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

[Shiroiken]

When I ran my first campaign and the rogue hit 11th level, I was like... WTF!!! The more I saw it in play, the less I actually cared about it. His primary use for it was stealth, so I learned to not bother rolling against him if their max was less than his minimum. It actually helped the game run faster, since he had a really high chance of success anyway (+15 vs. +3-4 was pretty common). Think of it as the player being able to use a Passive check for all trained skills (with the option for a higher roll if it matters).

Something else to consider is that this is a MAJOR class feature. This is the equivalent to access to 6th level spells, or a third attack per round. Nerf it, and you're telling the group that this class should be weaker. You best be ready with your reasoning, because some players won't take kindly to it.

 

[Horwath]

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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Have you ever picked a lock?

It's not meant to be picked in few seconds. Unless you are a world class burglar(read reliable talent).

DC 20 for lockpicking in pathetic. Because there is no failure penalty and you can roll as much as you want(if you have the time). That means that commoner with the tools can open a DC 20 lock in a few minutes.

DC 20 lock is a lock that you buy for 5€.

And retries happen. Default example are the locks. They are not traps that will blow in your face if you fumble one roll.

If you are hard pressed for quick pick lock? Though break. DON'T BE hard pressed to pick locks. It's a time consuming process.

 

[Iry]

This is mostly a joke, but...

“After prowling the city for most of the night, effortlessly slipping through windows and plucking up anything of value, you head to the local fence and spend another hour haggling. After adding up all the candlesticks and faux jewelry, you walk away with 1d4 gold.”

Alternatively, maybe the rogue ALWAYS finds something interesting?

“After prowling the city for most of the night, effortlessly slipping through windows and plucking up anything of value, you stumble across a strange scene. In the top floor of a well to-do manor, a dozen shrouded people are whispering furtive chants, and a red mist begins to appear.”

 

[cthulhu42]

And so is taking 10, right next to where it say the DM can ask for a passive Skill check instead of a roll.


No, 3rd tier of the character’s adventuring career. 1st tier is 1st-4th level, 2nd-tier is 5th-10th level, 3rd tier is 11th-15th, and 4th tier is 16th-20th. These are notably the points when classes pick up major game-changing features like extra attacks, and the points where, if you analyze the experience table and the encounter building guidelines, you find significant slowdowns in level progression.


I assume that rolls with a base 50% chance of success will probably be succeeded at, yes. Because players have lots of ways to improve on that base 50%. Bless, Bardic Inspiration, etc. plus 50% chance success rate is the sweet spot for getting the most value out of Advantage. And, again, passive checks are a thing.


You say that like Reliable Talent is a problem for most DMs. Yet, as you pointed out in the opening post, it made it through playtesting to be printed in the book. It never even occurred to me that it might be a problem because during up your chance of success on rolls with 50% or better odds without improving the maximum DC you can succeed at is pretty tame in my opinion, and a good chunk of the tasks that would potentially benefit from it wouldn’t even be rolled for at my table anyway. It seems like this is mostly a You problem, and like you’ve got a you solution, so at this point I’m not sure what we’re even still discussing.

Just to be clear, I am the op, not Ovinomancer, although he has voiced many of my concerns far more eloquently than I could have.

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[cthulhu42]

When I ran my first campaign and the rogue hit 11th level, I was like... WTF!!! The more I saw it in play, the less I actually cared about it. His primary use for it was stealth, so I learned to not bother rolling against him if their max was less than his minimum. It actually helped the game run faster, since he had a really high chance of success anyway (+15 vs. +3-4 was pretty common). Think of it as the player being able to use a Passive check for all trained skills (with the option for a higher roll if it matters).

Something else to consider is that this is a MAJOR class feature. This is the equivalent to access to 6th level spells, or a third attack per round. Nerf it, and you're telling the group that this class should be weaker. You best be ready with your reasoning, because some players won't take kindly to it.

Thanks. I am mainly looking for real play experience with RT to get an idea of how it's affected other people's games, so your input is helpful.

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[Sorcerers Apprentice]

If you want to discourage the lvl 12 rogue from random acts of petty crime, have other master thieves make fun of him for robbing farmers and shopkeepers.

 

[cthulhu42]

I think we've got hung up on my specific example of effortlessly robbing a town. The real point here is how RT affects the game through its potential abuse via any of the skills a given rogue might have proficiency and expertise in. Perception, Persuasion, Acrobatics, etc.

Yes, there are plenty of ways to deal with or discourage the rogue robbing a whole city blind. I'm prepared to deal with that. It was just one example.

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[CapnZapp]

Have you ever picked a lock?

It's not meant to be picked in few seconds. Unless you are a world class burglar(read reliable talent).

