A Leap over Boiling Lava onto a Flying Wyvern

[billd91]

The DM simply added that additional region to the roll. It's an issue that D&D in general has: no degree of success.

It does, and it doesn't. For combat, the damage roll indicates the degree of success. For certain skills like Craft (using the weird progress rules) and Jump you do get some degrees of success (jump determining distance travelled). Knowledge skills, if the tasks are well graduated, include a degree of success as well. But I think you're right that a more general idea of degrees of success would a welcome addition.

For a case like the OP, I'd probably have the PC do a jump check and then maybe a roll to hit with a grab. For a really good jump check, I'd give a bonus on the grab. For one not so good, I'd give a penalty. For a really abyssmal one that didn't even clear out from the initial point to be above the wyvern, I'd have them hit the pool - but give them points for style if they turned it into a spectacular dive.

 

[Barastrondo]

Players who claim to enjoy being reckless and complain when they fail to make it through impossible situations on a routine basis are a problem.

I agree, though with the caveat that a player may enjoy playing a character with a "reckless personality" while still ensuring as best he can mechanically that the character will survive all sorts of daring attempts. It's no worse than enjoying movies in which the main character does what we'd consider reckless things yet enjoys the protagonist's grace to survive until the end. It's the complaining part that's irritating.

I am glad to hear that in the lava-wyvern system of choice, there was none of that: just the rest of the group biting their lips, hoping to see their friend eke out that one last 5%. That's some commendable group interest right there.

 

[davethegame]

It does, and it doesn't. For combat, the damage roll indicates the degree of success. For certain skills like Craft (using the weird progress rules) and Jump you do get some degrees of success (jump determining distance travelled). Knowledge skills, if the tasks are well graduated, include a degree of success as well. But I think you're right that a more general idea of degrees of success would a welcome addition.

This is headed for tangent-town, but while all those examples you describes are degrees of success, there are almost never degrees of failure in D&D (critical failures being one exception), which is closer to what the original poster was talking about. It's certainly more interesting to have a graduated scale both ways in the design, yet certainly more complicated.

 

[The Shaman]

The main issue with that is that there's no point in the roll where the character makes a last-ditch grab for a wing or limb and succeeds at it: if he made the original roll, he travels the desired distance and lands on his feet ready to keep running, if he fails by 1 point he plunges to his death. The DM simply added that additional region to the roll. It's an issue that D&D in general has: no degree of success.

D&D has always had degrees of success: it's called the referee's good judgement.

I don't think this is about degrees of success, however; it's about how many chances does the player get to avoid failure by his character, which also happens to be an aspect of the game left to the referee's good judgement in many cases.

It does have a bearing, since 4E grants a save when you're in danger of (for example) falling into lava.

Just because the word "lava" appears in both the example in the original post and the snippet of rule posted doesn't mean one is the same as the other. There's a difference between being subjected involuntarily to some character or monster power and making a voluntary leap onto a moving target over a pool of lava.

 

[MarkB]

A few years ago I was working on an extensive list of modifiers for the actual value table for speculative cargo, based on the planet's trade codes, for a Traveller game I was running. The idea was that I could roll on a table, and maybe the price would come down because an Agricultural world experienced a bumper crop, or a bad harvest drove up the price, for a Non-industrial world a price would drop as a demand decreased for a particular mineral or increased due to scarcity, and so on and so on.

I shared my tables with another Traveller referee, someone I really respect. He looked over my work, then pulled a pair of dice out of a drawer and rolled them. He's look at the result, then say, "A mining accident created an artificial scarcity," to explain a high roll, or, "The local technology matured, driving down the price," to explain a low roll. Over and over he could look at that roll of the dice and tell me why the result was what it was for a given cargo on a given world.

What he was telling me is that the roll on the table already included all of the information I was trying to add if I simply interpreted the roll instead of fiddling about with additional granularity.

So, the roll of twelve? That already includes the desperate scramble to hold on, the last ditch grab for a wing or a limb, and the agonizing terror of the fall, at least by my friend's logic.

Just something to consider.

Funny you should give a Traveller-based example, since that system (at least, the Mongoose version - I've not read the rulebooks of other versions) does advocate granularity of both successes and failures.

A success by zero is considered only a marginal success, and may have consequences later.

