New Legends and Lore:Difficulty Class Warfare

[Balesir]

Can you help me understand what you're getting at when you say, "magic items, feats or whatever to adjust difficulty" - is it that the chance of success (on the d20) is increased by acquisition of these things, thus you don't rely as much on DM judgement?

I was thinking of the posts in this thread that assume there will be things like "elven cloaks" that shift the difficulty of a stealth task by one level, or "Cat's Grace" spells that shift the difficulty of a balance task by one level. In other words, system artifacts (not Artifacts ) that modify difficulty, in addition to the "player ingenuity" modifications. In effect, this amounts to a (+15) die modifier, but it's stated as "shifting the difficulty level" in the coversation.

Anyway. "whether or not the DM likes the idea" is a well-tried method for dealing with the issue. I think problems with that method usually arise when the DM's job/agenda isn't to be an impartial arbiter of the situation (as much as possible for humans, anyway), but instead to make rulings with bias that lead to preferred outcomes.

Oh, I realise that. My problem (and it is my problem - I recognise that, even though I suspect it might be one others share) is that I have seen the world view of DMs dictate what is a "good idea" too many times. Try reading the book "I'm Not Crazy - I'm Just Not You!" - it explains pretty well how different people have different ways of perceiving the world, and reach different conclusions about situations and actions as a result. We all have wired-in tendencies to specific prejudices (which, naturally, we don't perceive for ourselves) that slant the view we have of the world around us. Even understanding a little about what these prejudices are does not render us immune to them - we can just benefit from working around them and examining our reactions when the "danger signs" are present. One way of addressing this in a relaxation activity is to just roll dice and follow their lead

 

[Sammael]

IMO, the "ranking" skill system should work without any DCs whatsoever.

If your players want to ride dragons without any training, and you want them to succeed, you can reduce the difficulty on the fly: perhaps the dragons are really well trained? Or the players can find special dragon saddles? Or use special herbs that make the dragons more docile?

Perhaps the DM could add randomness by drawing "complication" tokens or something, and players could stop him by investing their own tokens (someone mentioned a system like that in another thread). Just thinking aloud...

 

[Sir Robilar]

In my opinion, this system is brilliant and shows why Monte Cook is so high-regarded as a designer.

When I assign difficulty levels for my players, I often have a hard time assigning a DC that fits the situation. I can see this going away when all I have to assign is one of the few difficulty ranks listen between novice and impossible. Also seems like a system that encourages creative thinking and greatly turns down the random absurdities of rolling a d20 every time. I already like it better than all other edition´s skill system and hope it will be part of whatever the next D&D will become.

 

[Pickles JG]

I was messing with a system like this for Call of Chthullhu where it always annoyed the heck out of me that an expert in some field would still probably only have a 60% chance of success at any task. I was looking at automatic success - 5/6 - 3/6 - 1/6 - automatic fail as tiers - +2 on a d6 = about +7 on a D20 or half Mearls bonus. It also reminds me of the Gumshoe sort of philosophy where if a clue is there it will be found. Clues would always have find difficulties that make success automatic.

I believe it is better suited to a levelless system than D&D but maybe in 4e terms the tiers would set the default difficulty - a master task at paragon is routine at epic & almost impossible at heroic. Really demi tiers would be a better level of granularity.

I have also been looking at numberless D&D using a dice with faces that say* things like :-
success;
fail (unless you are very skilled);
success (unless your target is hard to hit).

It's an intellectual exercise just now as it's a bit confusing but it made me think of abilities in a different way. In 4e abilities are pretty much tiered - good, attack stat, OK secondary stat or dump stat. This works fine in my numberless system as a good stat can turn a hit into a miss on one face one the die & the opposite with a bad stat.

It also works well in Mearls skill system where a character can have an ability where he is particularly apt at a skill, neutral or be inept. Each one could move the difficulty tier one step (though ideally you would have narrower tiers - +5 on a D20 is the right sort of level like skill training is).

