D&D 5E Do you use the Success w/ Complication Module in the DMG or Fail Forward in the Basic PDF

[Swarmkeeper]

When I see a bad mechanic I'll call it out, no matter what edition it's in, and won't apologize for doing so.

And I'm earnestly happy that you do so, as it makes us 5e'ers think more deeply about how we play. No one is asking you to apologize for it. Of course, your arguments would hold more weight if you actually experienced the mechanic in the context of playing a 5e game. Just sayin'.

Also, do as you will, but it might be nice for those that aren't familiar with you if you would occasionally addend your commentary in 5e threads with something like: "I prefer how it works in 1e which is..." or similar. There are new people joining 5e and the forums all the time, so it would be good to parse what's what with advice.

You're either forgetting or wilfully ignoring the flip side: that being there's always a meaningful consequence to a success.

Actually, I'm doing neither of those things. I'm just following the 5e rules for Ability Checks. 5e DMG p237 for those following along at home.

In this case it's that the party can move on; which by extension means failure equalling no change in the fiction is always a valid outcome. Put another way, 5e has it backwards: you should call for a check if a) there's doubt as to the outcome and b) there's a meaningful consequence to success.

I dunno, the 5e rules seem to work really well for fun at our table and many, many others. You ought to play 5e for several sessions to experience the totality of it. "But this is the way we've always done it" truly doesn't apply when playing the newest edition, IME. In fact, it causes more angst at the table than you might think to try to play 5e as if it were partly a prior edition. One can end up fighting the rules and/or awkwardly kludging together rules in that situation potentially resulting in unsatisfactory gameplay. Things run much more smoothly IME by simply letting the 5e rules work as intended.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

You're either forgetting or wilfully ignoring the flip side: that being there's always a meaningful consequence to a success. In this case it's that the party can move on; which by extension means failure equalling no change in the fiction is always a valid outcome. Put another way, 5e has it backwards: you should call for a check if a) there's doubt as to the outcome and b) there's a meaningful consequence to success.

This is really interesting thought. I'm still examining it.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I use it in some Situation. Because not using it only comlicates matters and involves meaningless rerolls.
In many situations it is not doing it differently than just make it fail and then the more time consuing "if there is a chance that PCs might succeed, then assume they succeed if they just take their time".
In other situations failing forward does not make sense, usually when a failure does not stop the adventure from happening.

 

[Aldarc]

When I see a bad mechanic I'll call it out, no matter what edition it's in, and won't apologize for doing so.

You're either forgetting or wilfully ignoring the flip side: that being there's always a meaningful consequence to a success. In this case it's that the party can move on; which by extension means failure equalling no change in the fiction is always a valid outcome. Put another way, 5e has it backwards: you should call for a check if a) there's doubt as to the outcome and b) there's a meaningful consequence to success.

A third option exists: both you and 5e are wrong. This is to say, that you should call for a check if (a) there's doubt to the outcome, and (b) there's a meaningful consequence to both success and failure.

 

[tetrasodium]

A third option exists: both you and 5e are wrong. This is to say, that you should call for a check if (a) there's doubt to the outcome, and (b) there's a meaningful consequence to both success and failure.

I think this gets overlooked way too often, especially by newer gms relying on a prebuilt adventure (ie module/hc/etc) non success and nifty stuff happens. Bob fails and... "well crud I hope they wander into the important thing the module needs them to know or do in some other way"

 

[Argyle King]

While I love Dungeon World to no end, the only game that does D&D fantasy is, well, D&D.

Dungeon World, while cosplaying D&D, at least in my hands, generates a vastly different experience. The characters advance much more "horizontally" and acquire new ways of dealing with challenges, but their power level generally stays the same -- lvl 1 characters can take on a dragon, it's gonna be a hard battle and they will pay a great price. Lvl 10 characters can take on a dragon, and it's still going to be a hard battle and still will pay a great price. Playing DW is like watching and writing a fantasy TV show at the same time.

