RPGMemes

I feel like this doesn't take two things into account.

First is what the group wants. While that work for a bunch, and does for my Tuesday game, it wouldn't for the games that I've run in the past and personally doesn't work for me either. A lot of people actually like rolling for stuff like that. It adds some element of flavor on how good or bad it can go. While you succeeding might be all but guaranteed, the numbers can impact a lot. That and some of us just like using the clicky math rocks we've spent a disgusting amount of money on.

The other thing is that it still ignores the core problem of a 5% chance of failure of something that you are proficient or an expert in. An expert having a 5% chance of not just failure but critical failure isn't something that I really jive with. Can you imagine if those margins were acceptable in our reality? Can you imagine if there was a 5% chance that during a lecture on something that they've been studying all their life, a medical doctor gives genuinely dangerous advice to his students? Sure. Accidents happen. That has happened in the past but if that happened 5% of the time with every expert on the planet... well things would look very different. The entire term expert would probably have a different definition as that perpetual 5% chance would really change your opinion on how much you trust someone when they have the same chance of catastrophic failure as Joe from the market.