The Two-Roll Rule: A rule for cases where everyone could make a skill roll

[Jhaelen]

With these rules, the wizard will never succeed in finding food after the ranger and the rogue fail. So it's just a matter of whether anyone considers this to be a worse gameplay issue than letting everyone have an attempt, and virtually guaranteeing success on any check that only needs one success (unless the GM artificially inflates the difficulties).

I think that's fine, especially if the Wizard doesn't have any training in a skill that might help finding food. Actually, I'd expect a wizard (at least in D&D) to know a spell that might help, though.

The question to me is:
How many checks are there that only need one success? Finding food seems to be an activity that allows for multiple successes to lead to better results, i.e. find _more_ food.

The thread that inspired this discussion was mainly about Knowledge skills. Knowledge skills, imho, also work best, if multiple successes can be used to improve the initial result, i.e. hand out information in small increments. This also simulates that if one pc remembers something and tells the others, it may remind them of something they initially didn't think of on their own.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The thread that inspired this discussion was mainly about Knowledge skills. Knowledge skills, imho, also work best, if multiple successes can be used to improve the initial result, i.e. hand out information in small increments. This also simulates that if one pc remembers something and tells the others, it may remind them of something they initially didn't think of on their own.

I guess it depends on which you prefer - that the ranger is likely to remember some detail about magic that the wizard has forgotten, or that the ranger should almost never know something about magic that the wizard doesn't know.

For my money, the second generalization seems way more reasonable. In my mind, the only time the ranger would ever know more about magic is if they grew up in a region with very specific magical traditions with which the wizard wasn't familiar (e.g. the ranger grew up in a land full of undead, but the wizard had only read about them in books). This is doubly important in a system utilizing Bounded Accuracy, which greatly increases the chance of any chump randomly making a difficult knowledge check after the expert fails (i.e. the die vastly outweighs the modifier, so the ranger can roll a 15 with no bonus and easily beat the wizard's score of 5 + significant bonuses).

 

[GMMichael]

The Two-Roll Rule
Sometimes the whole party must complete a task (swim across an underground river, for example), though only some of them actually have the skills for it. Even a very competent party is unlikely to have everyone succeed at anything non-trivial. This sometimes makes for fun improvisation, but at other times it’s just a pain in the butt.

At other times, it might seem like everyone, independently, could at least attempt a task (like spotting a stealthy enemy). This has the opposite problem; allowing everyone to roll when only one person needs to succeed doesn’t work well, making many tasks far too easy.

I think these premises need consideration.

When must the whole party complete a task? If only half of them can cross an underground river, well, either the successful ones lower the drawbridge from the other side, or the non-swimmers find another route. If this is just a way to address splitting the party, you will hopefully agree that splitting the party occasionally is not a bad thing.

When it comes to the second case, I typically just ask for one roll from the best candidate, or ask everyone to roll, and whoever rolls highest gets the worm. For what it's worth.

The wizard shouldn't get a chance to hunt for food after the ranger fails, because the 2 on the ranger's skill check indicates a scarcity of game (among other things), and the circumstances which cause the ranger to fail would not allow the wizard to succeed. Those circumstances aren't going to change, just because someone else is making the attempt.

+1. If your specialist rolls low, it's not because he's rolling low. It's because the wind is wrong, or the gods have cursed the party, or...

 

[jeffh]

One of the problems in letting everyone roll is that it assumes the chances of each character are entirely independent of each other, when the die roll is really meant to encompass a number of variables outside of just your individual skill. The wizard shouldn't get a chance to hunt for food after the ranger fails, because the 2 on the ranger's skill check indicates a scarcity of game (among other things), and the circumstances which cause the ranger to fail would not allow the wizard to succeed. Those circumstances aren't going to change, just because someone else is making the attempt.

Thanks for spelling this out. At the time this post appeared I was thinking about a "by the way, you can justify a lot of this in a simulationist way" further follow-up to Hemlock, but then you went ahead and wrote it more articulately than I was likely to.

