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

[Charlaquin]

So there's just some 5-100% variable that gets tossed in?

Indeed, accounting for all sorts of factors external to the raw difficulty of the task and your character’s capabilities.

No, I couldn't, because I didn't. If I roll a 7, that is the highest that roll could ever be.

That’s just not true unless you believe in pure determinism. If you roll a 7 on a d20, there are objectively 19 other numbers you could have rolled, 13 of which would have been higher. Just because you didn’t roll any of those other numbers doesn’t mean it was impossible for you to have rolled any of them.

It would take a different roll to get a different number. It was only variable before the roll, and since 1 roll is all you ever get, there's no way to have done better.

Unless you rolled a different number on that first roll, which was a possibility (again, unless you believe in pure determinism).

I can see that. However, that just means that 95% of the time you aren't trying your best which doesn't mesh with how people do important tasks that their lives depend on.

No, it means 95% of the time you don’t output the best of your ability, despite your best effort to do so.

I mean, sure, if I'm out in the flower bed pulling the weeds my wife has asked me to pull, I'm probably not giving it my all, but if I was on a roof and had a killer with a knife headed my way, and there was a narrow board between two buildings as my only escape, you can be darned sure I'd be giving it 100% as I walked across.

Of course you would. But all sorts of factors could prevent you from balancing to the best of your ability. Not the least of which in that situation would probably be stress.

 

[Maxperson]

Indeed, accounting for all sorts of factors external to the raw difficulty of the task and your character’s capabilities.

That’s just not true unless you believe in pure determinism. If you roll a 7 on a d20, there are objectively 19 other numbers you could have rolled, 13 of which would have been higher. Just because you didn’t roll any of those other numbers doesn’t mean it was impossible for you to have rolled any of them.

Unless you rolled a different number on that first roll, which was a possibility (again, unless you believe in pure determinism).

That's not what determinism means. Nobody is arguing that our actions are prescripted. I wasn't forced to try and climb the hard wall by some predetermined script. Nor is what I'm arguing that the 7 I rolled was determined in advance.

What I am saying is that before the roll there are 20 possible results. After the roll ends up a 7, the other 19 are now shut off and were never possible for that roll. We know what the roll is. At least not without time travel allowing us to go back and roll again, in which case the 2nd time travel time around, it could be a 12.

No, it means 95% of the time you don’t output the best of your ability, despite your best effort to do so.

That still doesn't mesh with how things work. Watch the Olympics sometime. Unless someone fumbles, their attempts will all be close to their best. There's isn't some 5-100% variation in the works to see if they succeed or not.

Of course you would. But all sorts of factors could prevent you from balancing to the best of your ability. Not the least of which in that situation would probably be stress.

But not a 5-100% variation.

 

[Charlaquin]

That's not what determinism means. Nobody is arguing that our actions are prescripted. I wasn't forced to try and climb the hard wall by some predetermined script. Nor is what I'm arguing that the 7 I rolled was determined in advance.

What I am saying is that before the roll there are 20 possible results. After the roll ends up a 7, the other 19 are now shut off and were never possible for that roll. We know what the roll is. At least not without time travel allowing us to go back and roll again, in which case the 2nd time travel time around, it could be a 12.

But it was possible to have rolled a different number, which means it was possible for “your character’s best” to have been better (or worse). Just because it wasn’t doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been.

That still doesn't mesh with how things work. Watch the Olympics sometime. Unless someone fumbles, their attempts will all be close to their best. There's isn't some 5-100% variation in the works to see if they succeed or not.

But not a 5-100% variation.

Two things here: The olympics is an extremely controlled environment, designed specifically to facilitate athletes performances being based on skill alone. Second of all, it isn’t really a full 5-100% variation. It’s binary. You either did well enough to succeed, or you didn’t. So, let’s say you have a +5 to your roll and you need a total of 15 or higher to succeed, you have a 55% chance of succeeding and a 45% chance of failing. How much you succeed or fail by isn’t really relevant.

