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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7476963" data-attributes="member: 6775031">Two reasons, one in-game and one out-of-game:The in-game reason is diminishing returns for effort. It's the same reason why it takes more experience to gain a level when you're level 15 than when you're level 3. The wizard, already being far behind the curve in terms of martial prowess, is still picking up the easy tricks that the fighter mastered a long time ago. The fighter is learning super complicated stuff that takes a lot of effort to master. That's why they manage to advance at the same rate, in spite of the wizard putting in less-rigorous training.The out-of-game reason is that disparate advancement rates are unsustainable over any meaningful period. If the specialist succeeds 70% of the time in their area of expertise and a chump succeeds 40% of the time (at low levels), then failing to synchronize their advancement rates will quickly get to a point where the specialist is succeeding too often or the chump is succeeding too rarely. (If the fighter hits much more than 70% of the time, then it's boring and predictable. If the wizard has much less than a 40% chance to hit, in the rare situation where they might want to, then there's no point in even rolling.) You can see this effect if you look at third edition, where wizards quickly reach the point of "don't bother rolling" when it comes to their attack rolls, and fighters only care about their attack bonus because it limits how much they can pour into Power Attack. Fourth edition, while not perfect by any means, still managed to fix that problem.I'm not sure which option you're thinking about, in this scenario. Third edition was notorious for its number inflation, to the point where nobody had a chance at anything unless they had hyper-focused on that one thing. There was no point in throwing three or four points into Disable Device, because a +7 is meaningless when the rogue has +27 and the DC is 40. Splitting your skill ranks wasn't a real option; it was a trap*.*Famously, the designers are actually on-record as having admitted that they intentionally filled the game full of trap options, in order to reward system mastery for players who learned which options to avoid.</blockquote>

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