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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9288209" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Except that he sucks at stealth checks against level 1 enemies. He sucked at them even when the characters were first level. Now that they're 20th, he's effectively getting guaranteed failures--and has learned absolute bupkis if he were to go back and deal with weaker threats.That was not true in 4e, and the universality of the half-level bonus is precisely why. When the party is going out and doing things that are within or just beyond their comfort zone, his Stealth will be not great. (I would know, I have played such a paladin, though his name was Seth.) But if at, say, level 15 (analogous to 5e level 10), he were to need to go sneaking through areas populated with the kinds of threats he'd faced at level 1? He would be better at stealth than before. He would, in fact, have actually learned a thing or two. It wouldn't be enough to really make him all that good at it, a total bonus of +7 at level one is okay but not great, meaning he'd have solid chances to sneak past such things. (This, I must admit, I have not seen, but that only because my 4e games have been curtailed more than once by DMs having IRL issues that pulled them away from TTRPGing for the foreseeable future.)The explicit aim was to reduce the size and amount of bonuses characters could receive, so that the numbers would be lower (and thus easier to do math with) and progression more tightly controlled. A PC getting more than +25 by level 18 in 5e is equivalent to a 4e character having +50 by level 27, something even ultra-experts hyper-specialized in one and only one skill would struggle to achieve. A much more typical skill bonus for many characters would be...well, about equal to their character level (half from half-level bonus, the other half from training, ability score, items, etc.), so around 27. Meaning, for a 5e character, roughly Expertise with a +0 modifier or Proficiency with a +5 modifier, and nothing more.Hence, despite explicitly trying to curtail extreme bonuses and keep numbers within a neat, tidy, narrow range...bounded accuracy has actually not done all that much to bound accuracy. Instead, what it bound was off-label stuff. That stuff barely moves, and may even stay essentially flat across a character's career. Your weaknesses never get less weak, unless you radically refocus your character to address them, paying a steep price to do so. Meanwhile, your enemies get stronger; hence, instead of a treadmill, we have people straight-up losing a Red Queen's race.You probably wouldn't be surprised to know that I feel that 5e bonuses and effects suck to begin with (seriously, "competence" is now apparently succeeding about 15 percentage points more often!) So if AD&D is supposed to suck when treating 5e as one's baseline...Popularity isn't a design goal any more than sales are a design goal.You cannot point to a part of the design and say, "This is what causes popularity." Popularity necessarily is much later down the chain of cause and effect than the goals phase of game design. Designers certainly hope that their designs will be popular. They will, in all likelihood, ask players about how they liked various things. But popularity itself is not and cannot be a design goal.</blockquote>

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