D&D, on the other hand, is much more "gamey". It feels like a tabletop Diablo, and it's something I honestly enjoy from time to time. The characters grow from being scared of goblins to wrestling with dragons over the span of the game, ridiculous things like grabbing a book so it can't be burned by a fireball actually work and when bossfight starts I draw a giant HP bar on screen. We also measure damage numbers in hundreds at tier 1, thousands at tier 2, and tens of thousands at tier 3+, lol. Because "I HIT HIM WITH MY SWORD FOR TWENTY THOUSAND DAMAGE!" is much cooler than "uh, yeah, 20 damage".

Overall, if my Dungeon World villain is "played by Christopher Lee", then my D&D villain is "voiced by Troy Baker".

So out-of-combat scenes are closer to QTEs with exploding helicopters and naughty word than they are to, well, scenes in a big-budget fantasy TV show. And I want my QTEs cool and bombastic, with exploding helicopters and falling buildings.

I think your post just convinced me to check it out.

 

[Charlaquin]

Different perspective. You say the 2 means there's a 90% chance you could have done better but I say the 2 means that for some reason this particular lock has you stumped and that the farthest you're going to get with it is nowhere: you could not have done better in this instance as the 2 represents the best you're gonna get. No re-rolls.

No, I literally could have done better, if I had rolled anything else. You can rule that I’m not allowed to try again until circumstances change if that’s how you prefer to run the game, but it’s an objective fact that I could have done better.

And yes, this makes things more difficult in general for the PCs by in effect lowering their odds of success at any given moment. I'm more than fine with that.

Difficulty isn’t what I’m concerned about here.

I disagree that it's best DMing practice to compare the best a character could ever do (i.e. a roll of 20) with a situation's difficulty and just say either straight yes or straight no.

That’s not what I do. DCs aren’t just out in the wild, existing independently of actions. There’s no difficulty to compare to unless there’s an action being performed that could succeed, could fail, and has a consequence for failure, and in that case what I compare it to is the result of the player’s actual roll, not to the best they could have rolled. However, if there’s no chance of failure or no consequence for failure, there’s no DC and no comparison. I just narrate the results of success.

That makes it purely binary, where in reality there'd be many more factors.

It’s not purely binary - some actions have costs that must be paid to even attempt them, and some have consequences on a failure that result in progress with a setback. Some tasks even have different consequences at different thresholds, though I generally try to avoid using that.

Some days you just ain't got it. Sometimes something that in theory should be in your pay grade is still beyond you.

This is the only defense I’ve ever seen of the “your first try represents your best attempt technique” and I don’t find it compelling because I don’t see any gameplay value in modeling that.

Flip side: some days you're really rocking and pull off that best-ever move, beating something that most of the time would defeat you.

Well, sure, sometimes you get a great roll. That’s the nature of dice.

20 isn't the norm. It's the exception. 10 is the norm, and Take-10 - while boring - is a mechanic I can thus live with.

Again, I’m not advocating for take 20. I don’t like take 20. It’s a sloppy attempt to make best DMing practice (only calling for rolls when there are sufficient dramatic stakes to warrant it) and turns it into a player-facing mechanic. In so doing, it causes weirdness like comparing the best possible result to the difficulty of every task, which also necessitates the nonsense that is having naked DCs absent an specific action they’re being used to resolve. Take 10 has similar issues, though not as bad. There are at least some situations where it can be useful to represent the average result of a task performed repeatedly over time with a 10 + relevant modifiers.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think your post just convinced me to check it out.

It’s an excellent system.

 

[Charlaquin]

A third option exists: both you and 5e are wrong. This is to say, that you should call for a check if (a) there's doubt to the outcome, and (b) there's a meaningful consequence to both success and failure.

I struggle to imagine a scenario where failure has a meaningful consequence but success doesn’t.

 

[loverdrive]

I struggle to imagine a scenario where failure has a meaningful consequence but success doesn’t.

If the character is trying to somehow retain status quo, or otherwise nothing changes on a success. Like, I don't know, requiring a roll to resist a temptation.

But I think that's more of a Fate-esque "what's cool" thinking that I don't think is that fitting to D&D.