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I am the DM for a campaign and play with the following house rules:

  1. When gaining proficiency in any skill (during character creation, taking the Skilled feat, etc.), you may choose a skill more than once. Your proficiency bonus for that skill is the number of times that skill has been chosen times your base proficiency bonus.

  2. When you gain proficiency in multiple skills at the same time, the skills chosen must all be distinct.

  3. Any feat that allows a player to "double" their proficiency bonus for a skill instead allows the player to mark one additional level of proficiency in the given skill (e.g. Expertise).

Example of stacking proficiencies

Create a very sneaky and acrobatic Kenku Rogue.

Through Kenku Training, choose to gain proficiency in Acrobatics and Stealth. Rule (2) prevents me from choosing Acrobatics and Acrobatics. Through the Rogue features, choose to gain proficiency in Acrobatics and Stealth (and any two others) and Expertise in Acrobatics and Stealth. From the Criminal background, gain proficiency in Stealth.

At level 1, the character's base proficiency bonus is +2. The player has selected Acrobatics three times, and stealth four times. The new proficiency bonus to Acrobatics is +6 and to stealth is +8.

Question

In RPG.SE questions such as this or this, it is clear that stacking proficiency bonuses should be avoided and is "insanely OP."
Why?
I see a trade-off here where a character could be (unreasonably) skilled at one or two things, but isn't very good at anything else.

Why is allowing players to stack their skill proficiency bonus considered to be overpowered?

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Santana Afton
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    re: the number of downvotes, I would love some feedback on what about this post is poorly researched, unclear, or not useful. – Santana Afton Oct 03 '18 at 18:53
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    I did not downvote, but we also don't require explanations. For you, it makes it hard to understand what's bad about your question, but I'd try and not worry about it. You've got a question, you're getting answers. If the answers are helpful to you, then that's a win. It's hard not to care about a downvote, but it's not a personal attack. The important thing is if you get an answer to your question. – NotArch Oct 03 '18 at 18:58
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    I didn't down-vote the question, but in the beginning you say you're the DM, but then you're talking about character creation, it's not completely clear if you're talking from a DM's or a player's POV. – Jack Oct 03 '18 at 19:03
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    @NautArch They aren't required, but they're often helpful in teaching. And a lot of the time people do comment their reason. – Jason_c_o Oct 03 '18 at 19:06
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    If you are the DM and have been a running campaign with players using this system, I'd very much suggest that you put up an answer with how it's worked for you. At the moment, you are the best person to say if it's balanced because you're using it :) And self-answering questions, especially with table experience, is accepted and encouraged. You can then compare your real-world results with the other answers. – NotArch Oct 03 '18 at 19:13
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    @NautArch you don't have to try everything to see if it is broken. Playtest is for the not obviously broken things. I am pretty sure WotC did not playtest Wizards with Heavy Armor and d12 for HD. – András Oct 03 '18 at 19:34
  • @András True, but they've got relevant and related experience. Hearing how it's worked from them as an answer would be helpful for all of us. If they've been using it and haven't seen problems, that's good for us to know. – NotArch Oct 03 '18 at 19:36
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    @NautArch Thanks for the feedback. I'm coming up on my third session using this system, so I may answer this question with my observations once as there are some of substance. – Santana Afton Oct 03 '18 at 20:32
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    Running the numbers for only level 1 isn't good - at level 20 with 4x proficiency it would be +24 without any stat or dice bonus - what's even the point of rolling at that point? – user2813274 Oct 04 '18 at 01:14
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    First I downvoted, the houserule was so very stupidly broken. However, asking why and how it is broken is a valid question, so I finally upvoted it. – András Oct 04 '18 at 07:09
  • By RAW you cannot stack Expertise you can't go higher than double proficiency. You are trying to solve a problem that does not exist.https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/87593/do-bard-and-rogue-expertise-stack – John Oct 25 '18 at 14:58

2 Answers2

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It leads to "All or Nothing" skill development

This is going to cause exactly the problem that the 'bounded accuracy' philosophy of 5th edition was designed to address: All skill checks become either trivially easy for experts, or impossible for everyone else.

