Why PCs should be competent, or "I got a lot of past in my past"

[Micah Sweet]

I understand. However, the difference matters when we get to beyond considering you, personally, which is more my interest. So, to a degree we will talk past each other on this.

That gets into questions of popularity, which is heavily associated with questions of profit, neither of which I care about.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That gets into questions of popularity, which is heavily associated with questions of profit, neither of which I care about.

Its also, however, associated with maximal utility, which I don't think can be blown off as easily; if you feel otherwise you do, but I'd suggest not expecting other people to consider the maximum benefit to the most users is not particularly reasonable. I can care about that quite a bit without caring meaningfully about profit.

 

[Staffan]

I'm talking about the stuff that everyday people in the society do on a daily basis to get by - growing or creating food, manufacture of consumer goods for sale, the raising of children, and so on. These basic things must be low-risk, easily accomplishable tasks, or you can't have a reasonably stable society in your world.

I don't care if you commute to work by getting on a 20th century bus, or flying on a pterodactyl, or by picking up a pointy stick and going to dig for tubers - the bulk of the population must have very little problem doing it, or you lose a significant portion of the population every day to trying, and your fictional society falls apart. Broadly and statistically speaking, going to work in the morning must be pretty much a no-brainer.

If there isn't going to be a significant consequence and notable chance of failure, you don't need to roll the dice, and you aren't going to need mechanics. "Life skills," are things that generally succeed, and therefore don't need mechanics.

In my opinion, this should also apply to many uncommon skills. Using the GURPS example I used earlier, Piloting requires a roll both on take-off and landing, which creates absurd statistics.

Many, perhaps most, skills should just be things you can do. Being better at a skill should generally mean you can do it better – not necessarily with a higher chance of success (because we're talking about things where this is supposed to be automatic), but at a higher level of quality. Perhaps the issue is not whether or not I can climb the wall, but how fast I can get up.

This is an area where I think Pathfinder 2 missed an opportunity with its proficiency ranks – there should be many tasks where success is automatic (or at least automatic for certain proficiency levels), and where having higher proficiency lets you do more of it, or do it faster, or something like that. I do remember an article on the D&D web site from when they were working on 5e, and Monte Cook was involved, where he described something like that.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

This is an area where I think Pathfinder 2 missed an opportunity with its proficiency ranks – there should be many tasks where success is automatic (or at least automatic for certain proficiency levels), and where having higher proficiency lets you do more of it, or do it faster, or something like that.

in a way, pf2e does sort of do that naturally by having fixed DCs for certain tasks but rapidly scaling proficiency, so that after a certain point you can, say, perform easy treat wounds tasks with no risk of failure, or consistently long jump your maximum long jump distance without rolling.

 

[Staffan]

in a way, pf2e does sort of do that naturally by having fixed DCs for certain tasks but rapidly scaling proficiency, so that after a certain point you can, say, perform easy treat wounds tasks with no risk of failure, or consistently long jump your maximum long jump distance without rolling.

But you need to be ridiculously overleveled in order to have no risk of failure (assuming you don't take the Assurance skill feat). To have no failure chance at DC 15, you need a bonus of +24 (which would make a 1 a critical success, reduced to a regular success for rolling a 1). Assuming it uses your best stat, that's something you get at level 11 or so (master proficiency +17, stat +5, item +2). If you're OK with failing or crit-failing on a 1, you "only" need +13, which is about level 5 if you're maxed out on that skill.

With Assurance, the autosuccesses scale pretty well to the level where the next proficiency level is available.
Trained DC 15: level 3 trained.
Expert DC 20: level 6 expert (master becomes available at level 7).
Master DC 30: level 14 master (legendary becomes available at level 15).
Legendary DC 40: can't be achieved via Assurance at level 20 or lower.

 

[pemerton]

Which RPGs have it where the players aren't doing some kind of adventuring?

Apocalypse World. Wuthering Heights.

Burning Wheel can be played like this. Cthulhu Dark can, too.

That's not an exhaustive list.

