D&D 5E Reliable Talent. What the what?

[5ekyu]

No, the medium tasks are for non-expertise and the hard tasks are for expertise skills. The very hard are expertise skills, but you're yet to identify the reasoning that has a rogue player picking skills for reliable talent under different criteria than the skills he picked for expertise.

Fly expends a resource, one that could have been a fireball. Invisibility doesn't, in fact, beat any stealth checks; it allows stealth checks. Knock also expends a resource and creates a clearly audible knock up to 300' away, hardly a stealthy action.

We aren't really talking about peons, though, are we? In a small town, the targets you hit are merchants, not farmers, and even they can't afford very hard difficulty locks or magical seals very well. Plus, they carry a good deal of coin or goods that are valuable, so it's not pocket change we're really talking about. If you have a small town that your rogue rolls through and robs with impunity and comes up with only a few 100 gold, I'm asking what kind of plague or war is currently raging on the streets.

And, actually, the fact that other level 12 NPC rogues can do it as well exacerbates the problem in the fiction, it doesn't solve or ameliorate it. You now get to come up with reasons they aren't making enough money to live extravagantly knocking over the occasional D&D version of a small bank every other week. You can do this, certainly (and I have), but pretending it's a trivial effort is ridiculous.

I have no idea what you mean by picking skills with reliable talent. last i checked reliable talent applies to any proficient check. Last i checked, expertise applies to up to four of your skill/tool proficiencies whether they came from race, class, background or whatever - so not all of a rogue's proficiencied checks are going to be expertise.

So...

With attribute bonus of 5 and proficiency of +4 at 11th we have the following results:
Moderate/Medium DC15 = automatic with both proficient and expertise.
Hard DC20 = Roll for proficient checks and automatic for expertise checks.
Very hard DC25 = Roll for both proficient checks and expertise checks.

With attribute bonus of +5 and prof bonus +5 at level 13 (same time as 7th level spells unlocked)
lowing results:
Moderate/Medium DC15 = automatic with both proficient and expertise.
Hard DC20 = automatic with both proficient and expertise.
Very Hard DC25 = Roll for proficient checks and automatic for expertise checks.

opposed checks for all cases are against a floating Dc so not as rigid a thing.

As for trivial effort blah blah...

in early DnD editions the idea was not everything had to be shown in a PHB or even books.

But some folks did not think thru.

So you had more than a few games where they had traditional castles as stronghold without magic as high level party objectives and suddenly **OMG** teleport breaks castles etc etc etc.

Rougue or any other 12th level PC decides to go knock over locals for loot, you can choose to handle it as a downtime activity, give them relatively reasonable for their level and time loot **or** you can decide it breaks your game because you put a lot of loot out there with no guards or wards to protect it against foes that would be out to get it. or somewthing in between.

The game rules, the rogue stats, telport, raise dead, open locks, fly, etc etc etc - all those various "not what one might normally see in a non-magic world - stuff do not tell you to in your setting put in "more gold than we are paying for defenses to protect."

if you as Gm cannot build a setting that keeps your characters from breaking your setting, 12th level rogue skill rolls are not going to be on your top ten huge honkin' problems list, IMX. Look at stuff that comes after 12... if lockpicking is your fret point for 12th level.

How about, banks pay for protection wards... so all their locks are "magic locks" and special alarms go off and they have paid some group somewhere to respond when a mage or rogue or other character gets antsy?

Course... if this small town bank has enough gold to make it worth a rogue 12 time AND its basically open season, why hasn't a red dragon flown in, levelled the place and taken the gold? or .... insert any number of bad guys...

But its your game so have fun... i realzied that challenges of type X would become obsolete as campaign progress and the setting de jour, PC objectives and challenges need to address that a decade or so before the "definition of is" was a thing.

As some others have suggested, maybe restart a campaign at 10 if you want those things to be tough.

its up to you

 

[BookBarbarian]

I agree with others that the point of Reliable Talent is to make things that were harder at lower levels trivial at higher ones. At this point I would change how I challenge the Rogue player.

Now the question is not "will he be able to unlock the door?" It's now more of "What will he do with the cursed loot he doesn't know is cursed?" How hill he handle the fact that that quiet little house he robbed blind has really a front for the most powerful crime syndicate in the land/belonged to an Ancient Gold Dragon disguised and living with his human wife and their half-dragon offspring etc etc etc?"

 

[Wulffolk]

Just a quick reply off the top of my head, if eventual success is never in question then there is still a resource to be expended . . . TIME.

Time is the ultimate resource in any setting that does not allow for time travel (damn, i hate time travel). Instead of simply saying any skill check succeeds and moving on, how about changing the key element to be how long it takes to succeed at the task?

