[D&D Design Discussion] Preserving the "Sweet Spot"

[Wulf Ratbane]

Wait a minute. The setup was that skill checks become meaningless versus static DC.

No, the setup was this.

Picking a lock is neither heroic nor dramatic. Locks should be made obsolete as a dramatic obstacle. Tell me of a legendary story where a lock gets picked?

It's not my fault that you didn't realize that RPG's single most influential literary work of fantasy uses a lock as a dramatic obstacle.

A locked door is not a dramatic obstacle.

They spent an awful lot of time in the book and the movie convincing me otherwise.

I asked for a legendary story was a lock gets picked.

Pardon my meta-game view of the issue.

Lock picking is really dramatic in TV shows because they can cut to the lock. Cut to the side kick. Cut back to the tools. Cut to the person picking the lock. Cut to a timer on the bomb that's about to go off. Cut to the sweat forming on someone's brow. Cut to the sidekick. They can swell the "hey, look, tension!" music. In a RPG, you roll a d20 and announce 36.

You can't really be that obtuse. The die roll provides the dramatic tension in the d20 system. Very often-- almost always, in fact-- it's a single d20 roll.

Otherwise we can carry this patently absurd argument across the entire game. Saving throws, attack rolls, skill checks...

It is not heroic. It is not dramatic.

The long history of natural 1's and natural 20's rolled at my table beg to differ.

Cut to the DM announcing the DC. Cut to the player shaking his dice. Cut to the player's buddy saying, "Just don't roll a 1!" Cut to the other players yelling, "FOR CHRISSAKES DON'T JINX HIM!" Cut to the player's sweaty brow as he releases the die. Slow motion zoom on the die as it rolls around the table...

and...

comes...

up...

1.

Cue the agony.

 

[Victim]

I find skill checks boring too. Basically, the player is irrelevant for most checks; his only involvement is to act as a die rolling engine. Since there's no decisions to be made, there's nothing for the player to do. Even a complex skill check is just more rolls without player input.

Combat is a complex interaction between a number of factors that takes player input every round. If you abstracted it into a single "Fight Things" check without the chance for meaningful player input, as most skill checks are, then it'd be boring too.

Random =/ interesting.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

This thread reminded me of complex skill checks. They can go a long way towards making skill checks interesting, expecially with a little creative DMing.

This is a mechanic that I think doesn't get used enough. I found it very dramatic in a Serenity one-shot I ran last year. (It's also more integrated into that system.)

But it doesn't totally address the 'automatic success / automatic failure' dilemma -- 5 successes for the rogue just means it will take him 5 rounds.

 

[Particle_Man]

Skill checks do not have to fail on a natural 1. So a high enough Open Locks skill means that even a '1' will succeed.

Also, the Rogue can choose to have that "take 10 on skills even if I am stressed out" ability, precluding low rolls.

 

[jmucchiello]

Pardon my meta-game view of the issue.

Fine. I give up. Since you didn't address the fact that your example of getting around the locked door didn't require a skill check, you obviously aren't really reading what I'm writing. At no point during the "speak 'friend' and enter" encounter is any of the fellowship's players rolling a die to pick a lock. Thus this encounter is not a lockpicking exercise. It is a puzzle. Puzzles don't come down to skill rolls. Puzzles scale from 1st to 101st level. Your example is not an example of lockpicking in a legendary story. It is an example of a puzzle in a legendary story.

Regardless, if we can ignore the specific example of Moria, my assertion was that as the players become more and more heroic, the actions they perform change. Thus while a locked door is a dramatic obstacle for 1st level schlubs. A locked door is out of genre as a dramatic obstacle for 20th level uber-heroes. Knock is still a 2nd level spell, isn't it? By the RAW locked doors should not be a serious obstacle for parties with access to scrolls of 2nd level spells! Knock is still within the sweetspot, isn't it? A 4500 gp wand of knock that will open a whole lot of locked doors, chests, and the gates of moria is within reach of a party at 8th level with a little money pooling. Poof, there goes open locks as a useful skill. And that's without stone shape, dim door, passwall, teleport and I'm sure others. How many spells are you going to tweak to preserve the sweetspot?

Are there other 5th level spells that need work? Passwall? Permanancy? Sending? Spell Resistance? Telepathic bond?
6th level: Analyze Dweomer? Antimagic Field? Find the Path? True Seeing? Wind Walk?

