Maybe add a TLDR to the post next time, im afraid not everyone will read it due to its length.
The way skill checks work out mechanically in your typical d20, including 5e D&D, is that by default a normal person on a normal difficulty check has somewhere near a 50/50 shot at making it. Task difficulty and character skill will move the bar a little bit, but guaranteed success are rare since ±2 from proficiency or whatever is ±10% chance. If you're good at something you'll succeed maybe 80% of the time, but you're still going to be at 50% for a difficult task. BG3 follows this in a straight-forward manner.
Not...really. What you want to do and how high the test is depends on alot of things. It depends on the difficulty of the task and how you approach it. The DM manual says the following about skill tests: A 5 is very easy, 10 is easy. 15 is moderate, 20 is hard, 25 is vrery hard and 30 is nearly impossible.
The DM manual even says that a DC test of 5 can be safely disregarded most of the times because of how trivial it is. And as a player I concur. They then say that just using 10, 15 and 20 can work just fine and honetsly ive only ever seen a DC 15 test once and nothing above that. Guess my DM's and myself arent sadistic enough *shrug*
That said I wouldnt want to see characters who are proficient in something automaticly pass them. That would make things completly irrelevant. And make rogues and bards insanely overpowerd.
That said, I agree on the fact that the tests atm are very frustrating. Even more so because failure is a 100% failure. Even in DOS 2 if you failed something you still got something out of it. A good voice line for your trouble or something, but at least something. It also rarely completly shut you out of dialogue as far I can renember. Which for example at Nettie the game does as soon as you fail once. I think thats also why we (or at least I, and I never did this before...) reload a save as soon as we fail something because failure is absolute and its all tied to a trivial dice roll that we dont feel in control over.
TLDR: Agree that rolls could be done better. In pnp DND you can roll with your failures and it writes a better story. In bg3 atm that isent the case. Failure is absolute and the player has little control over it, which doesent feel very dnd to me.
