Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 7893435" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Expertise is a substantial part of what these classes get. It is much of what they contribute to the party. Rogues, in particular, have pretty one note play outside of skills (I sneak attack. Next turn: I sneak attack), and it is the main time that Bards get the spotlight rather than being the person in the back buffing and debuffing for the glory of others. All well designed classes gets their time to shine and outclass the others.It only covers a limited number of skills, and a number of skills are mostly just relevant to the person who has them, such as the stealth that only the most eccentric Rogues will not be spending one of their expertise on. Until level five it is on average less effective than the guidance cantrip, and that can continue to be used on any skill rather than (eventually) four skills.In fourth and late 3rd tier it will get to the point where they almost can't fail a check for which they have expertise, and without a natural one rule will never fail DC 10 or 15 checks. But bear in mind game breaking rates of success are generally just a case of setting DCs too low. Some of the more game-breakable skills to have near automatic success would be persuasion and deception, but it really is not a huge problem to have the Bard be able to get a moderate discount with all but the most prickly merchants, or consistently talk their way past the town guard, or almost always make allies of npcs who could have just as easily become enemies. This still doesn't let them achieve anything unachievable, and if things achievable by a lucky die roll are going to break your game then there are bigger problems. It is totally reasonable for some npcs, by reason of belief, personality, or fear of their boss to be unpersuadable. You're not going to talk the Pope into quitting Catholicism even if you roll a 32.There is the danger that certain types of checks become boring, but this will depend on the personality of the player. Once again it is a key time to shine for these classes. If they don't enjoy being awesome at skills then they should probably be picking a different class.Also for most of the skills expertise really just adds realism as people in the real world who heavily develop certain types of skills (experts, if you will) are almost automatically going to succeed when they do anything of normal  or even fairly high difficulty with them. The real world has plenty of people who would almost never fail a performance check, and I've certainly had various professors who (separately) would have at least minimally passed almost any moderate to difficult history, religion, or nature check, and in a world of magic the same would be the case for Arcana. If acrobats could not be confident in the certainty of their success there would be no such thing as acrobats.</blockquote>

Verification