D&D 5E Adjudicating Unusual Actions

[Celebrim]

Ummm...no

Err... ok.

"Without this feat, you can use the Survival skill to find tracks, but you can follow them only if the DC for the task is 10 or lower. Alternatively, you can use the Search skill to find a footprint or similar sign of a creature’s passage using the DCs given above, but you can’t use Search to follow tracks, even if someone else has already found them.

Its done as an "untrained check"

Untrained checks, if they are even allowed, generally autofail if the DC is greater than 20 (or in the case of Track, a 10!). Thus, even if you have a +18 bonus to search, if you are attempting to follow tracks you automatically fail. And if you have a +18 bonus to survival, but lack the track feat, you can only follow tracks that were just made in soft ground - and you'd automatically fail to track say a halfling.

It has a disadvantage

Disadvantage is a 5e mechanic.

Dont remember what book covers that edge case but its a thing

Not sure what you are thinking either.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Catapults were literally designed to fire halflings and gnomes. Most people don’t realize this, and assume they were meant to launch large stones to take out walls. Not true. They were made for two main purposes: to remove the infestation of said halflings and gnomes from your area with minimal touching, and to launch them into enemy strongholds to start an infestation there in much the same way Gengis Khan used diseased bodies.
Plus, as an added bonus, it was fun. In the early days back when water deep was still a small town, Fineges Ferrome started the first halfling chucking contest using catapults.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Err... ok.

"Without this feat, you can use the Survival skill to find tracks, but you can follow them only if the DC for the task is 10 or lower. Alternatively, you can use the Search skill to find a footprint or similar sign of a creature’s passage using the DCs given above, but you can’t use Search to follow tracks, even if someone else has already found them.



Untrained checks, if they are even allowed, generally autofail if the DC is greater than 20 (or in the case of Track, a 10!). Thus, even if you have a +18 bonus to search, if you are attempting to follow tracks you automatically fail. And if you have a +18 bonus to survival, but lack the track feat, you can only follow tracks that were just made in soft ground - and you'd automatically fail to track say a halfling.



Disadvantage is a 5e mechanic.



Not sure what you are thinking either.

Yup. Its called an untrained check. And if the dc is too high to check then you are restrcted from using it. ONLY if the dc is too high though. When i said "disadvantage" i was obviously not using game terminology. Its just the word i felt like using. I was refering to the dc restriction.

Putting a sort of cap on you due to competancy makes perfect snse to me. There are aspects of skills you will lack competance in if you lack experience. Part of what skill points represent is experience. Makes perfect sense to me.

 

[Celebrim]

Seriously, the ballista example:

"I tie the rope to the bolt and then around myself." = Sleight of hand check to secure the knots. DC 10 - you know how to tie knots, but you're in a hurry.

Problem is that shafts aren't notably easy to connect ropes to unless they have some sort of ring on the end or hole through the shaft. So stage one is probably modifying the shaft with a Craft check of some sort in order to make that easy Use Rope check. Otherwise, I'm going to require a much higher DC in order to tie a special knot that doesn't slip on an accelerating shaft of uniform diameter.

"I fire the ballista at the dragon." = ranged attack with a siege weapon. +2 to AC due to the increased difficulty with a rope tied to the bolt.

This is more or less reasonable. The real question here is how easy does the game system make it to make an attack with a siege weapon on a moving target. In my experience, dating back to 1e, D&D has traditionally made this vastly too easy. Which would fall under the metarule of, "Players that are wise never argue for rulings that could be used against them."

Then EITHER roll damage, and for any damage number better than average, the bolt lodges in the dragon OR roll a d20 - DC 12 to see if the bolt sticks.

Again, this falls under the metarule of, "Players that are wise never argue for rulings that could be used against them." D&D traditionally does not assume that every missile weapon that strikes a target becomes embedded in it.

Where is the dragon flying? Acrobatics checks to try to climb up the rope while avoiding being smashed into obstacles. DC varies based on the terrain.

As a player, my concern would not be for getting smashed into obstacles. I totally could see reflex saves or skill checks to avoid that, and as a DM I would concur. But as a player my concern would be the dragon would swivel its head and roast both me and the rope I'm on, and/or use one of its claws to simply pluck the offending dart from its hide and send me plummeting to the ground. And as a DM, that's exactly how my dragon would respond to this. Of course, a skilled attacker with a great knowledge of dragons might land the dart in a place where the dragon couldn't reach it while flying (with a suitable additional penalty to hit the smaller target), and a skilled acrobat might be able to shield himself from the dragons direct line of sight and thus the breathe weapon by shifting his center of gravity and 'flying' a bit as he trailed the dragon.

 

[Umbran]

I don't see how. One of them has to do with the chance of success. The other has to do with whether a lack of proficiency serves as some sort of gate keeper that prevents the attempt or ensures failure.

I'm looking at this from a technical writing standpoint: Note how you don't actually talk about the chance of success in the text - the probability isn't mentioned directly or explicitly. You talk about whether a person has "skills" or "proficiency". Having skill and having proficiency are pretty much synonymous in common language - so you sound like you are talking about he same thing in both. That's the problem.

You would think except a huge number of game systems do not in fact adhere to this principle, and insist that things can only be attempted by people who have spent the necessary chargen resources. 3e D&D as a familiar example is rife with them. For example, no matter how observant you are, you can not track someone nor can you detect a trap unless you have spent an additional chargen resource for tracking and trap detection.

Yes... so the question is whether you agree with the system as to what kind of efforts require specific training, and what do not. Any able-bodied person can run. Not anyone can cast Fireball. Somewhere between those extremes, there's going to be personal takes on what is "realistic" for a character to do without special chargen/charadv resources spending, and what they cannot.