 

[pemerton]

I should have been clearer when I likened a RPG to a Choose Your Own Adventure book. You did a much better job explaining this issue. I am a player and the way you described things is pretty much how my DM runs his RPG sessions. He'll describe the scene the party finds themselves in and role-play the NPCs. All the while making us guess and leaving us with hints. And sometimes the hint is an 'evil' chuckle from him.

So, when upthread I posted this:

This sounds like a description of a railroad-y approach to RPGing.

It's not essential to RPGing as such.

I was saying that there are approaches to RPGing that differ from what you describe in the post I've quoted.

I'm not saying that what you describe isn't one approach to RPGing. I'm just saying that it's not essential to RPGing. There are other ways of setting up the imagined situations, and of establishing what is at stake in them, and of adjudicating the outcomes of the actions that the players declare for their PCs.

 

[Celebrim]

In my opinion, this should also apply to many uncommon skills. Using the GURPS example I used earlier, Piloting requires a roll both on take-off and landing, which creates absurd statistics.

I agree with your assessment of how fortune should work in skill systems.

For a system built around skills it probably has the worst skill implementation in the history of RPGs. The problem here is that GURPS doesn't really have any notion of difficult. You are generally rolling against a target number set by your skill and GURPS is rather leery of modified rolls because it knows just how much havoc they play with its 3D6 fortune mechanic.

The problem is not a problem if like DC 20 or D6 you say that things have difficulties, and that the difficulty of common tasks is so low that you normally only fail them when you are distracted by something else or otherwise under adverse conditions. In both systems its reasonable to have the DC of taking off be 0 and of landing being 5, and then in both systems any reasonably competent pilot will not fail. D20 takes it a bit further by allowing you to take 10 on anything you are skilled in provided that you aren't distracted. Monte Cook spent a lot of time thinking about this casual realism problem like, "Under my system could a 2nd level Expert (pilot) reasonably expected to fly a plane?" and "Under my system are the distances people can run or jump somewhat reasonable?" It's one of the things that really impressed me about 3e.

I judge a skill system by a lot of features (GURPS fails on all of them) but one of the things I'm looking for are "Does there exist ordinary tasks of the skill that a proficient person can perform reliably (without chance of failure) but a non-proficient person may not, and further does there exist tasks so difficult that a nonproficient person cannot be expected to perform at all (auto failure) but which a very skilled person might perform reliably or at least confidently?" Because if we look at the world we see that tasks exhibit that sort of range - DC 5 to DC 25 in D20 terms.

It's never possible to accurately judge the difficulty and chance of failure of tasks with just a bonus and a fortune mechanic, but RPGs aren't really trying to be simulators so much as throw out numbers and results that are believable over a wide range of skills and tasks. As you note, the skilled pilot who Launchpad McQuack style crashes twice a month - the logical result of the GURPS system - fails that test.

 

[payn]

in a way, pf2e does sort of do that naturally by having fixed DCs for certain tasks but rapidly scaling proficiency, so that after a certain point you can, say, perform easy treat wounds tasks with no risk of failure, or consistently long jump your maximum long jump distance without rolling.

Its kind of weird in that you start ok at most stuff, but then get worse and worse at everything but one or two things which you get really good at.

 

[Wolfpack48]

I'm going to pick on you here because you gave me a really nice introduction to the topic, but this post is really a response to the entire thread.

First all, this conversation almost never is productive and I think I'll have to drop it because invariably this topic creates a lot of defensiveness about whether or not they are a good DM, or whether they had good DMs, or what it means to be good DMing and I'm really not interested in those topics and least of all when discussed from a defensive standpoint.

Then why bring it up in the first place?

But that said it is so incredibly obvious from this claim that I'm not communicating well and you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

Because absolutely, I6 Ravenloft (my favorite adventure of all time) is just a simple dungeon crawl. Indeed, it's a simpler dungeon crawl than a lot of the things that are on offering up that point. The great thing about say I6 or Hickman's other masterpiece 'Pyramid' is that Hickman takes the tools that 1e AD&D provided and he doesn't demand anything of the system other than what it already provides for and supports. I6 Ravenloft is a pure dungeon crawl of check for traps, kick down the doors, kill the monsters, and take their stuff in its purest form. But what he does is make that pure dungeon crawling experience powerfully evocative and literary by the use of a great framing story, by the use of a proactive antagonist, and by the use of great atmospherics including probably the best designed map in the history of gaming. But there is nothing going on in the game other than dungeon crawl and one of the ways you can tell that is that Hickman has to create relatively few inline rulings or minigames to describe the encounters that he designed.

