D&D 5E Is Expertise too good?

[5ekyu]

On the general subject surrounding DC, approaches, needing 30s for rogues...

I follow the DMG recommendations on setting DC to easy, moderate, hard by training/proficiency, aptitude/ability from an either, both, none perspective chosen from either "what/what created the challenge or if itvis natural who/what i see it in my minds eye as being able to deal with it. On top of that i add rrsources as a factor.

So if i have an inn door locked... Intended to be secured... By an inkeeper who spent normal time, normal funds but was experienced at secured (say former burglar - proficient in b&e or retired sentry.) It would be 15 DC moderate to pick or to force.

There are a lot of approaches that could get around the door... Or thru the door without skill check - hacking it down with axe, setting it on fire to burn it to ashs, hacking thru floir in room above, gas form, teleports, etc.

Or one could try and get the key by various means, or copy the key, or maybe compell the person with the key...

But if it does come down to defeat the door itself... By skill to pick or force - the DC would be 15.

The character may gain advantage or disadvavtage (use crowbar, two of us try, etc) but it is the character's competence that is key, the character's knowledge of locks and doors, not the players.

So, i am not one that sets DC after hearing approach. I dont make finding something hidden in the throne easier if you say throne instead of room when you describe your search. The size of the areas being searched is already factored into the system by time and as far as our game time goes rewarding you for saying blank the throne, then blank the desk, then blank the wardrobe as opposed to blank the room and the furniture o me is putting way more on the way you phrase it as player and less on what the character is good or bad at.

So, yeah, that means at 15th level or 11th level the rogue may be able to beat dc no prob... Because that dc is set by campaign and setting, not the need to challenge the rogue... Just like how i font need to stop a fly spell from "beating" the jump challenge or revivify from making dead no so bad.

 

[CapnZapp]

Expertise seems to me to be the equivalent of the Fighter's Fighting Styles. Those are limited to +1 or +2. Yet Expertise gives up to +6.

Nah, it's just skills.

Skills are valued significantly lower than attacks in D&D.

If you run a non-standard campaign, where combat isn't the usual centerpiece, then feel free to change it though.

 

[5ekyu]

I avoid asking for a mechanic. I want a story.

In the case of climbing the cliff, the player needs to describe some specific effort. If the player is scanning for danger, what kind of danger?

I try to keep in mind the perspective of the character. Somethings are obvious. Other things are less so.

Passive skill checks reveal clues, but do not necessarily disclose everything. A successful passive perception that detects a possible avalanche might mean the DM says, ‘where you are walking, your footsteps sink into crumbly rock’. The location of a monster might reveal, you see what looks like scrapes across the soil (which are tracks the monster made while moving around). Or so on.

Everything translates into narrative.

i try and avoid the bold or giving it too much weight in my games for the following reasons:

1 - A player may know nothing about climbing or hills, or may know a ton about them and in this case basing any of my decisions on the player's expertise in knowing to ask for "any sign of toxic fungus from the roots?" or "any sign the roots and plants are really mostly dead and not sturdy?" or or any number of a thousand things. to whatever degree this is given weight and puts the onus on player knowledge and my knowledge of this "real world equivalence" then to the same degree off that character and the in-game reality.

2 - Some players are better at others in the actual expressing their statements of action than others - making it clear or sound logical and complete or reasonable - again puts player ahead of character in the "results".

3 - it can lead to or give the impression of need to "GM proofing" the discussion and play by working out very carefully and consistent statements not unlike how some try and "monkey paw proof" wishes. At the reverse, it opens the door for "really hinging on what was or wasn't said. Ye olde days of "you didn't say you looked up" are not fondly remembered and frankly, this very example "what kind of danger" really seems like if not in the same house as "you didn't look up" to be at least in the same zip code.

if a Gm asked me "what kind of danger?" or told me i needed to tell him, my response would likely be "the kind my adventurer would know about in this circumstance based on his experiences. I am a 50+ yo overweight IT specialist in a non-magical world... I doubt either of us knows as much as my character does about this in terms of details." if that wasn't good enough... then i am in the wrong game.

i am not saying these are all problems in your specific game or anything like that... but that kind of statement and that kind of approach is one i have seen produce problems along these lines and especially in the context of general statements on forums, i think they can oft run into being misunderstood.

i assume the degree of competence of the character and choices from the player to be enough for the system and game to run well and meet the expectations we all agreed on. the player's knowledge of or competence in the "task" or his ability to put together a convincing statement of effort need not factor into it.

