Quote Originally Posted by Sindeloke View Post
I assume it comes from the game itself, which has always put forward the exact premise that "skills are how non-magical characters do the things that magical characters do with spells."
Is it? I'll grant that there's some overlap, because spells are allowed to do anything and anything skills do is by definition a thing, but I don't think I've ever seen any version of the game present the role of skills as "skills are supposed to be where the Rogue's answer to things like teleport, major creation, planar binding, genesis, and scrying come from". Mostly the game seems to just sort of ignore the question of where the Rogue's answer to those things is meant to come from, leading some people to infer that maybe they could come out of skills.

The 3.5 rogue splatbook introduced the exact concept of "enough ranks in Balance to balance on clouds."
Sure, but that worked extremely poorly. Did you ever see a Rogue use their Balance check to fly? The good version of "balance on the clouds" was balance on the sky, which was an ability that was separate from the skill system and just allowed you to balance on the sky directly.

In a system with strongly themed classes and strongly themed backgrouds stapled further onto it, do we need an elaborate skill system to say "this person is proficient in diplomacy" when you can instead just go "obviously a rogue with a merchant background is good at bribes, add your proficiency bonus to your Cha check", or "this person isn't proficient in water vehicles" when instead you can just go "you're a blacksmith who's never been outside the light-polluted big city in your life, you do not add proficiency to your Int check to navigate by the stars"?
What you are describing is a skill system. It's just one where skills are bought in large, homogenous packages and adjudicated with a hefty helping of arguing with your DM. I find that less than appealing for obvious reasons.

If you're doing that without magic, you're doing it either by being Batman, who has always conveniently studied exactly the obscure text that would have forced him to learn this language, or by being Reed Richards, who is so impossibly smart that he figured out how to translate it just by Knowing How Language Works or building a translator out of his pocket calculator in five minutes or something.
Or you do it by Daniel Jackson, who lives in a universe where the dead languages in ancient tombs are related enough to one another that you can reasonably expect a guy who studied Ancient Egypt to be able to get the gist of what they mean. Or perhaps the runes are a magical equivalent to wiring and follow consistent rules, such that a skilled expert can make inferences about the behavior of the system with sufficient study.

Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
Why do spellcasters have spell slots? Why do bards have inspiration dice? Why does any class have any game mechanic?
But again, the suggestion is that it not be a class mechanic. The suggestion, as it is being presented, is that you have this thing that is part of the skill system that classes get managed access to in order to make up for the disparities in their class kits. How is that not just an excessively complicated set of epicycles layered on top of "write some class abilities for Barbarians that are good"? What is the substantive benefit for declaring that "climb a tree" and "climb to the heavens" are meaningfully part of the same system?

The skill system is simply a convenient already existing game mechanic that is understood how it works to demonstrate a means to show warriors doing fantastic things.
But the proposal seems to be for something that works differently from the existing skill system. The skill system is "you have a bonus that grows as you advance and use it to make checks". If you add "and also when that bonus hits specific thresholds, you get bonus powers", you aren't benefitting from an existing game mechanic. You are adding a new one.

Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
People don't play high level because they start at level one and real life interference ends the gaming group before or just about when those high levels are reached.
That's a big one too. I suspect if you mathed it out, there'd be relatively little correlation between how long campaigns lasted and what level they started at. If anything, I'd expect starting at a higher level to weakly correlate with lasting longer, because I'd expect the people who start at mid or high levels to mostly be established groups that are less likely to fall apart after a couple sessions. I mean, really, if a campaign doesn't get to 20th level, it seems a bit silly to blame that on whatever flaws you see in 20th level play. They didn't get there!

However, sometimes "too powerful" isn't really "too powerful".
Power is a really complicated consideration that tends to get boiled down to "I don't like, pls nerf". Reasonably often, what is described as "over powered" is simply a necessary component of the game that should be made easier to access, or the only appropriately-powerful option in a sea of mediocrity. This is especially true when people conflate "this class is over/under tuned" with "the way this class works is bad".