I'm going to ignore your first sentence here because like your previous paragraph, I don't think it's productive.

I picked Ravenloft because we were talking about "killing monsters and taking their stuff" and I highlighted the sentence in your post that I had in mind when I picked it -- the scenario is one where the plotline and character and backstory around the adventure is important enough that there's more to it than simply killing monsters (although there is plenty of that). I could have picked Village of Hommlet or Dragonlance I suppose as they have other plot and information gathering elements besides simply killing everything in the dungeoncrawl. Dragonlance even aspires to character development along the way, though a lot of folks didn't like the sweeping narrative ("railorad-y") arc. When I talked about primordial, I meant the earliest dungeons (B2) where basically clearing out the monsters is the goal.

I6 Ravenloft is not a module that shows off 1e AD&D's limits as a game. Quite the contrary, it's a module that shows off the game's strengths. If you want to show off the weaknesses of the system you are much better off picking another even older dungeon crawl and that's S2 White Plume Mountain. This is a "dungeon crawl" that is anything but a classic kick down the doors dungeon crawl and instead envisions the entire dungeon as a series of custom minigames where the rules of the game are encoded into each encounter area. Read the text of S2 and then imagine you're a brand manager or design manager for the game tasked with reviewing a writer's submissions and making sure that he is adhering to the game rules and making sure that single set of rules are utilized by all the various writers, designers, and contractors you've hired. It's really clear that there is absolutely no concept of that in publishing S2 and also that the designers of the dungeons are getting more creative than the rules allow. Sure, there is less story and literary value here than in I6, but I6 sticks within what the game knows how to cover. S2 however immediately creates the problem that 1e AD&D's lack of a unified skill system means that how a particular challenge is handled by the game is all over the place, not only across the brand but sometimes even within the same product.

Now, S2 is what I would also call a classic funhouse dungeon, and If we're talking "killing monsters and taking their stuff" this is a classic example of that. Plotline? Character? Essentially zero.

Right, so the scenarios started running into situations that the rulebooks didn't cover, and so they handled this by writing adventure-specific effects. In this particular scenario, most of the spot rules were about the particular traps -- pretty common in the day. I doubt you could come with a "unified trap system" for any of these custom funhouse rooms.

I played back then as well and we had blast and for the first few years this was all so novel that I didn't even realize we were having problems or what they were and I sure as heck didn't have a clue what the solutions were. But as for the claim this isn't rocket science, go look at the text of the flooding room trap in C1 and evaluate it as a set of skill rules for swimming with the intention of using it as the basis of general rules for swimming/drowning/rescuing people ect. Imagine the rules used for PC's as lifeguards on the beach or something if you think it wasn't rocket science to shift game focus.

Right, so what I was saying earlier applies here. My statement about "rocket science" referred to players coming up with house rules for these sorts of things, or as in this scenario, written, adventure-specific rulings. We didn't worry or care at the time about whether those were the best rules possible or whether they would be used in all instances. I actually don't even worry much about them today. At the time, there was a Dragon article about using your character stats for dealing with "skill tests" (e.g. roll under your INT to make a "Knowledge check" to get more info about something you observe. Roll under your DEX to jump across the roofs of two buildings). When I say it isn't rocket science, I mean we happily grabbed those approaches (or made our own) and didn't worry too much about whether they were official rulings -- we did what we needed to do to get by, and that was fine. Now, newer systems have nice systems for stuff like this, and we use those. Shrug? In any case, these house rulings weren't "rocket science."

Because like I said, the fact that you evaluate I6 as something other than a simple dungeon crawl is hugely revealing that this problem never even struck you back in the day and you really never had a lot of soul searching about it. I'm not saying that to attack your DMing, because I sure as heck am not defending all my DMing back before age 23 or so or even heck to this very day (I still learn and make mistakes). But we are really really on different pages.

Again, this isn't productive.