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5e's skill system is utterly broken, and broken against the players. If I failed at my job as often as a 4th level expert in D&D failed at an 'easy' task, I think I'd probably get fired. Given that, it seems obvious to me that if you're finding that castings of guidance, bardic inspiration or...

I think you missed my point. I was arguing that foci cause a form of fatigue that isn't shared by more specific material components.

Sure, but if your typical play is to simply announce that you're casting a spell and ignore the material component, the only difference when you cast one of those is that you quietly cross off the component (or potentially even just enough money for the component). Waving a stick around (or...

If you have a focus, you don't need material components. Clerics and paladins just have to wear a focus in a way that it is visible, and therefore it doesn't require a hand, and is mechanically superior to using material components. Druids just use something that's naturey, which is like using...

"The system is incredibly bad... and it's deliberate so that the game is better". The problem is that it takes a high level of system mastery on the part of players and DM for this to work, since it's not really made clear in the rulebooks. There's no advice to "avoid rolling if you can" for...

BA? Except that players tend to not simply try to do everything, but base the actions they attempt on how they would describe their character, which tends to feed into their stats and skills. So the difficult climb is attempted by the strong, athletic barbarian in the group while the wizard...

"In the first tier (levels 1-4), characters are effectively apprentice adventurers." There's also the question of to whom they're apprenticed to, and the examples in character creation which make it seem like being a high up in the thieves guild and a master assassin still plonk you as a...

At first level, their strength bonus applies to not just the initial roll, but also the damage dealt, and they can use substantially larger weapons. Going from an 8 strength character with no proficiency to a 20 strength, trained in athletics character at level (say) levels 5-8 takes a DC 10...

The backgrounds rules seem to suggest that your character didn't just wake up yesterday and start learning how to thieve, similarly for how hard it is to get new proficiencies. If we're talking about (say) thieve's tool proficiency, you've had 1400 hours of training from a master. For comparison...

My point is that this is a problem with skills, not magic. Yeah, that just looks like a mess of poorly written mechanics to me. It's a whole bunch of random DCs, most of which are way too high for the circumstance they're describing. According to that, the entire population of my old home town...

If that's really what the book says, then the designers prove themselves somewhat foolish, or very flexible with language at least. I wouldn't count "45% of the time" to be "can usually be done by". http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?495062-Spreadsheet-of-published-skill-DCs Has a...

The games DCs outside of combat aren't remotely balanced. That's why there's so much advice around which is basically "don't ask for rolls unless you can't avoid it", along with "try to convince your DM that you just succeed without having to roll".

Level 1 character with specialization and 18 in a stat only has +8 to a check. If you're using the standard array, they only have +7, so it's actually a 10% chance to fail, I misspoke. I mean sure, by the time you've reached level 9, characters typically can automatically succeed on an easy...

The 5e skill rules are so poor that this is hardly the point where you should be making a stand. If you really want to simulate this, then for knowledge checks give each character different information to the others based on their individual check result (secret, of course) and let them argue...

Mapping is dead and gone, and good riddance. It basically just wasted time transmitting information from the DM to the mapper in an inefficient format, who then showed the map to the party. Unless the goal of a section is to make the players lost, then I'll map if I think it's necessary to show...

I think that this is actually a problem with skills and ability checks - at first level the best spell for a job just succeeds, while the best skill for a job, still has a 15% chance of failing a simple task.* *I'm leaving out skill specialization, because I don't think that requiring everyone...

So how is the quote I posted relevant to the discussion then?

I don't comprehend why anyone would have a problem with this, with no explanation whatsoever. It's not like D&D is set in the modern day where the law says you're not allowed to work until... Oh, wait, the law around here says you can go and get a job at literally any age, as long as it doesn't...

You say this as though buying sharpshooter somehow reduces the character's ability to have a personality. This is a pretty poor effort at a cheap shot. The vast majority of feats are reasonable - they give players more options to express characters that have unusual abilities. If some of them...

Sketchy info here, so hard to work out what you actually saw. For starters, it looks like you've got a fighter vs a ranger? That basically means you have a fairly ideal comparison - the ranger has more versatility than a fighter, the fighter is doing more damage. Now, if that was the ONLY way...