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Message: <blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 7372839" data-attributes="member: 12377">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.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%.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.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.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.</blockquote>

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