D&D 5E Is expertise badly designed?

[DND_Reborn]

Isn't that the entire point of being a skill monkey class? You don't get powerful, auto-success abilities like spells, but you have a high chance of succeeding on mundane skill rolls.

Being a skill monkey can be accomplished through other means. Also, it shouldn't be the bright star, so to say, for either class IMO. Also, bards are already the true skill monkeys via Jack-of-all-trades.

Otherwise, I also like the idea of limiting rogue expertise to skills from the rogue class list.
Allowing bards, who can selected any skill as a class skill, to choose expertise in anything is more appropriate at least given the nature of the class.
Granting players the choice of expertise from a background skill by sacrificing the other also removes problems, as does deciding to use the UA skill-feats and expanding Prodigy to all races.

 

[Don Durito]

The Unearthed Arcana variants have greatly expanded the range of Expertise anyway. Now Rangers and Barbarians have access to expertise and Battlemasters can expend superiority dice for a similar effect.

 

[Xeviat]

Expertise is well designed.

Shoving and Grappling aren't. They should have been Saving Throws vs 8+Prof+Str.

This a million times.

Actually, this and Stealth. Perception should at least be a saving throw and saving throws should all scale.

Hu, something I like from Pathfinder 2.

 

[Coroc]

I play a ranger in OotA. Justified by his background story and several sessions within the game he has got underdark as favored territory now. Means he never can get totally lost there. If he does not know the exact path to a target he at least gets a good guess what the general direction is and if the tunnels split up he knows which one is more likely to lead to his target.
That is pretty powerful imho, is it overpowered? Well a ranger should excel at such tasks so I just say it is not.
With a rogue you surely got other options also to spend you ASI, since you need stealth, perception and investigation on top of sleight of hand and lockpicking. You need Int, Wis, Dex, and everyone needs Con.
So if you need Cha also because you like to be good at deception, then expertise is the only way around the rogues MAD. So here I also say, it is ok by me. Does not matter that the rogue scales some obstacle with 100% assurance, when the rest of his party cannot.

 

[S'mon]

Works fine.

Arguably Reliable Talent at Rogue-11 is a bit OTT since it means auto success on nearly all checks IME, but given that Rogues are the skill monkeys it works well to mark them out with a power different from but equal to that of the spellcasters.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

You do know how a forest differs from say... manhattan & wallstreet or the businesses & apartments on either right?...

. . . And climbing walls is different from swimming is different from judo.
5e skill system is not designed to be that granular.

The fact that anything the wizard even needed to roll on was all but impossible for the artificer by the end of the game.

Really? Assuming the artificer was of equal intelligence and proficient, there should only have been a +6 difference at the mythological level. When you're rolling a d20, a 6-point difference is nice, but is hardly the difference between "Not quite auto-success" and "all but impossible".
What am I missing?

There is also the arcane trickster from sharn with expertise stealth making the gloomstalker's stealth out in the wilderness favored terrains of Xendriik & depths of Khyber equally pointless in another game

That does indeed sound odd. Does favoured terrain give a Stealth bonus?
Without the benefits of darkness, the difference should just be the proficiency bonus, but after the ranger casts Pass Without trace, the numbers should have been to the ranger's advantage, not the rogue's.

 

[tetrasodium]

7

. . . And climbing walls is different from swimming is different from judo.
5e skill system is not designed to be that granular.

Really? Assuming the artificer was of equal intelligence and proficient, there should only have been a +6 difference at the mythological level. When you're rolling a d20, a 6-point difference is nice, but is hardly the difference between "Not quite auto-success" and "all but impossible".
What am I missing?

That does indeed sound odd. Does favoured terrain give a Stealth bonus?
Without the benefits of darkness, the difference should just be the proficiency bonus, but after the ranger casts Pass Without trace, the numbers should have been to the ranger's advantage, not the rogue's.

now your starting to see As soon as the druid or ranger suggest casting pass without a trace on the ranger, someone in the party would suggest they not waste the slot & just wait here while milo checks it out. It got to be so problematic in that game that even the ranger started nodding his head whenever the AT would say something like " $d20Roll plus like a billion... so... $sillyResult" & at least once pointed out that the AT probably didn't even need to roll. The ranger eventually quit even trying to stealth because he was always the weak link that got detected no matter the situation if they were both out there. Even if I as the gm didn't make it clear who/what was seen the fact that the AT would need to roll bad & him good for him to not be mathmatically the weak link left an understandable bad taste in his mouth.

Ranger favored terrain allows them to stealth at speed rather than half speed so the ranger could more quickly reach ta further away point he'd get spotted at & run back past the invisible stalker AT who was then lined up to be even more awesome if anything was giving chase to the ranger.

 

[Esker]

Moving about unnoticed in a crowd? Sounds like a Charisma (stealth) check to me.

Ooh, interesting

 

[jayoungr]

As soon as the druid or ranger suggest casting pass without a trace on the ranger, someone in the party would suggest they not waste the slot & just wait here while milo checks it out.

Sometimes that just happens. Like, I'm playing a rogue in a game right now, and she's plenty stealthy. But the wizard's familiar can fly and also won't attract attention if seen in most circumstances, because it's just a bird. So when there's scouting to be done, we send in the familiar--but in a different party, I might be doing all the scouting.

I don't think it's a flaw of the game; it's just one of the quirks of how two features happen to overlap.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Moving about unnoticed in a crowd? Sounds like a Charisma (stealth) check to me.

Would it?

Blending into a crowd... are you "hiding" or "trying to seem to fit in or belong"?

If you are "hiding", I would still rule DEX (Stealth), if you are "blending", I would go with CHA (Deception).

The concept of CHA and Stealth IMO actually oppose each other. CHA is your personality, confidence, or "putting yourself out there", etc. and Stealth is about "pulling back, hiding, being unobtrusive".