Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flights of Fancy" data-source="post: 9668277" data-attributes="member: 7037975">The problem with this is meta-currency. The player knows it was bad luck when they rolled a 4. You might think they shouldn't know why, but the truth is the player knows. Depending on the scene, they might feel it is pretty stupid and resent failing due simply to bad luck.I have no issue with 5% success, in and off itself. I take issue when the numbers say there should be 0%, and people want the "nat 20" to work anyway. If a roll of 20 can't make the numbers work for success, there should never be a roll. That is what I am saying.But it isn't a 1-in-20, it is a 0-in-20. A roll of 20, -1 for STR 8, is 19 which fails the DC 20.Sure, and I can see why some groups embrace that. Unless a DM is strict about when to call for checks and doesn't allow absurdly ridiculous thing, I can't get behind the 1 always failing and 20 always succeeding. I like to keep it simple: if the roll + bonuses makes it, you succeed. Otherwise you fail. I don't care if the roll is 20--if you don't have the bonuses to make the extra amount, no good.Great example. That natural 20 on the combat matrices (?) in 1E was to allow someone to hit higher ACs without bonuses. Once the numbers went over 20, you needed a natural 20 AND a bonus of +1 (for 21) or better (for higher numbers).I suppose you could extrapolate that to 5E-mechanics, so if natural 20+bonus is "within 5" of the DC, then you can do it. In the jumping example above, that would be such a case. But if the DC was 25, then even the natural 20 would fail.But this gets to a level of nuiance that many players don't care to embrace I would think.</blockquote>

Verification