DC 20 for lockpicking in pathetic. Because there is no failure penalty and you can roll as much as you want(if you have the time). That means that commoner with the tools can open a DC 20 lock in a few minutes.

DC 20 lock is a lock that you buy for 5€.

And retries happen. Default example are the locks. They are not traps that will blow in your face if you fumble one roll.

If you are hard pressed for quick pick lock? Though break. DON'T BE hard pressed to pick locks. It's a time consuming process.

Why do you hold "lock-picking" to realistic standards?

This is a fantasy game where lots of things happen much more quickly than IRL.

And don't tell me the Rogue "needs" to do her stuff excruciatingly slowly when a fighter only needs 20 seconds to kill a dragon, and the Wizard only needs 6 seconds to bust open that lock. Or magically transport himself and the whole party inside the vault.

No, just like you can shoot a Crossbow nine times in 6 seconds (including winding it up eight times), a Rogue only needs a few seconds to do her stuff.

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[Saeviomagy]

It's not the fault of RT. It's the fault of the skill system.

Like others have said, 10th level characters shouldn't be messing about with mundane tasks.

In 3e, a normal 10th level character would be walking around with a +17 or so to their best skills, without going over the top. That would mean they could automatically succeed a 'tough' skill check and have only a small chance to fail a 'challenging' one.

However with the way that 5e's skill system works, most characters at mid-level can only automatically succeed at an easy task with the skills they are best with, and they'll have a 25% chance to fail with a moderate task. 5e characters are incompetent clowns.

Except for bards, who get auto-success on moderate tasks, and rogues who get auto-success on very hard tasks and make everyone else look like a clown.

At least without rogues, everyone would suck at everything they tried to do.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So what I'm asking for here is how other DM's have dealt with this and how it's affected your games. Is it as broken as it appears? Have your players abused it? If so, what did you do about it?

In my experience, it's not really a big deal, because skill checks are not a big deal in general. Regardless of whether someone succeeds or fails on any given skill check, the narrative is going to move forward and it's unlikely that anyone will die as a result, so it doesn't really hurt anything if the rogue just doesn't fail. One thing that I noticed with my rogue is that, even though he had a really high minimum check result, most checks just gave that minimum result, so reliability wasn't even a factor in those few situations where the skill check really was a big deal. (As an unexpected benefit, most of the checks that the rogue was making involved him acting independently from the group, so not having to roll meant that we could speed through the solo stuff even faster and get right back to the group.)

1. Implement the natural 1 rule for skills. It doesn't seem out of line that a skill attempt, like an attack, could fail on a 1. Even masters of their crafts sometimes err. In fact, I don't really understand why skill checks are exempt from the natural 1/20 rule in the first place. Furthermore, our rogue has the Luck feat, so his odds of failing a skill check would be pretty darn low. But at least there would be SOME chance of failer that would make his roll mean something.

In general, this sort of rule is a bad idea, because it means people should constantly be falling down while walking down the street. One of the most elegant design features of the d20 system is how trivial checks can be ignored because there's no chance of failure; the DM just needs to determine what the DC is, and then only ask for a roll if they would fail that check on a low result.

If you would always fail on a 1, then you need to roll for every trivial action you take, because you might roll a 1. It doesn't matter whether your minimum check result would normally beat the DC by 10, because every action has a chance of failure.

2. Change the rule to give him advantage on skills checks with prof bonus skills. Again, this gives him a significant boost to those skills (some of which he also has expertise in) so his success rate would be very high, but again, there would be some small chance of blowing it.

The problem with advantage, just in general, is that it only comes in one degree. Giving advantage automatically would mean there's no benefit to favorable circumstance, having help, magical foresight, or any of the other things which would normally grant advantage. Rogues also tend to have high bonuses in general, thanks to expertise, so advantage plus expertise would probably let them succeed 98% of the time anyway, and what's the benefit of slowing down gameplay by rolling for something that only has a 2% chance of happening?

And honestly, I'm not worried about the loot he might get. It's the story telling aspect that bothers me. There must be some challenge, some drama, some cost, or what's the point? Isn't the whole point of bounded accuracy that even trivial challenges have some small chance of going sideways?

The point of bounded accuracy is that you don't need to be a specialist in order to succeed. If you look at 3E or Pathfinder, a lot of the high-end checks are in the DC 35 - 40 range, so you need to have a huge bonus to even attempt them. (Literally, the Escape Artist DC for masterwork manacles is DC 35, and the Disable Device DC for a superior lock is DC 40). Bounded accuracy is supposed to mean that most people can attempt most checks, which is why most/I] check DCs are 20 or less; and even a character with a low-ish stat can attempt a difficult check, as long as they have proficiency.

That a specialist might still have a chance to fail on easy checks was never the selling point of bounded accuracy, though it remains in effect in many cases.