That is to say, the DM either sets skill DCs low enough for everyone to have a fair shot at making it, in which case the expert almost can't fail (and in that case, why would the non-experts even try?), or the DM sets the DCs high enough for the expert to be challenged, in which case everyone else can't possibly do it (so again, why even roll?).

This leads inevitably to a situation where there isn't much point to basic proficiency; everyone wants to dump all their advancement into a few skills in order to be "the one" for those specific skills, and everyone else avoids those skills like the plague because they know they can't be good at it.

Yes, your idea would allow characters to become more highly specialized -- but that actually isn't a desirable outcome. It isn't fun for one character to be the God Of Investigation while everyone else has to just wait for that one character to handle all the Investigation rolls. Maybe that one guy gets a moment of power-fantasy gloating -- "Ha, nothing escapes my eye!" -- but the rest of the table is effectively being told, "You cannot contribute in this situation." And that's not fun at all.

As a side problem, your concept virtually removes the role of ability scores in being good at a skill. At some point (probably around level 10), the value of the trained skill bonus completely overshadows the ability score's contribution, to the point that it almost doesn't matter if your character is agile or not, charismatic or not, all that matters is what skills you trained up.

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Darth Pseudonym
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    And skills are no equally useful. Perception comes up in every session, but I have yet to roll for Animal Handling, after more than a 100 sessions – András Oct 03 '18 at 19:32
  • @András Well, a DM could easily jack up the difficulty of Intimidate and Perception while leaving Handle Animal checks relatively easy, since nobody is going to bother going all-in on that one. But yes, the highly variable value of skills does play into it somewhat. – Darth Pseudonym Oct 03 '18 at 19:47
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    Can't +1 this answer enough. Not only is it OP to stack proficiencies so much, it is contrary to the core design tenet of D&D5e! – R. Barrett Oct 04 '18 at 20:03
  • @R.Barrett I'd argue that's it's only OP because it's contrary to the design. – Captain Man Oct 05 '18 at 14:39
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    @CaptainMan: Virtually everyone who played DnD 3.5 would disagree with you. Especially with respect to 'Hide'. – Mooing Duck Oct 05 '18 at 16:15
  • @MooingDuck 3.5 didn't design around bounded accuracy. – Captain Man Oct 05 '18 at 16:23
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    @CaptainMan: And that's exactly why I mentioned it. 3.5 didn't design around bounded accuracy, and skill stacking was still a huge problem, for the reasons mentioned in this post. – Mooing Duck Oct 05 '18 at 16:59
  • @MooingDuck I'm with you now. – Captain Man Oct 05 '18 at 17:04
  • That last paragraph is a matter of opinion - personally speaking, I prefer the "aesthetics" of "intense training and mastery of a skill beats natural talent", but YMMV. – Errorsatz Apr 16 '20 at 00:18
  • It's a matter of fact that this rule would virtually remove the role of natural talent in being good at a skill. Whether that is a desirable outcome or not, is opinion. But the devs called that out as a specific problem with 3.*, so from a developer rationale point of view, it's a problem. – Darth Pseudonym Apr 16 '20 at 19:32
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Stealing thunder from classes who get expertise

Gaining expertise is a class feature for some - to give that out for 'free' to others reduces that value of that feature and it may be un-fun for those who chose them.

Whether or not it's OP is going to be very table dependent, but the bigger concern for me is taking away a feature given only to some and making it available to all.

Opposed Skill Contests become unbalanced

An area where this may become a legitimate balance concern is with regard to the opposed skill contest. In these cases, the classes (see above) that wouldn't ordinarily have expertise all of a sudden become a lot more powerful in these cases (grapples, etc.) - especially considering monsters don't have an explanation of how they chose their ability proficiencies or an opportunity to create expertise when they normally don't have it like the PCs would.

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