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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7191004" data-attributes="member: 996">Good, because there /really/ were.  There were meat-shields and band-aid clerics and trap-fodder rogues. Minor stroke of genius, choosing 'Role' as the formal label when writing for the Hallowed First ROLEplaying Game, though.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  Hi, welcome to Roleplaying!  First step, choose a Role!  ("hrmm makes sense...") I'd say they were narrower in some ways.  The band-aid cleric ('healer') was narrower than the "Iconic Cleric" was narrower than the 'Leader Role,' most notably.  Then again CoDzilla was much broader in effectiveness than the "Iconic Cleric," so we might swap the last two.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Roles are very nice for new/casual players, they streamline putting together a basically functional party.  A little more 'advanced' or merely more concept-/story- driven table, and they can be ignored, optimized against-type, and generally played with. DC is relative to bonus.  In concept, 5e DCs go up to 35, and bonuses up to about +17 or so.  So an Expert (with Expertise) can hail-Mary the 'virtually impossible,' on a natural 18, but no one else need apply.  Aside from those extremes, though, BA works by keeping the range of likely bonuses:  -1 to +17, from completely overwhelming the d20.  An incompetent rolling a 20 can get as good a result as an expert rolling a 2.  You're never entirely out of your league. What about the characters with +25 and higher?  No 'problems' with them?That was a problem in 3e, you could optimize very high skill bonuses, very quickly (IIRC, even a very basic, PH-only 'diplomancer' could have been +14 at 1st, +21 at 2nd, and kept going from there).  With ranks alone, you could get a +23 in a skill, before stat mods and items, but, no one could put a rank in every skill every level, so while some characters had +23 others had 0 - that overwhelmed the d20 (and usually it was overwhelmed long before that, thanks to magic items, stats, feats, and optimization in general - you could get triple-digit skill bonuses).  The 'expert' could beat the result of your natural 20 by a mile, on a natural 1, even if you weren't an incompetent, but a same-level adventurer. 4e solved that with a half-level bonus instead of ranks.  The 'trained' expert got a +5, and typically a high stat, while the untrained still got the half-level bonus, making chargen/level-up simpler as a minor bonus.  That 5 and the difference in stats wasn't enough to overwhlem the d20.  That and /level/ still could, of course, so you had the sense of advancement at very high level vs low, without creating incompetence in your fellow high-level characters.5e, of course, has solved it with BA. Of course, in 5e BA, you're never entirely into the next league, either, so there's a sense you're not really advancing much.  Whereas, with 'bigger numbers' of 3e & 4e, you got the sense that you were getting better every level, even if the challenges you faced were often getting harder, too.  The key, as a DM, is not to present too much conformity-to-level.  Call back a challenge from a few levels prior now and then, and let everyone realize how much they've advanced.</blockquote>

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