A failure by only 1 is likewise a marginal failure, and the GM may allow the player to scrape a success out of it if they accept some significant consequence to their actions.

D&D is less well-suited to such a system, lacking the 'bell-curve' mechanics of a system that uses two dice to determine each check. But if you supplement a failed roll with a saving throw, then Presto! You've got your two dice, and only a lousy roll on both will result in ultimate failure.

This is headed for tangent-town, but while all those examples you describes are degrees of success, there are almost never degrees of failure in D&D (critical failures being one exception), which is closer to what the original poster was talking about. It's certainly more interesting to have a graduated scale both ways in the design, yet certainly more complicated.

Just a quick note on this: A number of skill checks in both 3e and 4e use a "fail by less/more than 5" mechanic to determine the severity of the penalty for failure - i.e. whether you simply fail to make progress when climbing, or actually start to fall. Also, any game which includes a pool of points that can be used to boost d20 rolls - such as 3.5e Eberron's Action Points or Star Wars Saga Edition's Force Points - effectively has degrees of failure on attack rolls and skill checks, since a near-miss is amenable to being boosted up to a hit with a limited resource, whilst a miss by a wider margin is not.

 

[The Shaman]

Funny you should give a Traveller-based example, since that system (at least, the Mongoose version - I've not read the rulebooks of other versions) does advocate granularity of both successes and failures.

A success by zero is considered only a marginal success, and may have consequences later.

A failure by only 1 is likewise a marginal failure, and the GM may allow the player to scrape a success out of it if they accept some significant consequence to their actions.

That's a 'goose Trav'-ism (or -esty, to some) not found in the original Traveller game I play.

D&D is less well-suited to such a system, lacking the 'bell-curve' mechanics of a system that uses two dice to determine each check.

The bell curve damps down the chances for extreme rolls at either end of the spectrum; a 20 on d20 is 5%, a 12 on 2d6 is a little less than 3%.

There's still a discrete chance of success tied to each value; rolling 10+ on d20 is 55%, rolling 7+ on 2d6 is about 58%.

But if you supplement a failed roll with a saving throw, then Presto! You've got your two dice, and only a lousy roll on both will result in ultimate failure.

That's two discrete rolls, not a bell curve.

 

[Fifth Element]

There's a difference between being subjected involuntarily to some character or monster power and making a voluntary leap onto a moving target over a pool of lava.

Sure there's a difference, but claiming that the 4E "save to avoid dying by falling into lava" has no bearing on this situation strikes me as bizarre. Even if there is a similar 3.5 rule, it doesn't make 4E's rules structure irrelevant to rules calls in a 4E game. But this discussion itself is irrelevant, so I'll stop there.

That's two discrete rolls, not a bell curve.

It's not a true bell curve, but it's not a straight line or binary result either.

 

[Uder]

Of course, reckless may be how the players like to play, so it's not necessarily an undesirable result.

I don't mean "try something fun and crazy" reckless, I mean "by the rules if you do this you're supposed to die, but I fudge it every time so you can get away with it until the one time I'm in a bad mood/not showing favoritism/flake out" reckless.

 

[Herschel]

The main issue with that is that there's no point in the roll where the character makes a last-ditch grab for a wing or limb and succeeds at it: if he made the original roll, he travels the desired distance and lands on his feet ready to keep running, if he fails by 1 point he plunges to his death. The DM simply added that additional region to the roll.

This.

 

[Bullgrit]

1. Roll for a DC of X to land solidly on the wyvern's back. If you fail, you can roll for a DC Y to grab onto something and just hang on. If you fail the second check, you fall into the lava and are gone.

2. Roll for a DC of X to land solidly on the wyvern's back. If you fail by no more than Y you grab onto something and just hang on. If you fail by more than Y, you fall into the lava and are gone.

If the first example is not acceptable, is the second option acceptable?

Or is the only acceptable idea to roll once against one number and fully succeed or fully fail?

There's an example in one of the old, classic rule books, (I can't remember where, right now), about a PC deciding to jump off a cliff to escape some overwhelming monster. The falling damage would problably kill the PC, but the official advice was to consider a reason for a % chance that the PC might survive the fall. I think the exact reason, in this case, was that there was an underground river that the PC could land in. So this idea of giving one more roll for a PC to survive is quite old in D&D.

Bullgrit