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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Runestar" data-source="post: 4447199" data-attributes="member: 72317">MyISPHatesENWorld, your solution is not without its merits, but I ultimately still favour any solution which reduces the incidence of DM fiat to a minimum, or if possible, can do away with it altogether. The issue here is not so much that the DM cannot apply the houserule you have proposed (impose a cap on how high a skill check may go at any 1 level), but that he should not have to. Do bear in mind that there may be people who subscribe to dragon but may not frequent these forums (or the one at Gleemax), and as such remain unaware of any potential problems these background traits may pose. It does not help that the article is prefaced by the designer proclaiming how insignificant these bonuses are, and his comments can be construed as an outright challenge to try and break them. And indeed, some players just might start stacking these bonuses, thinking them harmless as purported.For every astute DM who realizes the implications of allowing these background traits, there are likely many others less experienced who do not. DnD should be designing an internally consistent ruleset which players and DMs alike can readily just pluck out of the book and use as is without having to playtest it first to find out if they are okay or problematic, rather than flooding us with a ton of options containing both useful and crappy material, and putting the onus of sieving out the good from the bad wholly on the DM's shoulders. As such, I advocate nipping the problem in the bud. Likewise, I see no way of justifying to my players why the character who probably doesn't need an intimidate bonus gets one (the one with 10 cha in your example), while the character who would likely appreciate such a boon (ie: the 18cha dragonborn) can't get one.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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