I’ve seen the polar opposite. I can’t even fathom what would cause a dm to be restrictive about 5e skills. How would you even be restrictive?
It is difficult to answer the question without making a comparison, to demonstrate what I consider to be broad latitude and depth to skills. So, with that said, my experience with a
well-done "skills are broad and powerful" thing has come from 4e. In 4e, Religion can be used to do things like improvise a prayer that will help a spirit find rest, communicate with presences that normally cannot be directly observed, or ritually purify someone so they can enter an area of dark powers without becoming tainted (all of these being examples from games I have played.) Arcana isn't just knowledge about magical things--it can be used to change the parameters of an existing enchantment, temporarily suspend or even rewrite the wards that would normally set off an alarm if you pass through a door, leave a secret magical message that can only be found by a designated recipient, or jury-rig an artificer's abandoned experiment so it will work...for now, anyway. (Most of these are, likewise, things that have actually happened in a game I was playing.)
I have never seen a 5e DM willing to allow anything like that. Religion is exclusively for determining whether you know information about a belief system (often cults, but general religious-knowledge stuff too) or the beings revered by such systems (deities, angels, etc.) Arcana is exclusively for whether you can identify an item or a spell or the like. And, from what I can tell, that's
pretty much what the game itself says those skills do.
Jump to overhead attack a dragon. One DM says DC 15, Another DC 20. Another DC 25.
Yeah, this is the other side of it. Any actually interesting or powerful applications of skills, if they are permitted at all, are given insanely high DCs (and, almost as often, disadvantage), so you're essentially guaranteed to fail unless you're hyper-invested and have someone buffing you.
That is precisely what makes it so workable in practice. The DMG suggests only using e numbers, and the variability within that 10 point range from table to table, or even ruling to ruling, is the game working as designed.
See above. I find this "working as designed" cashes out as "skills can't really do very much, and if you try, DMs will just ensure that you fail by always giving stupidly high DCs."
Sorry if I'm being slow, but I don't get what you mean. No skill is unique to any class. Arcana isn't just for wizards, and even Stealth and Thieves' Tools aren't just for rogues. So what's different about fighters?
Rogues get Expertise (not unique, but only two classes get it by default), Reliable Talent, Stroke of Luck, and various subclass-specific benefits (e.g. Inquisitive, Mastermind, Phantom, Soulknife, and to a lesser extent Assassin and Thief.) Wizards get
spells and cantrips, tons of them. Druids have friggin'
Wild Shape. Etc.
Barbarians get nada by themselves, so certain subclasses (looking at
you, Berserker) are screwed in that regard, but most of the time subclass makes up for that gap. Fighters, though? Diddly-squat. BMs getting
artisan tool proficiency is the best you'll get (and don't even get me started on the bad joke that is "Remarkable Athlete.")
And by the way, what fighters get for skills is great!
Irrelevant, because you can get whatever two skills you want from Background, and no class has such an awful class skill list that the two you get from it are necessarily always bad. Any character can contribute to skills, and that has nothing to do with
being the class they are. Being a Fighter has no meaningful impact on using skills. Being a
Bard has meaningful impact on using skills. Being any full-caster does. But not a Fighter. Fighter is locked out of anything but skills, and skills (as noted) are back mostly in their 3.5e rendition where Religion is exclusively about recalling facts, and not about doing impressive and influential things that involve the magic of faith and devotion.
Those are all good points, Minigiant. I think my level 16 game has been fine, but I can't deny we've experienced some of those issues, especially the second. Maybe I'm giving 5e too much credit for good high-level play because my main point of comparison is 4e with its preposterous 30 (!) levels. As much as I liked 4e, I thought it went down sharply in quality after the first few levels, and I literally never saw a single game above about level 12, which isn't even halfway to the max. 5e is better than that, at least.
What system did or does high-level play the best? People seem to like BECMI but I have no experience with it at those levels.
My experience, albeit not nearly extensive as I would like, is exactly the opposite. 4e was perfectly functional across a large range of levels, and in fact got really really good in early Paragon, when you had enough features to do lots of cool things, but hadn't yet gotten into the higher complications of Epic teir.