This moves ability scores away from numbers the same way that skills have gone in this model. You obviously lose granularity but I would get this back with limited use (per day/encounter session/adventure) bonuses. Ie a big bonus some of the time rather than a small bonus all the time. In 4e all that high abilities really do is make you better at certain sets of "skills" including initiative, basic attacks & HP.

*using Icons - what it gains in conceptual elegance it loses in trying to figure out the pictures.

 

[TerraDave]

well, now we know he is spittballing.

Not thrilled. A lot of solution for not much of a problem.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Two things:

1) I can see a system like this causing major arguments: the DM declares a difficulty of X, the player is adamant it should be Y (because at X he has no chance to succeed, while at Y he at least gets to roll

If anyone can succeed at anything they care to attempt with a good enough die roll it devalues having skills so much that choosing them becomes unimportant.

I'm not a doctor so it makes perfect sense that I couldn't perform heart surgury even if I rolled a natural 20.

2) When writing a pre-gen adventure, what should the difficulties for tasks be? There's no tie between the difficulties Mearls has put forward and character level, nor is there a clear rate at which PC ability increases. So, where do you pitch the difficulties?

You do what all DMs did before there was a pre-set DC range menu, decide on the difficulty of a given action based on how hard it actually is to accomplish. It may be that some tasks are at a base level, impossible for the PCs to accomplish in a straightforward manner. The part about the system that is really cool IMHO is that the DCs are not immovable objects.
Players can come up with clever ideas in play to turn the impossible into at least a decent longshot.

Getting rewarded for clever actions in actual play as opposed to optimizing build is a good thing. This levels the playing field between system masters and new players. Its about time the game returned to being about the people playing rather than the numbers on some sheet.

(Incidentally: I'm not a fan of this system. I never liked "Trained Only" skills in 3e, since I'd much prefer that PCs at least have a chance to perform the action. This system essentially expands the "Trained Only" model a whole lot further.)

I'm not a fan of the 3E implementation but I like the concept of trained only for certain things, especially knowledge. The main thing is that every character have access to the same skills so no one gets an advantage merely by choice of class.

 

[P1NBACK]

There's no tie between the difficulties Mearls has put forward and character level...

As there shouldn't be.

The difficulty of the challenge should be independent of the character level.

If my 1st level PCs approach and want to scale the great ice wall that blocks the northern pass, I shouldn't be adjusting the DC for their character level. Nope, I'm going to be like, "Dudes, you realize this is a Grandmaster task right? And, you're going to need quite a bit of climbing gear? It's a 1000 feet high and made of ice and snow. You sure you don't want to petition the Night's Watch to let you pass through the tunnel?"

 

[I'm A Banana]

[RE: No Sense of Increasing Skill]
I'm sorry - how does this occur? Are you thinking "At level 1, you choose your skill levels and that's it?" This seems extremely unlikely.

If you automatically advance in "ranks" with level, it exacerbates the difference between you and an untrained person, leading you to be able to do things that no one else can even try, which would seem to work against Mike's first point in the article, that is, giving all characters a decent chance to contribute. The difference between a Novice and a Master is even more harsh than the difference between a DC 10 and a DC 20.

If you DON'T automatically advance in "ranks," then you're stuck capable of the same stuff when you're a legend that you could do when you're off the turnip truck.

I don't see how you could do both? Maybe you advance EVERYONE a "rank?" Perhaps that could alleviate the problem, but when our platemail dwarf is balancing on a tightrope as well as our Acrobat did 3 levels ago... I suppose that's an issue with any "everyone gets better at everything" system, there's just a bigger grey area between "you can try this" and "you will probably fail."

[RE: Complexity Without Payoff]
Err... no. The Difficulty Rating replaces the DC.

And then those who have the right Skill Rating still need to roll to accomplish the thing, no? And it's not like we wouldn't have different chances for success in that roll.

I mean, if all it is is matching up DR with SR, then it's not complexity without payoff, but it is toothlessly binary. Either you Can or you Can't. There is no try. Which means that there is no drama or tension, it's either Off or On. Which is a much bigger problem than complexity without payoff, IMO!

