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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 8649065" data-attributes="member: 97077">This aligns with my thoughts on how things work in D&D 5e. If a proposed action has both an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence for failure, then some kind of roll if appropriate. If it lacks at least one of these conditions, then there's no roll. Reasonable people can disagree on what is meaningful in context, particularly in the abstract. (They're probably more able to agree at an actual table during play.) Without employing the flourishes on DMG 242, we can resolve the action into success, failure, or progress combined with a setback. With DMG 242, we have more options if we want.Calling for an ability check when it vaguely smells like it could align with a skill is a hard habit to break in my experience. DMs can see a benefit to stopping for a moment to consider whether the outcome is truly uncertain and whether there's a meaningful consequence for failure before calling for a check. They may find that they start calling for fewer checks than before, balancing out automatic success with ability checks in a way the Middle Path method in the DMG lays out. Players can also make this easier on the DM (and themselves) by being reasonably specific and clear about what they're doing and hope to accomplish with an eye toward succeeding without a check at all, if they can. This can have the side effect of enriching the conversation of the game and making the setting seem like a real place.Finally, a simple trick to making actions have meaningful consequences by default: Make Time Matter. This is already built into combat, if you think about it. If I fail to hit with my attack roll (a boring binary result of hit/miss), then it could be that the monster who is trying to kill me gets another turn to attack. In an exploration or some social interaction challenges, time could be ticking down toward an unwanted outcome or there could be wandering monster checks or random encounter checks at specific intervals. In these cases, "you fail to pick the lock" goes from a boring binary result to "We're one step closer to the prince being sacrificed to demons at midnight" or "Now there's a chance we might get eaten by a grue." Those are meaningful consequences that are easy to implement and understand and creates opportunities for the players to make meaningful decisions and trade-offs. In my experience, the more meaningful decisions the players can make per unit of game time, the more engaged in the game they become.</blockquote>

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