Skills should not go up with your level.

[Jester2028]

I love the d20 system and I love being trained or untrained in skills. As a DM I like the degrees of success or failure to be on a 1-20 scale, at all levels. When you start to level up and soon you’re adding 10 to a skill check, it makes the dice rolling less important. You get to level 15 and you’re adding 11 to an untrained skill? What’s the point of even having dice anymore. I don’t like having to think of things as a DM on a 1-30 or 1-40 scale.

My solution would be to keep the TEML at +1, +2, +3, +4. Have untrained skills on a -1, -2, -3, -4 scale. And allow feats that can boost skill checks and that’s it! That way the absolute highest you can roll, without a feat bonus, is 23 (since a natural 20 is, a natural 20). This will make each number between 1 and 20 much more meaningful.

Thoughts?

[Bardarok]

Having the dice become less important is the point. That's how the game simulates a character becoming better at something. As you level up DC 10 checks become easy and then trivial DC 30 checks go from impossible to hard to easy.

[Corwin Icewolf]

Exactly. In real life, people who get really good at stuff become less likely to fail.
That's why expert tightrope Walkers don't fall to their deaths 50 % or even 25 % of the time, why professional strongmen's backs don't give out very often when they try to lift something heavy, nor do they utterly fail to lift something they've lifted many times before 50 % of the time.
People who get good at stuff become more consistently good at those things.

[LordKailas]

3.0, 3.5 and even PF1 all have the same thing. When you hit level 10 if you've maxed out your skill in a class skill you are adding +10 to the die roll by virtue of your 10th level training alone. If you rolled a 20 the minimum value you got would be 30, but was probably a lot more then that.

This is to simulate that you've been training at the skill and have gotten better. Sure this means that some tasks might be trivial after a certain level but it makes sense. Swimming in a pool that's six feet deep is completely trivial to an olympic swimmer, but a total novice has a chance of drowning.