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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ainamacar" data-source="post: 5843690" data-attributes="member: 70709">Thank you!  And I enjoyed your thoughtful comments, they really got me thinking.  Especially the one about requiring simultaneous successes vs. accrued successes, that caught me by surprise.I do think skills, attacks, and defenses should all be on the same scale so they can work together seamlessly and introduce all sorts of opportunities for interaction, improvisational or otherwise.  I hope both that and keeping a more moderate range of DCs is a 5e design priority, whether or not anyone from WotC ever reads this little thread. (Given the volume of stuff being written about 5e, I'm not exactly expecting this to reach Monte's eyeballs.)  Even so, a dragon would tend to have very elevated ability scores on top of whatever other level-scaling may be present in 5e, and I'm guessing the AC of dragon scale will be pretty darn excellent, especially while it's still on a dragon.  Ultimately, I think the raw numbers we associate with a dragon have less impact than the abilities it brings to bear.  Especially compared to 3e/4e, where player and creature bonuses went up more-or-less in tandem.  I mean, does it matter that much if a dragon's defenses are only 5-10 greater instead of 30 greater than that of a lowly orc mook?  PCs able to handle the dragon effortlessly wipe those mooks in either case.  So if the fighter loses his +1 attack per level I might hold a wake, but to celebrate its life rather than mourn its passing. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Yeah, the interaction between DC and training difficulty would need to be worked out in some detail for most skills.  Your notion of inherent vs. peripheral complexity might be useful.  For the last few years I've been playing in a success-based homebrew system where there is also a direct analog to DCs.  The rule-of-thumb we've been using quite successfully is setting the DC so that a single success gives the minimally useful result.  That could be viewed as a fast at-the-table proxy for estimating the inherent vs. peripheral complexities.  For writing rules, though, the full spectrum of possibilities should probably be considered.For D&D using this tiered skill system I might adapt the above rule-of-thumb such that a single success always gives the players something useful enough for the game can continue.  For skills that have almost always represented something like complex checks (Decipher Script, Track, etc.) it might be enough to say those checks essentially always have multiple levels of success.  For something like long jumps and other open-ended checks without a truly fixed DC maybe the best solution is to ignore successes and just use the best d20 rolled.  It's an exception,  but a pretty reasonable one.  (Although jump checks in D&D are  already weird: no one jumps between 1 and 20 feet with equal  probability. Maybe there is a success-based version that makes more sense.)  For everything else I think you shouldn't think about multiple successes as required, but as gravy when they come up.  That said, I'm sure plenty of ambiguous cases would crop up.  Careful consideration of all the major skills followed by playtesting would be required to see if it all gels.  I'm optimistic it could work, but I hope not to a fault. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The reason to require multiple successes at once is to highlight the qualitative differences in training and draw a firm boundary around what constitutes a check.  In this system I think it's a feature and not a bug.  Here's my rationale:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Multiple successes are only required when the person trying the check is not sufficiently trained to reliably achieve the desired result.  Such a check is qualitatively different from that of a person who has sufficient training because it requires additional resources and aid to even attempt.  Conceptually, I find this very appropriate.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">When one retries simple checks that need only a single success (indicating sufficient training) the new chance of success is generally independent of the old check.  If successes accrue when multiple successes are required then this person (who is, by definition, undertrained for whatever they are attempting) benefits from their previous attempts.  I find that pretty illogical.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">A person who has already attempted the check has (unless they totally failed) already gained the benefit of whatever partial success they had.  There is no reason to give them that and make it easier to succeed better in the future.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">If successes accrue across multiple checks what sets highly trained characters apart?  Do they still need fewer successes?  How does that work when using multiple skills, as in your Decipher Script/History/Arcana example?  If the answer is an even higher skill bonus we're right back to the escalating DC problem we're partly trying to avoid in the first place.  (You did get me thinking about ways to make this work.  It works great with Aid Another, but collapsing multiple skills into a single d20 check due to Mastery is still problematic.  Hmm...)</li> </ol>With respect to the student having already partially translated the scroll, note that the level of success he obtained (Competent) is relatively easy for the mentor.  If it would help the mentor at all, it should have been an automatic success (as Aid Another) at the Competent level, but an automatic failure to aid at the Expert level since the student didn't succeed on that check.  Letting the student simply roll Aid Another at the Competent and Expert levels was, I think, a generous but still reasonable call.  Under no circumstances would I let the student roll Aid Another and grant a separate bonus for his previous success at the Competent level.The clumsy but still mostly-effective thief definitely offers an interesting dynamic!  And there are a whole host of classes that have in the past had access to skills that make perfect thematic sense, but were rarely worth taking because the ability scores matched up so poorly.  A fighter of average Charisma might actually invest in Intimidate.  And for skills that could conceivably be used with multiple ability scores it would be nice too.  For example, using Religion for inspirational purposes (Wis or maybe Cha) but also theology (Int).  Even a dullard cleric with 6 Int but Religion mastery could surprise the Wizard more often than the latter would like. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />OK, a small pool of standard options like that would work.  Although, since Masters throw more dice on easy checks you get the unintuitive result that the easier the check the more likely a complication occurs for them, and in fact they are more likely to face complications than someone who is less trained than they are on easy checks.  So I guess it works great when multiple dice are required, but not so great when multiple dice are supposed to be the benefit.  It might be easy enough just to say complications don't occur for characters making checks easier than their training, I suppose.  The math works sensibly, but is that the right thematic approach?</blockquote>

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