In 5e a nat 1 isn't an autofail for skill checks or saves, only for attacks.
Okay, glad to hear. Based on the videos I'd seen of people playing 5E, I wasn't entirely sure. (However, see below.)
Unfortunately, PF2E
did introduce a critfail for skills and do away with Taking 10, so my complaint there still stands.
This is a houserule. In 3e and derivatives a skill roll doesn't autofail on 1. In fact, unless it's specifically steated that something unusual happens, a 1 on the dice is just treated as that.
I am aware that skills don't autofail on 1 in 3E, although I wasn't sure if that was still the case in 5E until just now. However, even if a 1 isn't an autofail, given that a 1st level character probably can't have a bonus higher than +6, you're still going to fail a DC 10 "Easy" check on a 1, or for that matter, on a 2 or a 3. So that's a trained person with exceptional natural ability failing "easy" tasks 15% of the time. And since even a 20th level character can't have a bonus higher than +11 (excluding Expertise), the same will be true for DC 15 "Medium" tasks for them. So change the average lifespan of that trapeze artist from three weeks to one week.
Hence the existence of the "take 10" rule. If you're not in danger or distracted or otherwise have something interfering, you can be assumed to be able to accomplish tasks at your average level of ability.
Not to a reasonable DM, they won't. Their range of inputs is smaller - "is this a task that carries noteworthy risk for this character, yes/no" - but that's also an advantage, if you're trying to lessen their mechanical workload. (It does replace that with a descriptive input, though.)
Most modern game systems have an implicit or explicit rule that you shouldn't role for things of no importance: you don't have to roll your driving skill to drive to the store unless something crazy happens on the way.
However, in this case, you're actually creating
a lot more workload on the DM, because rather than having a DC to determine what a PC is capable of doing, they have to make a judgment call about every single action about whether it's worth rolling for or not. And unless whether or not a character has training in the task in question isn't being taken into consideration, they have to make that judgment
separately for each character. And again, once you've made the decision that something worth rolling, there's no ability to adjust for how difficult the task is or how experienced the character is. Ability score increases are limited in number and cost feats, as I understand it.
*Vanilla 5E, the difference between "trained" and "untrained" skills has, well, a 1-in-10 chance of being useful at level one, scaling up to a 3-in-10 at level 17+.
*More than that, if we read the check result as a "how well did you do" guide, which I think most people do intuitively, there's a pretty big chance for a 20th level Strength 20 Fighter with proficiency in Athletics to roll low and look distinctly unimpressive. (Even without critfails, people do tend to look at a 10 as 'about average'.)
*Switching Proficiency to Advantage solves both of those issues.
Those first two points, if anything, seem like pretty strong arguments that proficiency bonuses in 5E are
too small. Reducing them even further is going to make that problem worse, not better.
Advantage is nice in that it reduced the odds of a low roll screwing you over, but it doesn't actually increase the average result by that much (from 10.5 to 13.825) and it doesn't increase the maximum result at all. Also, since you can't get advantage multiple times, having proficiency becomes meaningless if there's advantageous circumstances that would let everyone roll twice anyway. Advantage is a great protection against bad luck, but it doesn't obviate the need for bonuses. (Keep in mind that abilities that amounted to "always roll twice and take the better result in this skill" first appeared in Saga Edition in 2007, so I've had more than twelve years to observe how this mechanic works in play.)
The real issue is that 5E reduced the bonuses that characters got for being trained, but left the skill DCs the same, so everyone became substantially less capable of succeeding at basic tasks. Perhaps instead of taking away what few bonuses they have, you should try reducing all the skill DCs by 5 so that the odds of success are improved.