 

[Maxperson]

But it was possible to have rolled a different number, which means it was possible for “your character’s best” to have been better (or worse). Just because it wasn’t doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been.

But none of that matters after the roll. After the roll is was no longer possible to do better. The roll itself determined what the roll would have been. Not something prior to the roll(determinism).

Two things here: The olympics is an extremely controlled environment, designed specifically to facilitate athletes performances being based on skill alone. Second of all, it isn’t really a full 5-100% variation. It’s binary.

Degrees of success or failure are a thing in 5e. Fail by 1 or 2 and you might have succeeded with a cost. Fail by 5 or more, and maybe you fall instead of making no progress. Knowledge checks often have graded success rates. Roll a 15 and you learn X. Roll a 20 and you get X and Y. Roll a 25 and you get X, Y and Z. It's not actually binary.

 

[Charlaquin]

But none of that matters after the roll. After the roll is was no longer possible to do better. The roll itself determined what the roll would have been. Not something prior to the roll(determinism).

The roll determines what the roll was, not what the roll could have been. Thus, if you roll less than a 20 in a “one roll represents your best effort” system, your best effort was less than it could have been.

You can say that doesn’t matter to you, and that’s fine. It does matter to me.

Degrees of success or failure are a thing in 5e. Fail by 1 or 2 and you might have succeeded with a cost. Fail by 5 or more, and maybe you fall instead of making no progress. Knowledge checks often have graded success rates. Roll a 15 and you learn X. Roll a 20 and you get X and Y. Roll a 25 and you get X, Y and Z. It's not actually binary.

Degrees of success or failure can be a thing if the DM decides. Most often, they are not. When they are, it is usually only trinary or quarternary at most. A full 1-20 granularity is rare, and something D&D 5e is really not built to handle.

 

[Maxperson]

The roll determines what the roll was, not what the roll could have been. Thus, if you roll less than a 20 in a “one roll represents your best effort” system, your best effort was less than it could have been.

No! The best effort was not less than it could of been. Best = best. Period. Only the roll was lower than it could have been, which is irrelevant if you only get 1 roll.

You can say that doesn’t matter to you, and that’s fine. It does matter to me.

Let me rephrase. None of that matters objectively after the roll. Objectively, all the other numbers are irrelevant to how well you did or could have done on that roll. Subjectively, yes, you care about it and it matters to you.

Degrees of success or failure can be a thing if the DM decides. Most often, they are not. When they are, it is usually only trinary or quarternary at most. A full 1-20 granularity is rare, and something D&D 5e is really not built to handle.

Sure. My point is that binary isn't inherent to the system. It's not just pass/fail.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I get what you mean, but I wouldn’t call it preemptively bending the narrative. There is no narrative until the players create it. There is only the world. You build the world to include objectives for the characters to pursue, and obstacles in the way of that pursuit, then you turn them loose in the world and see what happens. Sometimes that may mean things the players attempt don’t have consequences for failure, and that’s fine; they can have that. Other times, there will be natural consequences, and if there are, you roll to find out if the characters avoid them. If they want to keep trying and it’s still possible within the fiction, you let them.

Narrative, the world, the fiction. Pick your choose.

It does. Work is something I’m willing to do as DM to create a better player experience.

Me too, but I choose where to put my work carefully, and I’d rather put more work into adjudication than in front-loading world-building more.

How so?

I really wish the new forums had a function to include quoted text when quoting someone. I keep having to scroll up and see which part someone is replying to. So, this is in reply to “reduces room for improv”. I allow the PCs to create or change aspects of the world via improvised storytelling during play. This ties into what I’ll talk about wrt “volcanic” worldbuilding, but basically, I only decide the general difficulty of a thing ahead of time. I often don’t even keep an NPC statblock as written if what the PCs come up with changes what I want from the encounter. So, because I haven’t decide exactly the inner workings of a lock ahead of time, I can decide in response to a bad roll, that it is a trick lock and they need to investigate it in order to unlock it, or I can simply say, “it’s odd, you feel like it should have worked.” And then the players, directly or indirectly, determine that it’s a trick lock by speculating about it and then investigating further. Then, when they roll a high investigate check or arcana check or whatever, the nature of the lock and what stumped them initially is revealed, either allowing a newcheck or even negating the need for another check.

likewise, I might say, it’s an odd lock, how do you approach it? And their response might lead to a tools check, an investigate, and an arcana, and which rolls succeed or fail might determine, with input from the players, what is happening in the fiction.