Sure, but you are also thinking about very modern pin tumbler locks that are difficult to pick and require special tools and practice. As a 5 year old, I promise you that you can work out how to bypass simple skeleton key barrier locks that you might find in older homes using only a coat hanger if you put your mind to it.

Yes - and a 5-year old can know how to "climb", but El Capitan is out of their reach. In fact, though it is "just climbing", El Capitan is out of reach for anyone who doesn't have a whole lot of training and specific skills that you are unlikely to learn on your own without dying. Climbing an apple tree a lot won't get you up that rock.

So, it becomes a little unclear - what requires proficiency, and what merely requires a high die roll?

 

[Maestrino]

Problem is that shafts aren't notably easy to connect ropes to unless they have some sort of ring on the end or hole through the shaft. So stage one is probably modifying the shaft with a Craft check of some sort in order to make that easy Use Rope check. Otherwise, I'm going to require a much higher DC in order to tie a special knot that doesn't slip on an accelerating shaft of uniform diameter.

Good point. But I'd be tempted not to make it TOO difficult due to "rule of cool" and all, so if it were a coastal area or such I'd probably handwave it as "Oh look, you found a whaling harpoon."

 

[Celebrim]

So, it becomes a little unclear - what requires proficiency, and what merely requires a high die roll?

In essence what I'm saying is that everything "merely requires a high die roll". What exactly that roll is may vary according to the circumstance. In the case of grappling, it's some sort of opposed test, in which case there may be some sort of thing you could grapple that you will fail at because the opposed test is always too high for you to beat, where some better grappler could perhaps win that contest. In the case of some static difficulty, that difficulty may be too high for you to beat, but if it is then the system isn't arbitrarily stopping you from beating it.

Suppose D&D implemented 'Climb' the way it did 'Track', so that if you took the 'Climb' feat you could make an athletics check to climb something, but that you automatically failed any climb check with a DC above 10 regardless of how strong, agile, and athletic you were.

Or again, look what the rules are saying about 'Track'. A character can be super-humanly perceptive and super-humanly familiar with the wilderness, but without the 'Track' feat, they can't actually follow tracks. Imagine an alternative system where instead, the 'Track' feat merely said, "You have a +5 bonus on Survival and Search checks as it pertains to identifying and following tracks." We are still protecting the idea that PC X is very good at tracking, without suggesting that someone with the appropriate skills to be good at finding and follows tracks is unable to.

The "Kindergarten Rule" tends to prefer that rules be organized in that manner, and not the manner that D&D inherited from 1e when skills tended to be shoved into the system haphazardly (see thief skills and NWPs).

I'd even go so far as to suggest that everyone can, with a sufficiently high roll, cast fireball. The results of that attempt will be almost certainly spectacularly bad, but fortunately the usual result will be so spectacularly bad that the PC will luckily achieve the result, "Nothing happens." But in theory, I wouldn't say "No" to a 1st level M-U opening up a spellbook and trying to cast fireball out of it. I'd just roll Wisdom and say, "The spell is much longer and much more complex than anything you've ever attempted. You realize before going any further, that you only know just enough to get yourself killed in a gruesome manner. Do you really want to try this?"

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I'm looking at this from a technical writing standpoint: Note how you don't actually talk about the chance of success in the text - the probability isn't mentioned directly or explicitly. You talk about whether a person has "skills" or "proficiency". Having skill and having proficiency are pretty much synonymous in common language - so you sound like you are talking about he same thing in both. That's the problem.



Yes... so the question is whether you agree with the system as to what kind of efforts require specific training, and what do not. Any able-bodied person can run. Not anyone can cast Fireball. Somewhere between those extremes, there's going to be personal takes on what is "realistic" for a character to do without special chargen/charadv resources spending, and what they cannot.



Yes - and a 5-year old can know how to "climb", but El Capitan is out of their reach. In fact, though it is "just climbing", El Capitan is out of reach for anyone who doesn't have a whole lot of training and specific skills that you are unlikely to learn on your own without dying. Climbing an apple tree a lot won't get you up that rock.

So, it becomes a little unclear - what requires proficiency, and what merely requires a high die roll?

I think the difference between a skill and a prof could summarized the following way (at least typically):

Skill-very pure base area of capability in a basic experiencial quality that is both broadly applicable to things and precisely scalable but is itself a small simple but vague thing. Just applies to a broad list.

Prof-critical competance and capability in a non simplistic thing (non simplistic because were it broken down into skills it would be a complicated mess of them at different necesaary amounts of each) or in a very exposure specific skill. You either got it or you dont because it's not precisely scalable. Its black and white. Further not broadly applicable. Broad list of minor ability needed fir individual task.

They are inverses of eachother after a fashion.

 

[Celebrim]

Good point. But I'd be tempted not to make it TOO difficult due to "rule of cool" and all, so if it were a coastal area or such I'd probably handwave it as "Oh look, you found a whaling harpoon."

A whaling harpoon would be a very good start to this plan, IMO, as would a ballista that was specifically mounted on some sort of purpose built hardware designed to let it be used as a crewed anti-personnel weapon - probably with some sort of rotating platform and a crank to rapidly adjust elevation. I don't consider it out of the question that if there really were dragons, that people really would have adapted medieval technology to creating primitive "anti-air" weapons.

However, you may have noted that I'm not a fan of "rule of cool", simply because there is too much disagreement even within a table of good friends as to what is actually "cool". We all have our different preferences. One person's gonzo fun is another person's cringy destruction of the aesthetics of challenge and their immersion in the scene.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

had to edit previous post