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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tglassy" data-source="post: 7632116" data-attributes="member: 6855204">Um...I see a few things that is causing your problems. So first off, you’re adding complexity. That always causes problems. Second, a higher intelligence wouldn’t necessarily grant more skills.  It could grant more proficiencies, but not necessarily skills. And there are character choices which grant more skills. If you wanna be a skill monkey, there are things to choose to do that. You can’t give everyone everything. Though it makes sense to have more tool/language proficiencies with a higher intelligence, as those are usually more intelligence related anyway. Feats are the incredible things the likes of Mythological heroes could do.  Skills are just skills that anyone could do, and skill checks are used if there is a chance it won’t work. There nothing stopping you from allowing a check in these cases, the feats merely allow it to happen with no additional checks.  The Athlete Feat allows them to stand up with 5 ft of movement, no check needed. Also, if you simply grant these abilities to anyone who asks, you’re basically handing out free Feats, which spits in the face of anyone who forwent another choice because they wanted a specific Feat for that ability. I think this is your main misunderstanding. It’s not Intimidation vs Wisdom Save. It’s Intimidation vs Insight Check. Saves are against spells and attacks and the like. Skills are pitted against skills. If the target has expertise in Insight, then they can easily match someone with expertise in intimidation. Same with Stealth. The contesting check is Perception, not a Wis save. So there’s that problem solved. The DM decides the lock’s DC.  The whole point of expertise is to do things no one else will do. It makes the DC 15 lock, which someone without expertise may find mildly difficult, into a cakewalk for the one with expertise, as it should be. A 20 DC lock would be hard for others, but only mildly so to the one with expertise.  And yeah, the DC 25 lock is extremely hard for most, but not that hard for expertise. They’ll also be the only ones who can unlock a DC 30 lock, and at lvl 5, but in that case, the DM shouldn’t make a lock that high DC unless he really, really doesn’t want anyone to open it without a key. Making it a bonus action instead would do nothing for helping to unlock a lock, considering most people unlocking the lock will not be doing it in combat, so action economy means nothing, and arguably the Rogue’s Cunning Action could already make it a bonus action. So by doing that, you’re just nerfing the Rogue.  There are other abilities that make standard actions into a bonus action, Cunning Action being the main one. If the character wants to do that, they should choose those abilities. They do. That’s literally what they do. At lvl 5, a Rogue can have a +11 on any skill they have expertise, which means they literally cannot roll less than a 12, unless they roll a 1, which for me is always a fail, though that’s a house rule. It also means that harder DC’s, such as 15, are trivial, or even 20, they are still better than 50%. At lvl 5. This is what Expertise is for. Reliable Talent simply extends some of this to other skills that they’re proficient in but don’t have expertise. Basically, at lower levels, the Rogue can do this with a few skills. And at higher lvls, they can do it with more. This doesn’t solve anything.  Why would you erase the ability modifier?  That’s literally treating the ability score as if it were a 10 or 11. Literally, a Rogue with an 11 Str would have the exact same Athletics Check as a Barbarian with the Prodigy Feat granting Expertise in Athletics, and in actuality, someone WITHOUT expertise, but a 20 in the relevant stat, would have a higher check than the one with Expertise until lvl 17. That makes 0 sense to me. You can already have a Rogue with an 8 str take expertise in Athletics and become almost as good as people who are stronger, why are you going to penalize those who are actually stronger?  When two people of equal skill come together in a test of strength, the stronger one will win, as the equal technical skill cancels each other out. You’d need to explain this. They have this kind of mechanical for actual attacks, which takes a Feat, but how does this work with, say, lockpicking?  Take a -5 for...what?  Unlocking the lock?  Quietly, which isn’t even needed?  What about stealth?  You hide...EVEN BETTER!  It just doesn’t make sense.Thing is, Expertise is for making checks easier to pass. Feats are meant to allow you to do cool things, usually without checks. No one character can get Expertise in everything, so there will be plenty of things that challenge them.  Rogues get the most, with 4 (5 if they’re a human with the prodigy feat), but that just enhances their skill monkey usage. Expertise allows a character to shine in their very, very narrow field. It makes them important to the party. Trading expertise for what is essentially a Feat for every skill they have expertise in would either break the game, or be completely useless as the benefit is never used.</blockquote>

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