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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9505775" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I have a character with the Healer Feat in a game.  They used to be an army Medic (though they are actually a Wizard) and I took proficiency in Medicine.I've made all of one Medicine check in the time it took to reach level 9 (which I almost failed because Medicine is a Wisdom skill for reasons, lol) to identify what could have caused injuries to a corpse, to get a clue about an upcoming encounter.The book only has one use for Medicine (DC 10 to stabilize) and I've never had to roll it to heal anybody as it's not a requirement for using what the other players call my "magic duct tape".  The reason is, the book gives no examples for what Medicine does or how to use it, and so the player and the DM have to negotiate, using what little they know about real-world medicine, and what the medical knowledge of the sczhizo-tech pseudo-medieval setting would be like.There's lots of skills that fall into this trap as well.  And some that are suspiciously lacking- I still keep forgetting that Engineering isn't a thing, lol!Now I griped about this for some time, but I've come around to understanding why this is the way that it is- each setting has to define what it's skills do.The Arcana check made by a Magewright in the City of Sharn might grant very different knowledge than one made by a groundling Wizard who finds himself aboard a Spelljammer for the first time!Or as in my Medicine example, hard-coding the effects of the skill makes assumptions about the level of medical knowledge a given campaign might have.  It could be the difference between a discussion of an imbalance in one's humours, keeping a jar of leeches handy, making regular trips to the forest for healing herbs, being able to perform crude surgeries, up to knowing what bacteria are!There are a host of illnesses we know about today that people in say, the 1400s (about the time the bastard sword was invented, according to <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/technology-in-d-d-the-irl-timeline-and-pausing-it.686204/" target="_blank">Cadence</a>).  A simple line like "DC 15: remove a disease effect" could have major implications for an individual D&D setting or adventure.Now me personally, I'd rather have that information to be in the PHB, to use, modify, or discard as needed, but that would take up a lot of space, and maybe not every group would appreciate it.  And I think not having these sorts of reference points makes it hard to adjudicate what the DC's for certain checks should be.  Which makes it equally hard to say what the actual impact of Expertise is.  Is someone who can, at level 7, be unable to fail to make a DC 20 check in (insert skill here) a luminary in their field?  Are they capable of going beyond the bounds of what is known and expand what is known in the campaign setting?  Take Acrobatics- what's the DC for Simone Biles to perform a double back salto tucked with a triple twist?  25?  30?In 3e, because the DC's of many checks were known, some people attempted to reverse engineer stats for real-world luminaries, saying that no one on Earth is likely higher than level 5!Which to them, justified level 6 and higher characters being able to do impossible feats (which led up to things like <a href="https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/skills.htm#balance" target="_blank">a DC 20 Acrobatics check to balance on a cloud</a>).  Of course, as the many "Martial v Magical" threads on this very board show, there are people who absolutely do and absolutely do not want this sort of thing in their D&D games!So we have this muddy "system" of calling for checks if the outcome is in doubt, at an often arbitrary DC, and little way of knowing what the numbers mean, which makes discussing what the numbers should be, and whether or not they ought be more "bounded" kind of hard to determine.I think of my AD&D DM, who loves ability checks and the rather slipshod Non-Weapon Proficiency system, who would ask for checks made at + or - x (I remember once he told me to make a check at 50% ability!) based on circumstances, and ascribes almost mythical qualities to the roll of a natural 1 on a check, lol.  He would define how good someone is by how many slots they had devoted to a proficiency, and how good the result is by how low they rolled (strangely, the ability score itself, the prime mover of the check, was secondary- apparently he's a firm believe in experience trumping talent).I wonder what he'd say if a character with the ability of a 7th level Rogue were to manifest in his campaign.  "See, he effectively has 3 extra levels of proficiency and any roll above 10 would be a 10!"What an ability or skill check is, in a given D&D game, and what it represents, can vary from table to table.  As numbers inflate, those with lower numbers can be marginalized.  5e did away with "+2 masterwork tools" and "+5 competence bonus" items, but then gave an equal benefit to some characters and not others.I think that's a problem, but maybe I just don't know how to 5e.</blockquote>

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