Skill checks
Skill checks
(in D&D at least)
81 comments
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Fuck you, Im dm so I get to pick what does and doesnt crit >:(
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Exactly. Why not make them crit? It's going to be up to the DM anyway to define what a "critical success" means on a skill check. There's no hard rule like the extra damage that comes with crit successes on attacks. The DM gets to choose what a critical success on a skill check actually produces. The DM can easily just make sure the crit success isn't game breaking.
Your players are in an audience with the king. The bard tries to be funny and tries to convince the king to give him his crown and hand the kingdom over to him. Actually making the bard the new king would break the game. But maybe a critical fail means the bard gets sent to the dungeon to be tortured for daring to make such a request. A critical success means the king will grant the bard one "wish," ie, any reasonable single reasonable request that is within the king's power.
The whole situation is fully in the DM's power.
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The problem with DND¹ is that it's a wargame cosplaying as a role playing game.
We're not recreating historical battles. Let the players (and the DM) have fun.
1.— It boggles the mind that one of the early failed experiments at making role playing games (by slightly modifying the rules of pre-existing wargames) is still somehow the standard.
Sure, it was one of the main inspirations for the genre... but there's a good reason we're not still driving Ford Model Ts.
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D&D today is almost an unrecognizable game from its first incarnation in the 70's, though. I'm not really seeing the parallels to war games other than the fact that you have the option of using a battle map in combat, which is hardly unique to D&D.
To borrow your analogy, no one drives the Model T today, but cars still have 4 tires and a steering wheel.
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It's a game designed around math, combat, and dungeon crawling, not around roleplaying.
The objective isn't to have fun roleplaying, but to roll the right numbers to maximise damage to the enemy. Any real fun comes from ignoring the rules and homebrewing.
The car might have gotten a few coats of paint over the years and maybe more ergonomic seats, but it's still the same old chassis and engine underneath.
There are many games built around the concept of getting the players to have fun roleplaying, but DND has never been one of them, and if it ever became one it'd no longer be DND.
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They do if the DM says they do, y'all get way too hard for the rules as written.
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Yeah, the people that do rules as written, or follow a book for a campaign to the letter, to hard often end up taking the fun out of it.
My first ever campaign I was an outlander ranger with high survival. We started in a swamp and it was written "pass survival check, if fail, roll to go in a random direction". I somehow failed 7/8 rolls with +7 (bad luck). We spent the whole session going round in circles and ended up further away from our objective than we started.
I felt awkward/stressed, and the others just felt bored/frustrated.
Chatting with more seasoned players afterwards they were like "yeah, that shouldn't be how it normally goes, but it's not your fault, DM should have a fail safe for stuff like that. First rule is 'is it fun'. Just cause the campaign says 'do x' doesn't necessarily mean you should if it's not fun for anyone"
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Not to mention which game you're actually playing.
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Ok, but if the 20 doesn't succed, why did you let them roll in the first place?
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Sometimes, it's about sending a message.
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Because I don't know what their max roll might be and it achieves them something, they gain knowledge that something is impossible for them.
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Some players don't ask.
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Once in a blue moon, an impossible check can impress a scale of difficulty on the players.
D&D example: a player with a high bonus attempts an Arcana check to figure out an enchantment and rolls well, up to a natural 20. I let the players have their moment of joy. Then I make a big deal of telling them they don’t have any idea what’s up with this enchantment. I really talk up how weird/complicated/confusing/impenetrable the enchantment is.
I’d be trying to prompt emotions I want the players and PC to share. Frustration, inadequacy. The players would viscerally know they need to try a different approach.
And because I gave the check a decent chunk of game time, it has more narrative weight. An interactive skill check is more substantial in the player’s mind than a monologue on the task being impossible, particularly if it stands out because they fail that check despite a super high result.
It’s a niche scenario, I admit. Most of the time just don’t ask for the check.
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In addition to what the others have said, I think degrees of failure are often a fun thing to introduce whether they are in the rules or not (I'll assume D&D 5E). It might be that a 20 with your +3 athletics isn't enough to completely leap over that huge gap, but you manage to grab a handhold a few metres below the edge. You'll have to take a turn or two to climb up, but you're okay. The cleric's roll of 3 with a -1 athletics, on the other hand, sees him plummeting to the bottom and taking a heap of fall damage
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Yep, those are all great responses. I learned a lot.
Funwise, it seems like a good solution would be "failure... but!" approach.
So the player have at least some reward for doing the best they can even if it's not enought to clear the chalange completely.
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Maintaining the illusion? Not revealing the (impossible) DC?
