Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
DMing takes effort. That is not a shock.
As the number of powerful narrative-impacting tools increases, the number of potential issues the DM has to account for increases, and the difficulty of balancing encounters and apportioning loot increases. In my own experience and in the experience of other DMs I've talked to, this is a serious factor in preparing notes and a pretty common cause for not being able to get things together for a session.

It's not the only reason a session falls apart, but at least IME I still play with everyone I ran my first 5e campaign with. They're all still in the area and still playing and they all still get along with me. But we're on our third campaign together because the earlier campaigns had gotten too exhausting for me so I gave them a proper ending.
Quote Originally Posted by Sindeloke View Post
I think I'd rather do it as "you can choose X number of skill powers" where X is determined by your class, and is higher for non-casters. I'm not really fussed if a cleric can reach the same heights of shenanigans with Religion or a wizard with Arcane as a fighter or rogue with those same skills. Or, honestly, even if a wizard with the thief or urchin background wants to go hard into Stealth. As long as the flippy gymnast Acrobatics specialized warlock is only specialized in Acrobatics and still has to spend invocations and spell slots on Diplomacy, while the dexadin can have both through skills and the barbarian war leader can have both through skills and Survival skill powers on top of that, it still feels like a fair system to me.
I mostly just feel like the skill system isn't balanced enough to be used for a 'powers' system like this. Other than maybe having proficiency being a prereq for taking a power.