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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fearsomepirate" data-source="post: 8205267" data-attributes="member: 7021420">Here's how I think of it:d20 + modifier is a dead simple RNG to use. It's fairly easy for players to intuit, "I have a +10, so I have to roll a 6 or better...I have a pretty good chance of this." A quick player might even notice that he has an exactly 75% chance of success. The price of this ease of use is it's just plain bad at handling extremes. All you can do with d20 is shift it up or down 5%. It's not very granular, and does a bad job of representing anything where the variance is in the tail of the bell curve. So what do you do? 3.5's approach is to basically ignore the problem and try to represent extreme-scale probabilities with gigantic modifiers, which results in a system that is ultimately impossible to intuit and results in useless skills. 5e's approach is more to just accept the limitations of the d20 system. This results in some silliness, like an overly compressed gap between "novice" and "master" on the skill chart, but the answer is just, "Well, that's just a limit of the d20 system."</blockquote>