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Because I don't have everyone's modifier for every skill, ability, saving throw, and attack memorized off the top of my head, nor do I have magical foresight into whether or not they will choose to use abilities that would add more additional points on top of those modifiers.
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I agree. In casual play you can rely on veteran players to know their stats. If they're the type to lie intentionally then they can leave the table. If they're making mistakes then maybe something goes a little too easily, oh well. The best DMs i had didn't give a shit and focused on rewarding players for learning.
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You should at least have a general idea of your PC's skillsets. As in, don't let the country bumpkin make Arcana checks about monsters he's never seen, or let the stick figure try to punch down a wall. If you look at a character in a situation and think, "there's no way that could succeed," then they shouldn't be making a check.
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That’s partially less of an issue with fightclub
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It's technically homebrew, but basically every table Ive played at will give you a little bonus if you roll a 20 for a check and a little negative if you roll a 1. But we still kept that a 20 does not necessarily mean an auto success and a 1 is not necessarily an auto failure. You still need to beat the DC
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Mutants and Masterminds has (effectively) a +5 if you roll a 20, but no extra penalty for rolling a 1.
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Agreed, auto success on a skill check nerfs challenges.
If the DC is so high that the PC doesn't succeed with a 20, it seems too random to give it to them.
Then again, it depends on the situation: a nat 20 trying to convince the penny pinching tavern owner to give you a discount seems like fun even if the DC should be infinite; but when dealing with something story related, I'd stick a little closer to the rules.
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I recall a Zee Bashew video that I can't seem to find that referenced a chart of how willing someone was to help when requested. The idea being the scale isn't from "I will actively hinder you" to "I will sell my estate to aid you" but rather from less then helpful to more helpful.
For example, if you asked some haggard clerk about a quest the scale might be:
- Critical failure, the clerk directs you to the job board for details on any job.
- Failure, the clerk may point out there specific job on the board and direct you to it.
- Success, the clerk tells you that the person who posted the job is staying somewhere in town.
- Critical success, the clerk may share a rumor they heard in addition to telling you where the poster may be staying.
Regarding a discount from a penny-pinching inn keeper, perhaps it could go:
- Critical failure, payment for the entire stay is required up front. Extending your stay is not permitted.
- Failure, They are not willing to lower their prices
- Success, they will offer a lower price if you bundle extra services like meals, drinks, and baths.
- Critical success, they will offer you the bundle rate without bundling.
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This is the way
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They absolutely do, and the bonus effects are listed in the description of each skill action. Oh. you mean in D&D. washes hands
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Hello fellow Pathfinder!
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Dating back to 3rd critical skill checks in D&D suck because a lot of skills are written as pass/fail.
Example: picking a lock. If we want to add criticals, a 1 breaks the lock; mostly okay, with the long acknowledged fringe problem of experts being incompetent 5% of the time. What does a natural 20 get? I adore opportunities to be creative, but there’s not a lot better than, “You did it perfectly.” A regular success earns that according to the rules, I don’t want to take it away. A speech about how cool and ninja the PC is can come off pretty cringey to me. The correct mechanical answer would be to let the 20 roll over to the next check because the PC’s in the zone or whatever. Not awful, but it doesn’t directly reward the player right when they rolled the 20, which is the occurrence we want to feel good. We’re also rewriting several rules at this point.
Meanwhile, PF2e baked degrees of success into everything. On a crit fail they break the lock, on a fail they leave traces of their fruitless efforts, on a success they get one success toward opening the lock while scuffing it up a little, and on a crit success they get two successes and leave the lock looking pristine. The players don’t feel cheated when they get a normal success and scuff up the lock. The 20 has some reward for most characters. The 1 has a setback, even a reasonable setback for an expert with a +25 trying to open the DC 10 lock on Grandma’s rickety shed.
I actually don’t mind pass/fail skill rolls in D&D or other games. Rolling a 20 is inherently satisfying to me. But I adore the DC+10 critical threshold for making a good build feel like it was time well spent, in or out of game. And since the natural 20/1 and critical rules are connected at the hip, I’ll gladly take them both.
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D&D has all the money in the entire hobby, basically, and they still make terrible design decisions like this.
Rolling a nat 20 and getting a crit is the jackpot of d&d mechanics. Don't design a system where sometimes you hit the jackpot but don't win anything. That's an objectively bad choice to make.
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I 90% agree. I think most of the opposition to this comes from people exhausted with habitual boundary-pushers who think that a nat 20 means they can get away with defying the laws of reality.
Like, no, a nat20 persuasion does not convince the merchant to give you half his stock and all the money in the register... He would go broke and he's got a family to support, along with his own survival that your nat20 does not also convince him to stop caring about.
