Quote Originally Posted by Zuras View Post
Making everything a windowed treadmill system means that every character interested in succeeding at their skill checks must become more specialized over time. Instead of a non specialist having a small chance to be useful, it drops to zero. Worse, even someone trained but not specialized will soon have no chance of success. I’d much rather have a bounded accuracy system that only specialists can break, or include special perks only available to specialists to mechanically reward their specialization, than represent excellence purely by ludicrously escalating numbers.
Or, you know, stop increasing DCs with level. Same tasks should always have the same difficulty. There doesn't need to be a treadmill and bounded accuracy is neither the only nor a particularly elegant method to avoid it.


Now, my issues with the D&D 3.5/Pathfinder style non-bounded skill numbers are based on the criticisms I’ve read from others, not personal experience, but I’ve found 5e’s system pretty resilient, and easy to get what I want from without too much pondering. If you want something hard but not impossible, where the experts will shine, simply setting a low DC check but applying disadvantage due to the circumstances works really well.
Every single version of D&D has an utterly horrible skill system. Yes, 3.x+Pf are bad with making DCs and giving meaning to those rising skill level. And that is without considering nonsense like "average humans have only one level and thus only 1-4 skill points". But 5E basically gave up and uses lolrandom for everything with the DM supposed to restrict rolling to cases where randomness makes sense. It's only slightly better than one of those cointoss systems.

Nearly every RPG system with a heavy skill systems does it better. Splittermond, TDE, SR (barely), Gurps, SIFRP ...