 

[Yaarel]

if a Gm asked me "what kind of danger?"

Some dangers are obvious. Also passive skill checks mean players sometimes notice clues that they werent necessarily looking for.

In all, narrative determines the outcome. The ideal is for the players to feel like being there in the adventure, responding naturally to the surroundings, and deciding for themselves what they do.

The mechanics work best when they are ‘invisible’, loose, and never call attention to themselves.

 

[CubicsRube]

A popular houserule I have seen about Expertise is that it just confers Advantage rather than a flat bonus.

I like this ruling and could see myself attempt including it.

It makes sense that someone with expertise gets reliably better results. Sure a novice might luck into an answer every now and then, but experts consistently do well.

When i play tennis, sometimes a beginner will hit a great shot out of luck, but the next 20 will be crap. An intermediate has a much smoother range in the quality and type of their shots.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Interesting. I imagine in my case, because it doesn't create problems in the game, I don't have much of a care for how it affects bounded accuracy. I'm not much of a math guy. I don't care how elegant the formula is as long as it doesn't cause me any grief when I'm playing.

I define "auto-success" as an approach to a goal that has a certain outcome and therefore no roll. So that happens further upstream in the resolution process. In the case of someone that can tap the DC I call for due to Expertise (or any other reason), I guess I still think of that approach as having an uncertain outcome - I called for a check after all. The character then succeeds and it's essentially no different to me than if someone really did need to roll. Perhaps this mental parsing settles down any annoyance due to the niggling you mention.

I'm a design buff, largely because design incentivizes play. When design starts to distort incentives, I dislike that design. Expertise distorts incentives by being so attractive in the all-or-nothing skill arena. When it's a do or don't roll that can have big consequences (not seeing an ambush, tracking successfully, hiding from all the sentries, etc.) then the availability of such a distorting mechanic twists the incentives of play. For example, I have a ranger character in my current game and their player has dipped rogue just for expertise and the bonus action options because both of these things mean they can be a better wilderness warrior. That's just weird that it's the rogues who can be better at any skill than even the "smart" class and that rogues just run faster, every turn, than anyone else (high level monks excluded). If your concept has an aspect to be really good at a certain skill, then rogue (or bard) becomes highly incentivized regardless of the other aspects of your concept. Same with being fast -- rogue has abilities that strangely result in being able to run faster than anyone else. That kind of distorting pressure annoys me. I can easily deal with it in game -- rogues just do these things. But, from a design perspective, expertise shattered bounded accuracy, which is an annoying design choice, especially when the concept is already better done by both the advantage and the reliable skill rules. Expertise is just number inflation, and that's boring design especially in a system whose design goals include tamping down number inflation.

So, in play, whatever, I deal the game is fun and we all have a good time. When I put on my design hat, I hates expertise because it doesn't fit.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I avoid asking for a mechanic. I want a story.

In the case of climbing the cliff, the player needs to describe some specific effort. If the player is scanning for danger, what kind of danger?

I try to keep in mind the perspective of the character. Somethings are obvious. Other things are less so.

Passive skill checks reveal clues, but do not necessarily disclose everything. A successful passive perception that detects a possible avalanche might mean the DM says, ‘where you are walking, your footsteps sink into crumbly rock’. The location of a monster might reveal, you see what looks like scrapes across the soil (which are tracks the monster made while moving around). Or so on.

Everything translates into narrative.

Story is all well and good, but the players (at least my players) need the sense of peril that comes from the possibility that bad luck could make everything go pear shaped (and conversely, that good luck could enable the most ill-judged plan to succeed.)

 

[Eltab]

I picked up Expertise(Perception) for one character because I want to play a 'Scout' but personally I tend to be one-step-behind whatever just happened; I want the character to "have a sense" that something isn't right or something is about to happen.
Do you remember "Radar" O'Reilley, from M*A*S*H?

 

[77IM]

As I mention to Ovinomancer here, I wouldn't consider it an automatic success in the same way I would a task with a certain outcome. I would say the latter sits at the level of the fiction and that determination happens further upstream in the resolution process. The DM maintains his or her authority in that determination. I wouldn't consider an Expert "tapping" the DC any differently than someone rolling and meeting or exceeding the same DC. In fact, unless a player told me he or she taps the DC, I wouldn't even know it. I'm mostly oblivious to the players' character sheets anyway.

Oh, that's an interesting way to think about it.

