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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7738676" data-attributes="member: 6775031">The main reason is that it is incredibly unlikely for Jack (Fighter 1) and Jill (Fighter 20) to be hanging out together. Jack is mostly going to be hanging out with Bill (Rogue 1), while Jill spends time with Ted (Rogue 20).Since wide level disparities are unlikely to show up at the table, it makes sense to sacrifice how well the mechanics work in that scenario, in order to focus on making them work well in the situations which are likely to show up. It's a basic principle of efficient game design, that the rules should do a better job of describing scenarios that are likely to occur than scenarios which are unlikely to occur.I'm not saying that it necessarily makes a ton of sense for how a world is supposed to work, but Pathfinder 1E had a severe issue with high-level characters having such wide disparity in skill checks that there was often no point in rolling; any lock that a rogue could possibly fail to pick was a lock that a trained fighter would have zero chance at. It was the same exact issue which caused 5E to take the Bounded Accuracy route. But Bounded Accuracy comes at a cost, which is that there's very small growth across levels; a high-level expert isn't significantly better than a low-level expert. The universal level bonus solves both of those problems, by guaranteeing that high-level characters can always compete with each other, while high-level characters can still always beat low-level characters. And the cost of solving both those problems simultaneously is that now high-level un-trained characters can beat low-level trained characters, which seems counter-intuitive (and possibly un-justifiable), but is also not something that should be noticeable at the table.</blockquote>

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