D&D 5th Edition XII: Peasant Militias Can Defeat Smartphones?

[Person_Man]

So what if a Rogue can stealth around goblins and orcs all day long? He invested a lot into stealth, why deny him the opportunity to use that? That does not mean he should be able to automatically stealth around dragons and beholders.

Have you ever DM'd a 3.5 game with a player optimized with Hide/Move Silently and Darkstalker? In my personal experience, it truly sucks for the DM and other players. If the PC basically has a cloaking device that can only be bypassed by a small sub-set of enemies, then:

• That player sets the terms for the entire game - he constantly has the spotlight because he's scouting ahead with little danger of being found while his non-hidden party members wait, he can pick and choose which encounters to fight in, he can retreat without danger of being followed, etc.
• And/or DM must insert creatures that can specifically defeat that PCs cloaking ability, even if they otherwise unbalance the game or don't fit into his campaign.

So it makes sense to me that there should be some maximum ceiling on any success rate for every challenging action. (And the DM should be given explicit guidance on how to adjudicate whether or not it is challenging, and thus requires a roll). Everything (including spells, special abilities, etc) that effects an enemy should require some kind of roll, and the math for those rolls need to be bounded in some way so that you can't break the math, and thus break the game.