Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9630766" data-attributes="member: 18">I'm definitely in the &quot;multiple levels of success&quot; camp, but two I things I really don't like are:1) DMs who try to treat binary success games as &quot;multiple levels of success&quot;, particularly when it's not like, a house rule, they're just freestyling it. Like, no, making the DC but only by a small amount should not mean I basically fail, or have so many consequences I'm screwed, this is D&amp;D, that's now how it works, stop that! Bad DM! Either make it explicit and reliable how it works (and apply it to rolls from NPCs), or treat binary as binary and and multiple levels as multiple levels. I would literally rather have pure binary than this weird kind of DM fiat I've seen a few times.2) Having to do math to work out multiple levels of success. Just find another way to make the dice work if that's what you're thinking! So PtbA and so on are thus fine, but I loathe &quot;for each X points beyond the DC your success level increases one rank&quot;-type stuff.I haven't seen a lot of difficulty with coming up with &quot;successes with complications&quot; - I think that's generally the better approach than &quot;partial successes&quot;, because in my experience most DMs end up making &quot;partial successes&quot; into just &quot;slightly creative failures&quot;. Whereas success with complications for whatever reason seems to be more clear - you succeeded, period - but other stuff went wrong.Adding more rolls to a binary game is a very bad idea, I agree there. Because it's binary, it's essentially pass/fail, and even if you say &quot;Welll, only one roll should really be pass/fail, the rest add nuance!&quot; or something, the reality is most DMs are going to treat failures as failures, and are thus going to just make your success worse - because in most cases a success is already as good as you're going to get - critical successes which aren't silly just don't apply to a lot of situations.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 9630766, member: 18"] I'm definitely in the "multiple levels of success" camp, but two I things I really don't like are: 1) DMs who try to treat binary success games as "multiple levels of success", particularly when it's not like, a house rule, they're just freestyling it. Like, no, making the DC but only by a small amount [I]should not[/I] mean I basically fail, or have so many consequences I'm screwed, this is D&D, that's now how it works, stop that! Bad DM! Either make it explicit and reliable how it works (and apply it to rolls from NPCs), or treat binary as binary and and multiple levels as multiple levels. I would literally rather have pure binary than this weird kind of DM fiat I've seen a few times. 2) Having to do math to work out multiple levels of success. Just find another way to make the dice work if that's what you're thinking! So PtbA and so on are thus fine, but I loathe "for each X points beyond the DC your success level increases one rank"-type stuff. I haven't seen a lot of difficulty with coming up with "successes with complications" - I think that's generally the better approach than "partial successes", because in my experience most DMs end up making "partial successes" into just "slightly creative failures". Whereas success with complications for whatever reason seems to be more clear - you succeeded, period - but other stuff went wrong. Adding more rolls to a binary game is a very bad idea, I agree there. Because it's binary, it's essentially pass/fail, and even if you say "Welll, only one roll should really be pass/fail, the rest add nuance!" or something, the reality is most DMs are going to treat failures as failures, and are thus going to just make your success worse - because in most cases a success is already as good as you're going to get - critical successes which aren't silly just don't apply to a lot of situations. [/QUOTE]

Verification