[RE: No Need For Impossible]
mazing how often it *is* necessary - and it's often for the greyer areas. In 3E, you can tunnel through a wall at speed...

If it's something you want them to be able to do, it's not "impossible." If it's something you DON'T want them to be able to do, we don't need a rule for it aside from, "DM says you, being a human-like being, cannot tunnel through this wall for 30 feet in 6 seconds," any more than I need a rule telling me the chance for a quantum fluctuation causes me to spontaneously teleport into outer space each time I take a move action.

[RE: No Natural Ability]
Again, you make an assumption about how the initial levels are generated.

Can these initial levels increase along with my natural ability? Is training just a +1 "rank"? Am I going to have to track the "effective skill ranks" for a host of different skills? Or can I just roll a dice and add some modifiers and get on with my life?

[RE: No Surprise]
Interesting - you now are flying by using your arms. Doesn't this conflict with your point above?

Taking it a little more seriously, not having surprising results is something I prefer - good surprising is a small loss compared to losing bad surprising - which is mostly what I see.

A ruleset incapable of surprising narrative looses nearly all its appeal to me. I'm a lover of improv and I delight in unexpected directions, and the dice provide them. If I wanted to play Amber Diceless, I'd go play Amber Diceless.

[RE: No Surprise]
I think that is a better goal for a D&D skill system. You'll still get surprising results, but they will come from the player's ingenuity, not a lucky die roll. Focusing the skill system to make player skill an priority is a good thing in D&D, in my opinion.

It's really not my bag. Then we're back to entirely "Mother May I" gameplay, checking with the DM to see if your idea is "clever enough" to warrant a reduction in skill. The alternative is to use player's ingenuity to optionally generate some ad hoc bonuses, if you'd like, but not to make the use of the skill depend on having a clever player...which this system, with its harsh divisions between "You can" and "You can't," doesn't well support.

the only time a die is rolled is if skill rank = difficulty, in which case the DC is a static 15.

You don't think we'd have granularity for "easy for a Journeyman/moderate for a Journeyman/difficult for a Journeyman"?

In Burnning Wheel, say yes or roll the dice can be applied by the GM to him/herself - ie "There is no confict here, because that is impossible, therefore no dice need to be rolled".

Right. D&D as I've been playing it uses this. I don't see the appeal of giving an "Impossible" rating to a thing, except to put a rulesey stamp on "YOU SHALL NOT PASS"

So I don't see the railroading at all. In fact, by making the situation mechanically transparent to the players, it seems to me to facilitate them making meaningful choices.

It is waaaaay too light on the Random And Fun scale for me. Meaningful choices are all well and good, but rather than being the sole engine of success, they should, for my fun, be allowed to modify the chance of success. If chance doesn't play much of a role, for me, there's little reason to bother with it.

Anyway, it seems like some folks really <3 that it's not a random system, and so I suppose for them not being surprised by success or failure is a positive, but to me, that's entirely too dull and predictable. Adventure is chaotic and unpredictable, and fun, for me, is resolving the chaos into a game along with the players. I guess there's certainly room for a system like this, but as long as I don't have to use it, that's fine.

 

[P1NBACK]

The thing I like about this system:

Never again will an 18 Str Fighter fail at bending bars, lifting gates to have a 6 Str Wizard "give it a shot" and roll a natural 20 to succeed.

How embarrassing.

No, sorry Wizard, now you automatically fail this task.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

The problem isn’t the skilled guy, but rather characters who have little chance of hitting a DC of even 10 or 15 due to armor check penalties or low ability bonuses.

One issue I see is that it sounds like Mearls' solution will exacerbate the unskilled guy who he saw as the problem. Where before the unskilled guy had little chance of succeeding at the skill check, now he'll have an absolute failure at the skill check.

And I don't like nixing a die roll because it doesn't allow for go-for-the-gold heroics. When my hero comes to the broken bridge over the ravine I can put myself in danger and try for a nigh-impossible die roll to leap across and save the princess. With Mearls' system I come to the ravine and that's it. I absolutely can't make it across.