My quick suggestion (without taking the time to consider all of the repurcussions) would be to multiply the DC by x10 and let the character keep rolling each round until he accumulates enough on his rolls to reach the DC. For example: a DC 20 lock might be an auto success if only a single roll was required, but now rolling matters because the faster the Rogue can get to 200 the less time he wastes while the guard is circling the halls. The Rogue could settle for the passive automatic roll and take his time (around 10 rounds = 1 minute), or actively roll to get the job done faster ( maybe getting done in 7 or 8 rounds) and avoiding the consequences of getting caught.

This could work for many different skills or situations, such as climbing a wall, making it all the way across a courtyard with stealth, or translating an ancient scroll. Imagine the drama of that expert Rogue trying to open a locked gate while his party fends off a horde of bloodthirsty foes.

 

[5ekyu]

Just a quick reply off the top of my head, if eventual success is never in question then there is still a resource to be expended . . . TIME.

Time is the ultimate resource in any setting that does not allow for time travel (damn, i hate time travel). Instead of simply saying any skill check succeeds and moving on, how about changing the key element to be how long it takes to succeed at the task?

My quick suggestion (without taking the time to consider all of the repurcussions) would be to multiply the DC by x10 and let the character keep rolling each round until he accumulates enough on his rolls to reach the DC. For example: a DC 20 lock might be an auto success if only a single roll was required, but now rolling matters because the faster the Rogue can get to 200 the less time he wastes while the guard is circling the halls. The Rogue could settle for the passive automatic roll and take his time (around 10 rounds = 1 minute), or actively roll to get the job done faster ( maybe getting done in 7 or 8 rounds) and avoiding the consequences of getting caught.

This could work for many different skills or situations, such as climbing a wall, making it all the way across a courtyard with stealth, or translating an ancient scroll. Imagine the drama of that expert Rogue trying to open a locked gate while his party fends off a horde of bloodthirsty foes.

There are option under Role of Dice in DMG for taking ten times as long to default to 10.

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[CapnZapp]

We aren't really talking about peons, though, are we? In a small town, the targets you hit are merchants, not farmers, and even they can't afford very hard difficulty locks or magical seals very well. Plus, they carry a good deal of coin or goods that are valuable, so it's not pocket change we're really talking about. If you have a small town that your rogue rolls through and robs with impunity and comes up with only a few 100 gold, I'm asking what kind of plague or war is currently raging on the streets.

And, actually, the fact that other level 12 NPC rogues can do it as well exacerbates the problem in the fiction, it doesn't solve or ameliorate it. You now get to come up with reasons they aren't making enough money to live extravagantly knocking over the occasional D&D version of a small bank every other week. You can do this, certainly (and I have), but pretending it's a trivial effort is ridiculous.

Stop stop stop.

Now you're treating the game like a world simulator. D&D doesn't support that - not even close.

Any time you even *think* about how much gold a town *actually* contains, you're... not doing it wrong per se, but you are certainly on your own.

The rules are NOT meant to simulate the challenge of robbing a town blind, and that a particular talent of a particular class let's you skip all the die rolls is not a bug.

It's not a feature either. It's simply not on the map.

You're probably right that a town would contain significant amounts of coin even for a level 12 party. But if your players want to exploit that, and you actually let them, you're playing a VERY non-standard game.

Whether they pull this off by murder-hoboing everyone, or by pick-pocketing everybody using Reliable Talent, or by spell, or by persuasion, or simply by murdering the mayor and then asking everyone to dump their wealth on the town square or the mayor's daughter is next to die...

...is of incredibly minor importance.

The thing to remember is that you're using the game outside it's supported parameters - you're on your own.

And the game certainly isn't buggy just because it offers yet another way to gain this coin, or that this new way happens to not involve any die rolling.

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[CapnZapp]

And if you do just hand him a loot page he might get bored and stop doing it. Freeing up time for more adventuring.

Excellent idea.

Just give him 100 gp each time he goes looting. The lack of variance should soon bore him to death.

Which is appropriate for a level 12 Rogue stealing from farmers. Allowing him to make rolls would only encourage him, so in that respect Reliable Talent is actually a hidden feature!

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[Horwath]

Low skill DC's?

Let's assume he's got a 20 Dex, so that's +5. He's 11th level, so that's a proficiency bonus of +4. Then he takes expertise in, say, Sleight of Hand, which doubles that prof bonus to +8 for a total of +13. So now he's disarming any trap and picking any lock with a DC 23 or lower automatically. Yeah, it's supposed to be, "reliable" but good grief! And I don't even really mind him having such high chances to beat those DC's; I mean, like you said, he's supposed to be a skill monkey. But to have absolutely no chance of failure seems really weird.