The downside of this method is that it prevents anyone but the most likely from ever succeeding. With these rules, the wizard will never succeed in finding food after the ranger and the rogue fail. So it's just a matter of whether anyone considers this to be a worse gameplay issue than letting everyone have an attempt, and virtually guaranteeing success on any check that only needs one success (unless the GM artificially inflates the difficulties). That comes down to personal preference, but I see it as a small price to pay.

It's also sometimes possible for the weaker (at the skill in question, not necessarily physically) characters to aid the stronger ones, as Mark also points out. He labels it as an alternative to my rule but there's no reason you couldn't use both together. (The current draft of my rules doesn't explicitly acknowledge this possibility, but contains nothing that would invalidate it.) In this way you can at least sometimes have everyone participate, even under these rules. That will only help on some rolls; for example, I stopped allowing aid on Perception a while back (PCs who've already spotted something can point it out to ones who haven't, but that's not the same thing). But on attempts to forage I agree that it seems it should be possible. You might flavour it (no pun intended) as the low-skilled characters picking berries or doing similar relatively easy tasks, while the more skilled ones hunt or fish.

(In my own die-pool based system, the two "main" characters would roll their usual dice, everyone else would pick one of them to help out and roll one die, and the chosen character basically treats that die as part of his/her roll. 3rd and 4th generation D&D have Aid Another, which works similarly. 5th is more coarse-grained in this respect, but there's no reason you couldn't grandfather in the older version of helping if you like it better.)

 

[jeffh]

I think these premises need consideration.

When must the whole party complete a task? If only half of them can cross an underground river, well, either the successful ones lower the drawbridge from the other side, or the non-swimmers find another route. If this is just a way to address splitting the party, you will hopefully agree that splitting the party occasionally is not a bad thing.

Even in these cases, it's preferable if everyone can get across at once, no? I don't see how the (in any case situational) existence of alternatives invalidates the general point.

 

[GMMichael]

Even in these cases, it's preferable if everyone can get across at once, no? I don't see how the (in any case situational) existence of alternatives invalidates the general point.

You're right - the point isn't invalidated. There are times when the PCs and GM want the entire party to be in the same situation, and it's too time consuming to wait for everyone to roll.

Bear in mind: rules have agendas. You can't completely separate the rules from the story. So the Two Roll rule will likely have an effect of making the party "sticky," like the Attacks of Opportunity made some D&D duels sticky. Not a bad thing, but urging gameplay in one direction might lead it away from another.

Personally, I usually don't find it preferable for the party to act as a whole. When the PCs have to compromise, sacrifice, and even go solo...that's when you get some good drama. My PCs just spent an entire session together in a playhouse, just to get mostly separated by the end of this last session. Now, they're shaking in their boots because they feel their lifelines pulled taut, in all directions!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

You're right - the point isn't invalidated. There are times when the PCs and GM want the entire party to be in the same situation, and it's too time consuming to wait for everyone to roll.

Bear in mind: rules have agendas. You can't completely separate the rules from the story. So the Two Roll rule will likely have an effect of making the party "sticky," like the Attacks of Opportunity made some D&D duels sticky. Not a bad thing, but urging gameplay in one direction might lead it away from another.

That is a good and interesting point. I'm probably influenced by the fact that my players are not just willing but often eager to split the party, either for RP reasons or to maximize freedom of action (as opposed to survivability). So party stickiness isn't a rules feature that I need to prioritize.

 

[jeffh]

I meant "preferable" tactically. But I must say I see much less conflict between gameplay and story here than some of you appear to. If I'm trying to think in character (which, as a player, I sometimes do and sometimes don't), I am if anything even harder pressed to think of a good reason why my top priority should be something other than survival than if I'm thinking consciously of the tactical game. Unless I've more or less consciously created a character with a literal death wish, it's very hard to justify not having self-preservation be a major motivating factor - not the only one by any means, but a big one, that wins nearly any conflict. People who talk like it's good role-playing to ignore tactical considerations puzzle me.