D&D 5E Is expertise badly designed?

[miggyG777]

I am a fairly new DM. I have heard a couple of people argue, that rogue and bard expertise is a bad design choice due to its impact on the modifiers in the bounded accuracy system. Is it too strong or just right? I would be interested in hearing your opinions.

 

[DEFCON 1]

It's fine. When you are adding an extra swing of potentially 20 numbers from the die roll, the extra +2 or +3 or +4 from Expertise is barely anything by comparison.

 

[jayoungr]

I've played with rogues and bards at high level and have not noticed a problem. It does mean the rogue and bard are most likely to succeed at skill checks, but that's kind of the goal of the subsystem.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[RogueJK]

Expertise alone isn't as powerful as a number of other abilities or spells. It's certainly not too strong.

For example, take the Rogue's 11th level Reliable Talent ability, which means that they can't roll lower than 10 on a proficient skill check. Or the Pass Without Trace spell, which adds +10 to Stealth. Or, at levels lower than 13th, the Guidance cantrip's +d4 has the potential to add as much or more to a skill check as Expertise. Or Bardic Inspiration can add +d6/d8/d10/d12 to a skill check, which has the potential to exceed the bonus from Expertise at all levels. (Even up to 2x/3x.)

Any of those one adds a larger bonus (or at least potential bonus, or potential effective bonus) than the +2/3/4/5/6 from Expertise alone.

And a number of these sources of skill bonuses can all be stacked together, resulting in possible skill checks of over 50 without too much trouble, or over 100 in some extreme situations...

Which means, for example, that no matter what the skill in particular is, you need to be that class in order to be the best (in terms of possible modifiers).

Not necessarily. There are other (sub)classes that gain Expertise, like Knowledge Cleric or Purple Dragon Knight. And there are feats that grant Expertise, both official like Prodigy and UA stuff like the various Skill Feats.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Olrox17]

Expertise isn't the best designed system ever. It's limiting towards classes that have no access to it, and it's just a number increase, which is effective, but can be a bit boring.
It's not bad though, there are much worse offenders of bounded accuracy in 5e, several of which were mentioned by previous posters.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[MwaO]

I am a fairly new DM. I have heard a couple of people argue, that rogue and bard expertise is a bad design choice due to its impact on the modifiers in the bounded accuracy system. Is it too strong or just right? I would be interested in hearing your opinions.

1: Bounded Accuracy isn't actually a thing in 5e. 5e uses 4e/2 math. Except when it doesn't and then things function really poorly.

2: There's nothing particularly wrong with Expertise at low levels. The issue shows up at higher levels where Rogue's Reliable Talent means that something that Rogues want as a focus of their character is basically by definition never a challenge or there's less than a 50% chance of success. Now some players might want that because they auto-succeed at any task important to them. But some players might not want to auto-succeed at say deception because they enjoy the risk of failure.

 

[NotAYakk]

Every system has its flaws. And yes, it breaks bounded accuracy (as do a number of other things).

Expertise is an attempt to make "skill monkey" mean something serious. You could argue breaking bounded accuracy is a feature (together with reliable talent). The high level rogue gets a near veto on 4 kinds of skill checks.