Becoming nauseated after teleport would just ruin my fun. I have a character who can cast two quickened spells in a round (28th level remember) and the look on everyone's face the first time I teleported in and out and still took an action inside was priceless. And I still consider that the sweetspot for fun games. The disconnect here is vast and so I'll bow out the thread if I make my next Will save.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

*looks at Open Locks description* "You can pick padlocks, finesse combination locks, and solve puzzle locks." *shrugs*

Knock is still a 2nd level spell, isn't it? By the RAW locked doors should not be a serious obstacle for parties with access to scrolls of 2nd level spells! Knock is still within the sweetspot, isn't it? A 4500 gp wand of knock that will open a whole lot of locked doors, chests, and the gates of moria is within reach of a party at 8th level with a little money pooling. Poof, there goes open locks as a useful skill.

I don't agree with this analysis. A knock only undoes "two means of preventing egress". If a door is locked, barred, and arcane locked, it will take two uses of the spell. Two spells for the day, but if only one knock was prepared... ? A party with a rogue with maxed Open Locks could likely have saved those two spells... Resource management, and all that.

Spending treasure and XP for scrolls, well they might have been spent elsewhere when a skill could save the expenditure of both. And with regards to the 4500 gp wand purchasing, to me, that is a matter of style of play if MagicMart is a shoppe around the corner and not indicative of anything with regards to the "sweet spot" as a matter of charcter level spread. Not everyone plays with MagicMart.

 

[Nellisir]

*looks at Open Locks description* "You can pick padlocks, finesse combination locks, and solve puzzle locks." *shrugs* ;.

Oh, come on. Use of the open lock skill implies a mechanical aspect and/or a physical interaction that was wholly lacking in that "challenge". Using Open Locks to solve word riddles is just ridiculous. If you seriously consider that a "puzzle lock", then Bilbo could've used Open Locks against Gollum in the riddle game.

How many ranks in Open Locks does Gandalf have in your campaign anyways?

 

[Lanefan]

Timely discussion in one respect: both the Commune and Teleport/Planeshift issues came up in my weekend games.

Travel spells are awful in one respect: it makes designing encounters (particularly encounters intended to repeat) anywhere other than the main dungeon a waste of time. They also make it impossible to guess how long a party will take to finish an adventure and interact with the world again...if the dramatics of the story make it desireable that the Orcs invade 2 days before the PC's return to town, such that the party finds a battlefront where there shouldn't be one, travel spells become downright annoying.

Commune is going up in level next campaign. Period. I don't mind a party paying for it to be cast in town, but having the ability to cast it in the field is a bit much unless you're bloody high level.

Lanefan

 

[jmucchiello]

*looks at Open Locks description* "You can pick padlocks, finesse combination locks, and solve puzzle locks." *shrugs*

Surely you are not suggesting that players should roll dice rather than solve puzzles themselves. That is huge can of worms on this board.

I don't agree with this analysis. A knock only undoes "two means of preventing egress". If a door is locked, barred, and arcane locked, it will take two uses of the spell. Two spells for the day, but if only one knock was prepared... ? A party with a rogue with maxed Open Locks could likely have saved those two spells... Resource management, and all that.

The point is maxing the skills is not heroic when there are dozens of spells that accomplish the same thing. When characters hit 10th level, a locked door is not a dramatic obstacle (Wulf's concept). It just isn't. There are so many ways through the locked door that you cannot expect anyone to remember going through the door after the game.

Spending treasure and XP for scrolls, well they might have been spent elsewhere when a skill could save the expenditure of both. And with regards to the 4500 gp wand purchasing, to me, that is a matter of style of play if MagicMart is a shoppe around the corner and not indicative of anything with regards to the "sweet spot" as a matter of charcter level spread. Not everyone plays with MagicMart.

Wulf wants a normal D&D game by the RAW and thus buying/making wands is the expected style of play. This after all is not a low-magic setting. It is just a stretching of the proverbial sweet spot. And you don't need a MagicMart to spend time finding a wizard to commision a wand or to just make a wand yourself. The items are in the DMG and thus should be available to some reasonable degree if you are playing the RAW. If they aren't reasonably available you have drifted into a low-magic game setting. As I've said before, there's nothing wrong with a low-magic setting, but by the OPs words this thread is not a low-magic thread.

 

[jmucchiello]

Oh, come on. Use of the open lock skill implies a mechanical aspect and/or a physical interaction that was wholly lacking in that "challenge". Using Open Locks to solve word riddles is just ridiculous. If you seriously consider that a "puzzle lock", then Bilbo could've used Open Locks against Gollum in the riddle game.

To be fair, I'm sure "puzzle lock" in this context refers to something like a Chinese puzzle box. Opening the box is a puzzle. Solving the puzzle opens the lock. It does not refer to password riddles. If it did, Open Locks would be an Int-based skill.