Make Pass without a Trace a less broken spell

[Tanarii]

From a powergaming perspective, every warrior should ideally have Stealth, Athletics or maybe Acrobatics (but usually Athletics), and Perception as proficiencies. From a RP perspective (or a challenge-seeking perspective) not every PC should be powergame-optimized, but tactically these skills have the greatest impact on combat.

That's a valid perspective, if everyone is optimizing for the absolute best combat first and foremost. If the majority of a game is going to be combat encounters and the majority of those are going to be an ambush in either direction, I'd probably strongly consider it even on a Dex 8 HA wearer, as well as the party having at least two casters to put PWT up as much as possible.

Ultimately though, the "logic" of the check is irrelevant because it is an abstraction. The rules for group checks exist as a way to eliminate the "one check to rule the all" style of play. Skill checks are an abstraction of what is happening in game. Simply allowing skill checks to correlate one to one with actual attempts by each character leads to situations where the entire group tries something always having super advantage or super disadvantage. That is not a fun, or realistic, no matter which way it goes.

On the one hand, you can use group checks to say that, no, everyone cannot roll for Arcana separately to determine what this magic circle does. Either you let the person who is best at it roll (potentially with advantage from the help action), or have everyone roll and do a group check. If you do the former, it represents the most learned of the group explaining what they think, and the group trusting in their expertise. If you do the latter, it represents represents the group discussing the topic together and coming to a consensus. Mechanically, this means that you don't just get super advantage by having more people. Narratively it means that success is the group agreeing on something that is correct, and failure means the group could not come to a consensus, or that what was agreed upon was incorrect. Sure, maybe one individual did have the correct idea, but were convinced otherwise by the group as a whole. But whichever way you go about things, it is still an abstraction of what is happening.

From a abstract perceptive, I get where you're coming from. I've definitely used Intelligence (Lore) checks exactly that way.

But also from a game balance perspective, I feel that the value of hiding as a group & surprise is strong enough that it's balanced around low skill characters being an intentional drag on the group, and larger groups being naturally worse at it. A reverse One Check to Rule Them All situation ... every check matters.