Quote Originally Posted by JellyPooga View Post
This here is a classic example of expectations colouring the Rogue in a worse light than they deserve.

Expertise raising the bar on what constitutes being good at a Skill absolutely should not make doubled proficiency the baseline available to all classes. Baseline Proficiency does that and your GM shouldn't be artificially raising that bar in an attempt to "challenge" the Rogue; they should be allowing the Rogue to be better than everyone else.

Martials doing no more than "just attack", meaning lack of agency, sounds more like a player and/or scenario issue. Just because there's no spell descriptions telling you what you can or can't do, doesn't mean you don't have agency.
I disagree; the d20 is too much of a factor for characters that are meant to be highly skilled in that skill. It results in high level characters with proficiency regularly failing at tasks that a level 1 character will succeed at with some regularity. It is too lolrandom and not enough strategic predicatability, which limits agency (rather than luck). Rogues bypass this with Expertise, and it works great - they just need a developed skill system in which to play. The problem is, Rogues having this alone (out of the martials) means all the other martials get to have no fun here. Rogues don't need to be the only ones reliably good with skills - they should bring different things to the table and let what should be a whole pillar be for every martial to play around in.

In addition, I would probably make it so casters have fewer skill proficiencies in the same way they have fewer weapon proficiencies - something to do with how much of their time going to learning how to wield magic detracting from more mundane practice. This way, the skill space can be something martials excel at in particular.