Because it is true in most cases: making balanced house rules is a lot of work that often does not pay of... or worse, has a negative impact on the game...
if it pays of, it was usually ignoring RAW instead of adding something to that...
You know, put me in the camp you like... i happily ignore RAW if it is necessary, but I see no necessarity here in this case...
If you'll look at my sig, you'll see two houserules that I'm quite confident in asserting are simpler, more fun,
and more balanced than raw. Not all house rules achieve that, but I've never in my entire experience of D&D ever regretted introducing a houserule.
Not that I usually do so, but I'm the kind of person who might well spreadsheet various options on level up. I've written simulators for 3.5 era combat to balance ranger's dual wielding with barbarian's power attacking (the ranger needed quite a bump), and lots of smaller scenario's in 4e. My thesis is in statistical machine learning, and I play with lots of numbers in lots of ways all the time - I don't mind, I
like that! But a numerical system is interesting when it's complex (in the sense of chaos theory, or balance and not imaginary numbers) - and it's boring when there's an obvious "right" answer.
It's a very reasonable to stick with RAW if you don't want to take the effort to analyze something, and furthermore, D&D isn't just numbers; gameplay is a significant factor.
Nobody's going to blame you for sticking with RAW. But the risk of handing out free expertise is negligible (at worst it represents a bonus feat), but doing so ensures that intra-party balance is approved as the power difference between the power gamers with expertise and the special flowers without it shrinks.
And you don't need to take it from the mouth of a self-important forum poster (i.e., me...) - I believe many home games by WotC staff use this or a similar house rule as well.
To stress: this isn't forcing everyone to be a powergamer, and this isn't going to boost the powergamers to even more absurd heights since it's precisely the
unoptimized characters that benefit most. Boosting low attack bonuses matters more than boosting high bonuses, and what
really matters most is intra-party balance.
@
eamon : and what do you do with the hunter, who gets expertise for free?
Depends on your solution. The easiest and most reasonable is just to instead grant them a bonus feat of their choice. In practice you're giving others an extra feat too, after all.
look, i am not totally opposed to give out expertise for free... I would even give out 2 different expertise feats for different classes, maybe a fighter would gain a third...
but If someone honestly tells me he rather had an extra skill point, I would not want to tell him "no: skills are fine and well, but you know, this is D&D and D&D is about combat only..."
If somebody wanted that, I'd be so inclined too - it's a cooperative game, after all. I would tell them that I'd prefer them not to do that however - you can't choose to give up the half-level bonus to be the arch-dukes favorite son, either (I'm trying to say you can't trade out-of-combat favors for in-combat power or vice-versa), and they're making the DM's life harder by doing so. In practice, this kind of this never comes to a head in my experience, so there's no point in discussing hypotheticals here. I'd offer free expertise, and if maybe possibly somebody wants to trade that for something else - well, that depends on the situation.
Again, this freebie is particularly important for underpowered PC's, so you really don't
want people trading this away for something else. Tell em it's a math fix, not intended as a bonus ability, and they
should keep it.
If I get the feeling, that everyone should get that freebie some time in his career, ok... maybe I would integrate it into the story... but at level 1 I currently see no reasons to make gifts...
Many people do it at level 5. Doing it at level 1 might be considered cleaner or simpler (get it over with, already!), but I certainly don't care either way.
