The runes are written in English.
This made me laugh really hard
Sadly, the elf only knows Common and Elven.
My bestie had a character who only had a +1 in Charisma, but this was the highest in the party, so she became the party face. And she never rolled lower than 19 total when making Charisma checks for that character. The dice clearly had plans.
Or when the awkward friend wants to play a bard and the butterfly plays a fighter with CHA as a dump stat, then becomes the face anyways because they love roleplaying and can manipulate the GM IRL
I was once GMing for that same bestie in a 3d6-based system. I told her to roll, then realised her stats weren't high enough for her to succeed, so told her not to. She gave me a look, picked up the dice, and rolled a crit. Out of SPITE. And this is 3d6, so it's a 1 in 216 chance.
She didn't need to manipulate me. Either I went along with it, or my dice would be forever cursed.
"Ok your dumbass character gets the genius idea to ask someone who knows more about runes to read them."
Sounds like a possibility for a really creative story moment. Maybe the comic book that character always carries around with them just so happened to use the same runes as their "secret language" and the author of that comic is some super nerd for that specific language.
I take this more as the character just guesses and somehow gets it right. Or at least close enough.
This reminds me of it's always sunny when Charlie, who is illiterate, realises he can read Irish gaelic because his childhood penpal, who turns out to be his father, wrote to him in Irish.
One thing we often do is we gate the ability to roll on a check through whether or not the skill is trained - for example in our games with lockpicking, you can only attempt to pick a lock if you have proficiency.
This prevents the situation where the character with years of training and practice in a specific niche skill beefs it, but someone with no idea what they're doing then tries and succeeds - we say some things are only possible to try if you know how.
Don't apply this house rule to everything, but it's worth considering, especially in games where your party can casually drop a +10 or a +15 onto any skill check through the right magic to force a success anyway.
one of my players once created character so dumb, he can barely speak. at one ocassion during an fight he asked to roll for intelligence (he traded most of it for strenght) and got nat20. Nobody could stand the dumb mountain of flesh, suddenly telling everyone strategy tips.
A nat20 isn't an automatic success on skill checks, but there shouldn't even be a roll for something that is outright impossible. Unless there's some plot reason why this otherwise mentally challenged character would suddenly become fluent and a top notch strategist out of the blue?
Oh hey, its the funny elf face comics but from another artist!
Is that The Obelisk?
"Umm...'mellon'?"
I can't believe nobody has mentioned it yet. The runes clearly say "Is this Loss?" It's written plain as day
Ah yes. They group hearing the language without understanding it. ESL (Elvish as Second Language) character.
Why not roll Luck?
if you're going to let dice determine probability, then use the right probability dice. d10's can be chained to make a number between _ and infinity if you have enough dice. need a number between 1 and 1000? use 3d10. first die is 1000's place, second die is 100's place, third die is 1's place.
My observation is that when push comes to shove, the one good at a thing absolutely cocks it, only for the worst at the thing to catch it in the best way possible.
DM: Decipher this thing. Roll for int.
WIZARD: 3.... that makes 7...
BARBARIAN: 19, that makes 17...
WIZARD: ಠಗಠ
DM: ಠ‿ಠPerhaps a good DM or table could create good narrative spins for this....
sneaky edit: replaced [lenny face]s with relevant emotes
