Sleight of Hand

Lore & Background

Because the game is built on the AD&D 2e ruleset, Sleight of Hand is available to any character class. It does not require a specific background, making it a broadly useful tool in a game where the player must talk, fight, and navigate a city whose very geography bends to the beliefs of its inhabitants.

Reader's Guide

In Planescape: Torment, skills are allocated from a pool of skill points at character creation and can be improved as the character gains experience. Each skill check is resolved by rolling against a Difficulty Class (DC) set by the game for a given action. Sleight of Hand falls under the dexterity-based manipulation category and is used in specific scripted encounters where the game calls for a check to palm, shift, or secretly return an object.

Strategically, the skill is most useful in social-adjacent puzzles: a scene where you must secretly swap an item before an NPC notices, or a moment in a dialogue-driven encounter where the game prompts a Sleight of Hand check as an alternative to Persuade or Bluff. Because the game is real-time with pause, you can pause the action, select the skill, and resolve the check before the scene progresses, making timing less of a factor than in pure reflex-based games.

The skill interacts with the character's Dexterity modifier, so a higher Dexterity score improves the effective roll. It also pairs naturally with the Pick Pocket and Open Lock skills for a character built around subtle physical manipulation rather than combat. In multi-encounter sequences, a successful Sleight of Hand check can alter the state of an object in the scene, unlocking a different dialogue path or avoiding a combat trigger entirely.