This is not the case in my experience. On the contrary, it drives more engagement in my experience.

I imagine that is both due to our differing preferences and their effect on how a given resolution system plays out, and a driver of why we prefer different things. The causality of preference is loopy like that, IME.

I’m not familiar with the term. I assume it means the world is being created as you’re playing?

Not just that, but that is part of it. Rather it is about building enough of the world for it to feel complete and alive, but leaving room for your ideas about the world to change, and being willing to throw out pages or even chapters of information you’d prepared because soemthing the PCs said or did made some other idea into a much better idea for this particular campaign.

That means that in my Eberron campaign, there is a noble house in Breland and Thrane that is engaged in a shadow-war with The Twelve in order to break their monopolies, and it means that I don’t actually know yet whether Erandis Vol is actually a villain or not, and even if I did “know”, my answer could change next session when I get a strong indication that my BoV Paladin PC is looking for a tragic story to redeem some bittersweet ending out of, or is looking for an enemy that is visceral to her story and who she can just brutally murder without remorse.

Depends on what sort of elegance we’re talking about, I suppose. Avoiding front-loading certainly makes for a smoother DMing experience, which I suppose is a sort of elegance. I’m talking more about an elegant player experience.

IME, avoiding front loading creates a smoother player experience, as well.

I feel strongly that there are benefits to both approaches. I play D&D when I want the benefits of the former, and I play other games that are designed from the ground up for the latter when I want that.

Whereas for me, D&D, especially 5e, runs just as smoothly either way.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

That's not what determinism means. Nobody is arguing that our actions are prescripted. I wasn't forced to try and climb the hard wall by some predetermined script. Nor is what I'm arguing that the 7 I rolled was determined in advance.

What I am saying is that before the roll there are 20 possible results. After the roll ends up a 7, the other 19 are now shut off and were never possible for that roll. We know what the roll is. At least not without time travel allowing us to go back and roll again, in which case the 2nd time travel time around, it could be a 12.

That still doesn't mesh with how things work. Watch the Olympics sometime. Unless someone fumbles, their attempts will all be close to their best. There's isn't some 5-100% variation in the works to see if they succeed or not.

But not a 5-100% variation.

To be fair, this is a great argument for either using 2d10 or some other multi-die setup rather than a single d20, or making most tasks use multiple checks to determine degree of success/failure. The d20 is much too swingy to model reality well.

 

[Lanefan]

I think the more interesting discussion is around where did this "one and done" approach come from,

1e was the first place I saw it, in the write-up for bend bars/lift gates*.

what problem was it attempting to solve,

The problem of allowing infinite retries of the same approach - i.e. lots of dice rolling - until a high-enough roll comes up.

and how could said problems be solved in a more elegant manner?

Not sure it can, as the one-roll solution is already about as elegant as it gets. 3e tried going the other way and assuming a 20 would eventually occur, with the take-20 mechanic. This, while admittedly just as elegant, brought about the (IMO unacceptable) side-effect problem of every task becoming a purely binary you-can-do-it-or-you-can't setup: any uncertainty was removed.


* - I originally mistyped that as "bend bard/lift gates", which brings to mind a few interesting visuals...

 

[Lanefan]

Yes and this applies to some extent to the other players at the table. If one PC fails, others may try to join in, resulting in a cascade of rolls until someone rolls high. Telling the original player they can’t roll again and then allowing others to just roll... or not... ends up with some rather... unsatisfactory gameplay, IME.

Far more satisfactory than having the same player re-roll, in that having someone else join in means a different approach is occurring in the fiction. Therefore, reroll.