For me: most characters don't have Expertise, so I don't think about it when setting the DC, and if a character busts out Expertise, it feels a little like they "cheated" somehow. Conversely, if I DO think about Expertise when setting DCs, then I have to expand my range of DCs from 10-20 up to 10-30. This leaves a lot of characters in the dust. Almost everyone has a small chance to hit DC 20; almost no one has a chance to hit DC 30.

Does that make sense? I feel like I'm not articulating this very well. But I think it addresses at least that part of the objections that some have and I don't. I could probably write a play script to show it if you think it would help.

Question: How do you set DCs?

Thinking about this more, I set DCs based on the expected range of PC modifiers, and nothing more. I don't have any notion of "realism" or any scale independent of the scale determined by the expected range of PC modifiers.

That scale is "supposed" to be -1 through +5 at 1st level, up to -1 through +11 at 20th level, with -1 through +9 as a healthy range at mid-levels. So when I say "DC 15" what I really mean is, "about a 55% chance for a 1st-level specialist to succeed, or an 85% chance for a 20th-level specialist to succeed, and a 25% chance for someone dump-statting to succeed." Expertise distorts this scale; by level 9, an Expert can get this up to 95% success, and by level 13 and up, it's 100%.

I mean do your players say "I want to make an Insight check..." or just roll unprompted? It's more of a side question, trying to see how people who object to Expertise play the game and see if there's any similarities. I find a lot dissimilar outcomes in terms of play experience can come from how much blurring there is between the DM and players' roles.

Neither. They just talk to the NPC, and if I think their character would detect something their player doesn't, I tell them to roll Insight. The players just do stuff, and I tell them what happens, and the dice are there to help me determine outcomes with less effort and less boring predictability.

Of the three approaches described in the DMG (pages 236-237) - Rolling With It, Ignoring the Dice, or The Middle Path - which would you say best describes your game? I can spell them out briefly if you aren't familiar with this section.

The Middle Path. My typical procedure starts with Ignoring the Dice, but once there's substantial room for unexpected outcomes, I switch to Rolling With It. The "substantial" criteria is important; I don't usually roll if there's only like a 5-10% chance of something unexpected happening. I think I dislike Expertise because it eliminates some unexpected outcomes, by putting them back in the 5% or even 0% range.

You say "auto-failure" is worse. Can you explain how that might happen? I can see the "auto-success" bit but have gotten around that mentally. Not sure about "auto-failure."

It happens more in other RPGs than in 5E.

But an example in 5E might be an NPC with Perception Expertise and a Passive Perception of 22. Suddenly the mid-level rogue with Stealth Expertise has a chance of sneaking past. But if the whole party wants to slip past, then they are SOL, because it's literally impossible for the clumsy paladin to succeed, even with advantage! Now a clever party can still use magic to make it past (guidance, bardic inspiration, etc.) but they have to know in advance what they are facing, and it's still super not gonna happen. Conversely, without Expertise, the NPC might have a PP of 18. That's still devilishly difficult, but it's possible straight-up, and if they apply all the magic, it might even be likely. Group checks (where only half the party needs to succeed) make this particular situation better, but it's still a little problematic.

Let me turn this around: What if Experties tripled your proficiency? quadrupled? What if it were a flat +10, right from first level? Where do you draw the line? In the first 5E playtest, there was no proficiency; the math was totally flat between characters, and they all felt kinda samey. In 3E, it wasn't hard to get a 20-point difference between characters by mid-level, and that was demonstrably un-fun for lots of people.

One of the things I love about 5E was that it tightened up the quantitative difference between characters in order to focus on the qualitative, and Expertise works against that. I understand the need to make rogues better at skills than everyone else. I just think they should have found some non-success-rate-based way to do it.

 

[Satyrn]

I definitely do not "want the player to articulate the mechanics that will be in play." I'm not sure how you got that impression.

Can I explain how? It looks obvious to me.

I believe that [MENTION=58172]Yaarel[/MENTION] is working under the impression that his player is suggesting the character's approach is "by reading the guard's demeanour" or some such. Because that implied approach seems obvious to him, I think he's reading your posts as though it's obvious to you, which means that when you talk about needing an approach, you must mean something more than the implied "by reading the guard's demeanour."

In trying to figure out what that something more is, he's guessing you want the player to reference the mechanics to some degree because the difference between what you and Yaarel are each actually saying is so small.

Cause really all you're saying is 'I want the player to explicitly say "by reading the guard's demeanour" while he's okay with the implied declaration.