But at the end of the day, a lot of GMs who are sick of that need to be sent the dictionary page for the word "no." The occasional use of it really does improve the quality of the game, and I'm sure plenty of players will appreciate not letting aforementioned boundry pushers continue to waste time on impossible pursuits that do nothing to move the game forward.
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I've seen this easily solved by assuming the 20 succeedes but the DM decides how exactly.
"Okay. The dragon loves you know. They realize you have their old lover's eyes. You remember this too. Old tales in your family that you thought were a joke. You are apparently related. And they do love you now."
If you can't trust your players to act like adults and show some basic maturity. That's a different issue.
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D&D is that way, though. Every time you see a natural 20 for anything that isn't an attack does not automatically succeed unless people are using homegrown, which they often are.
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You need to qualify this statement with what you believe should happen on a nat 20.
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what you believe should happen on a nat 20.
Consistency.
My point is that setting up the expectation of a moment of triumph and then diluting it with exceptions is going to create moments of disappointment at the table.
If a nat 20 is going to be a big win it should always be a big win. That's so intuitively true that most people just play that way despite the rules.
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I don't mean that it's ultra rare, just that it serves the same function as a jackpot - it's the best possible outcome, the thing you're always hoping will happen when you scratch the ticket, press the button or roll the dice.
It's your chance to have that YOU WIN BIG moment. Setting up that mechanic and then creating situations where it doesn't apply is intentionally designing disappointment.
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If you make like five skill checks per game, yes it is rare and it's way more fun to treat it like a crit success. It's not a job, it's a weekend activity that is supposed to bring joy.
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They do in PF2e. And it rocks
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To be even more pedantic: the original poster's meme says skill checks don't crit, not that nat 20s on skills are a critical success. Most skill checks in PF2e have a critical success tier. Thus jagermo was correct when they said that skill checks do crit in PF2e.
That being said, you are correct about how the whole tiering mechanic works and a nat 20 not always being a critical success. :)
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Just because a Nat 20 isn’t necessarily the cause, doesn’t mean that skill checks don’t crit.
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You are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
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Acrobatics does. Add an extra flip.
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...If we fall off the rope bridge because you did a backflip I'm haunting you though.
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I have zero regrets about my sick-ass backflip.
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Rule of cool
If something sounds fun it’s happening at my table.
If you roll a 20 on persuasion or something we’re going to have fun, but I’m not turning characters into literal gods (though that did happen one game)
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It has the same mouthfeel as a crit, I want my wildest dreams to come true every time I see that two zero
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*in the core rules.
If you want to homebrew it then go for it.
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I like the idea of extraordinary luck given to players. Giving everything they do a 5% chance of incredible success no matter the difficulty is such a small tweak to let some really hilarious, or awesome things play out. And they will take more risks knowing there is potentially a great reward. How do you balance this? 5% chance of terrible failure no matter how easy. No more automatic success. Sometimes shit just happens and when it happens, it really hurts.
And also, you can just make regular failure more punishing or even make success a monkey's paw thing: "You want to seduce the lich?! already rolling dice "No, you fail. In your attempt to seduce the lich, his aura of evil has made you impotent. Permanently." OR "YES NAT TWENTY!! DM deadpan for 10 seconds, then "I have a fetish for fingers. I'll give you the information you want in exchange for a few those delectable, dainty fingers, half-elf" (Some temporary debuffs that can heal, and they get to skip the fetch quest)
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Depends what system you're playing
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20 peasants stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and attempt to jump across. On average, should one succeed?
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We don't do averages, just addition and subtraction 😂
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While no individual peasant ought make it across, im pretty sure on average, one in twenty people can jump the Grand Canyon
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They can’t crit, but success can be determined by numerical thresholds that the dm sets, and they just so happen to align with rolling a 12 for success, 20 for glorious accomplishment, and 1 for terrible snafu.
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put bards in garbage can. hm makes sense.
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If the players are demanding wild results, especially if they're the kind to roll unprompted, then sure.
But in my experience, it's usually just a little flourish or a small bonus, which I think is fine.
And if the issue is that a nat 20 doesn't guarantee success, technically, sure, but I'd be more annoyed being asked to make a pointless roll. I know there are reasons, like a hidden target number, or other characters being able to do it, but in general, I'd rather just hear "no" than go through a pointless check.
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I... did not realize that, I guess it makes sense, but I also think the concept of a skill check being able to do something analagous to critting is actually a good idea, if other rules or the scenario ... fit this as a mechanic.
81 comments
They do if it's funny. Fails too.