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With your procedure (assuming I understand you correctly), the DM constantly monitors all mods and, if a nat 20 wouldn't be good enough to hit the DC once mods are added or subtracted, then the roll is prohibited and does not occur. So there would never be a situation when a nat 20 would fail...

I think the fundamental wellspring of disagreement here is that some DMs (myself, for one) think of ability check DCs as the difficulty that an indeterminate character would have performing the task. And it turns out that other DMs (Maxperson and UngainlyTitan, for two, if I understand them...

Correct. This was in response to people telling me that 2014 RAW demanded that no rolls ever be made by players unless a nat 20 would succeed. My question was, if you play that way, how do you adjudicate the situation I was describing? That’s a good point. The 2014 rules don’t provide any...

Thanks for explaining. It’s great to get an insight into other people’s styles. You're right—our basic philosophies are on different planets! I've never even considered the idea of setting DCs based on which character is attempting the task. I wonder how many DMs operate that way? It seems to...

Thanks. That's a very common house rule—but it is a house rule. And it nerfs the Bard's Jack of All Trades feature, among other things. You keep saying "if failure is meaningful." I know that's language from the RAW, but I confess it has always struck me as highly ambiguous in many situations...

What would you do if the group encounters something and someone asks, "Have I heard about this before?" Would you let the player roll a knowledge ability check to determine that? Arcana, History, and Religion each "measure your ability to recall lore" about these topics. That's all they do. If...

Do you really do this? Every time? Really? Let's say a PC says she wants to climb a 100-foot-tall, dangerous wall. The DM determines that a DC 22 Strength (Athletics) check is required to successfully climb the wall. The PC's modifier for this check is +0. (The DM may not know this, by the...

I'm sure you're right: this is the movie tie-in adventure book. Neverwinter is a really good guess, too. I'm far less persuaded by the notion that they didn't say so because they're waiting until they see whether the movie looks good or bad. It's Hasbro making the movie, not some other studio...

This is awesome! But... as a matter of playtesting, I wonder whether this rule would have led to such excitement if it had been a part of the game from the beginning.

This is a total tangent, because truly wacky edge cases like this shouldn't be taken into account when evaluating a proposed rules change. But, under current rules and using only WotC-produced items and abilities, it's possible to succeed on a DC 30 check despite rolling a natural 1. (I mean...

To be clear: this precise situation, where everyone has an exactly equal chance, will happen only on checks where the DC is exactly equal to 20 + the highest modifier in the party on that particular check. Part of the discrepancy between my position and others' is that it seems this is very...

I don't intend for it to be taken as universal. I was asked for an example of why I might set a DC at 30 for the sake of world-building; I gave the example; then I was told the new rule wouldn't make a difference in that case, when it actually more than quadruples the chance of success. I don't...

All five PCs are rolling. Under the new rule, one PC out of five needs to roll a 20 to succeed, and everyone succeeds on a 20. There’s a 22.6% chance that at least one will do so. And let's say that one of them has a +10 to the check— a cleric with a +5 Wis mod, plus a proficiency bonus of +5...

The party in Eberron has a 22.6% probability of someone knowing the thing that is supposed to be "nearly impossible" to know. None of their stats or skill proficiencies will raise or lower this probability (though guidance, bardic inspiration, etc., could raise their chances even higher if those...

A party of five 16th-level characters hears a cultist raving about Tharizdun. The players have not heard of Tharizdun during play in this campaign. The party is in the Free City of Greyhawk, and none of them has ever left Greyspace. Tharizdun is a Greyhawk deity but not a widely known one among...

In my games, not every ability check is "relevant to the progression of the plot." I'd even go so far as to say that none of them are. There is no predetermined plot. There's just a world to interact with. But I've realized that bringing up knowledge checks was a wrong turn, because (1) I'm...

Sorry, I didn’t intend to sound curt. If you don’t set DCs higher than 15, then of course this rules change won’t affect you (literally—it won’t affect you, since it only exists for when a nat 20 isn’t usually good enough to succeed, which means the DC must have been above 15 even for someone...

No, it’s not.

I'm starting to think my DMing style is very unusual: I frequently set DCs higher than 20—partly, I think, because my players routinely attempt to do things that are "hard" or harder; only about 1/3, or in some cases less, of game time is spent on combat; there are lots of calls for rolls...

Everyone seems to think these edge cases will seldom happen. I guess they must call for a lot fewer rolls than I do. I run intrigue-heavy games. And I run more than one game. When my players hear about some new piece of lore, or learn about something that happened long ago, and they ask, “Do...