bonus = proficiency bonus + Wisdom modifier
Rangers also use Wisdom for their spells, though they're primarily martial characters.