And on the whole I'd much rather deal with permanent advantage to a feature than to have it be automatically successful 100% of the time (on 23 or lower DC's). That is just so... anticlimactic. If there's zero element of danger, what's the point?

I'm not so worried about it in a dungeon delving situation since difficulties will ramp up as they get into higher levels. But the potential for abuse on a more mundane scale is almost too good to pass up.

I'm sorry but DC 20 is a lock.

DC 20 means that anyone can pick that lock given time. On average that time is two minutes.

That is lowest a lock can be.

DC 35 or 40 would be state of the art/best in the world lock.

And in some village? ofc you will only have locks, or next to those(DC 25).

Fighters get +50% damage at lvl11. Casters get level 6 spells. And you are worried about picking crappiest locks that exist at-will?

 

[Wulffolk]

Rogues don't like carrying large quantities of relatively cheap things. They are out to score the high value items. Commoners rarely have high value items or many coins. Commoners typically barter, and have limited access to coins, and prefer not to keep them when they do come across them because coins are easily stolen and have no practical use.

It would not be worth the effort of any master Rogue to gather all of the petty valuables and try to convert them to coins. Use the emcumberance rules, and keep track of the time it would take to accomplish their tasks. It is like that question about whether or not Bill Gates would lose money if he took the time to bend over and pick up a $100 bill.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I mean, me either - usually in a situation where taking 10 would be appropriate, it’d be better to just let the action succeed.

My point exactly. So, unless there’s a source of pressure, you shouldn’t be rolling to pick locks most of the time anyway. A locked door with no complicating factors to make trying to pick it a risk isn’t an obstacle, it’s set dressing. And if you’re already putting complicating factors in your campaigns to make picking locks risky, it shouldn’t be too hard to ramp those factors up for characters who can reliably achieve an average roll result under pressure. Frankly, as a DM, you should be designing around the expectation of characters reliably being able to achieve average results anyway.

Also, side note, speaking of things that aren’t in the rules, locks and tools being damaged or broken on a failed Dexterity check sure is one of them.

Sure it is, right there where it says the DM narrates the result of the check.

A rogue has a pretty limited number of expertise skills. Four, to be precise, or three plus thieves’ tools. And it also doesn’t do anything to increase the difficulty of tasks the rogue can succeed at, it just removes the risk of failure at things they already had a 50% chance or better at succeeding. Picking four skills you can count on to always succeed at tasks below Very Difficult DCs seems like a perfectly reasonable feature for a 3rd-tier Skill monkey to me.

3rd Tier? Rogues? One of the most popular and versatile classes? Huh.

I guess? Again, I feel like this is only a problem if you weren’t already counting on the character to reliably be able to achieve average roll results. Which in my opinion you should have been. YMMV, I guess.

I get what you're saying, but 50/50 isn't reliable -- it's pretty much very far outside the definition of reliable. If your car start only half of the time when you turned the key, you wouldn't call that reliable. What it reliable is what the character can achieve every single time, and that goes from a DC 14 to a DC 23 in one fell swoop.

To put it another way, if you reliably expect a character to succeed at a task, why would you ask for a roll to begin with? Are you telling me that, before the rogue gets reliable talent, you'd assume automatic success at any DC 23 or less for their skills with expertise? I strongly doubt it, which is why this advice is bogus. If you ask for a roll, there needs to be a chance of failure. Designing your adventures with the idea that a 10+ roll is reliable is asking to witness a lot of unexpected failures.

Cool, sounds like you’ve got a fix that works for your game. Glad to hear it.

I have many fixes, doesn't prevent me from noticing the problems.

 

[CapnZapp]

I'm sorry but DC 20 is a lock.

DC 20 means that anyone can pick that lock given time. On average that time is two minutes.

That is lowest a lock can be.

DC 35 or 40 would be state of the art/best in the world lock.

Again, you're looking at this from an angle the game isn't about.

"Anyone" isn't picking locks in D&D. It's the heroes (and the odd villain) that are.

And the game isn't about frustration and defeat, it's about succeeding under pressure!

In short, locks are there to be picked.

Not to be not picked.

Therefore, the same DCs as in the rest of the game applies.

A DC 20 lock isn't a sharty lock - it's a lock only an experienced hero has any great chance of opening on her first or second try. That sounds like a professional lock to me!

A DC 25 lock is stratospherically difficult to open. Even our level 12 Rogue can't open it automatically, and has a significant chance of failing (40% or so). That's a world-class lock if I ever saw one!

That's the ONLY perspective that the rules support. All the simulationary stuff about retries doesn't matter - the game is about the here and now, not statistical frequencies.



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