D&D 5E Deal Breakers - Or woah, that is just too much

Tectuktitlay

Explorer
The DnD skill system is much like Democracy really. It is the worst system except for all the others.

Which kind of democracy? A true democracy? A democratic republic? A demarchy? A consensus democracy? A cellular democracy? A sociocracy? An associative democracy? A participatory democracy? A people's democracy?

Kind of like in economics, capitalism is given this same comparison, where it's the worst economic system, except for all the rest. When in reality, a mixed economy has actually proven to be the most stable.

So...having a simple skill system that you can then use to simulate degrees of success with multiple skills used in a skill challenge like system? Or freeform let people make checks that determine success in ways they hadn't intended based on information they didn't have about who or what they were using their skill on or for? That's a more nuanced, and by precedent very possibly, in aggregate, more stable use of the skill system.

Just saying. It's considerably more nuanced, with many more layers of potential use based on the same simple mechanical core. Something to think about.
 

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Shasarak

Banned
Banned
Which kind of democracy? A true democracy? A democratic republic? A demarchy? A consensus democracy? A cellular democracy? A sociocracy? An associative democracy? A participatory democracy? A people's democracy?

A Democratic Democracy of course.

Kind of like in economics, capitalism is given this same comparison, where it's the worst economic system, except for all the rest. When in reality, a mixed economy has actually proven to be the most stable.

Yes, and Fiat money has always failed yet people still seem to want to try it out.

So...having a simple skill system that you can then use to simulate degrees of success with multiple skills used in a skill challenge like system? Or freeform let people make checks that determine success in ways they hadn't intended based on information they didn't have about who or what they were using their skill on or for? That's a more nuanced, and by precedent very possibly, in aggregate, more stable use of the skill system.

Just saying. It's considerably more nuanced, with many more layers of potential use based on the same simple mechanical core. Something to think about.

A more nuanced system is invariably worse then the current system, it takes more time, decreases your chance of success and fails to reward your Nat 20 in any meaningful way.
 

ccs

41st lv DM
A more nuanced system is invariably worse then the current system, it takes more time, decreases your chance of success and fails to reward your Nat 20 in any meaningful way.

What makes you think that a Nat 20 is deserving of any special reward? It's no harder to achieve than any other # on the die
 


S

Sunseeker

Guest
Well obviously that is your call but I personally like my games to be less PG13. My group are adults who can deal with adult themes, if we had kids in the group then obviously it would be dialed way back.
You're welcome to run your games as you like of course. At my table we don't allow non-con. Going back to the OP this was actually one of the things I mentioned will make me walk from the table. It's not a maturity issue, it's not an "adult"ness issue, it's just something I find unacceptable for the players to do to NPCs, or to be done by NPCs to players.

As I get older I find playing the "guess what the DM is thinking" game to get less and less fun. If the DM just shuts you down then just do something else.
My job is to present challenges. You job is to solve them. If every challenge was resolved by me giving you the answer, it wouldn't be a challenge. The fact that you don't know something about what's going on behind the scenes is par for the course for every single D&D game ever. You're not entitled to know. You have to earn it by overcoming the challenge of not-knowing.

I dont think that it is entitlement to expect to have a chance of success. Actually the opposite of entitlement if you ask me. Entitlement would be expecting to get what I want without having to even roll for it and then kicking up a stink when the DM even asks me to roll.

If you ask me to roll when I can not even succeed on a 20 is not Player Entitlement that is the DM being a dick.
Tough. Sometimes success is beyond you and you will never know until you try. Welcome to life: sometimes you do your best and still fail.

But again: I DONT ASK. Players tell me what they want to do and then they do it. I don't play "mother may I" games and I'm not in charge of their actions. You never know how hard something is, or even if you have a chance at all, but if you want to pick the lock using Handle Animals and a chicken, you are welcome to try.

NPCs are not as free willed as PCs by definition because they are not the Protagonists, they just support the story they dont drive it. The Dragon does not suddenly decide not to kidnap the Princess because his friend asked him to move caves and Orcus does not decide to sit around the campfire singing Kumbaya because a millenia of chaos and destruction is enough for anyone.
Maybe in your games they don't, and if that's how you want to run your games you're more than welcome to do so. In my games dragons are free willed and a good diplomacy check and some effective bribery could get him to take up residence elsewhere and no longer be a threat to my game. And why couldn't Orcus get tired of death and destruction? Wouldn't that be an interesting story to explore? Perhaps a good-aligned party could see to turn Orcus from the ways of madness and death instead of destroy him (since as a demon lord he'd just reform in a thousand years or so). The BEST absolute BEST villains I have ever enjoyed were villains with real story, real character, real emotion and I think it would be much more fun to run an adventure through an Orcus who is questioning himself and his way of life, than simply a big fat blob of kill kill kill.

So you may imagine a NPC has free-will but in truth it is just the DM getting them to do whatever he wants in the service of the story he is telling.

One could also say: So you may imagine a PC has free-will but in truth it is just the PLAYER getting them to do whatever he wants in the service of the game he is playing.

So thanks for demonstrating my point.
 

S

Sunseeker

Guest
Exactly what kind of skill system are you running here. I do not roll a check to find out how well I perform. I roll a check to find out if I succeed or if I fail, just like a roll an attack to find out if I hit or I miss.

If you have another system then it probably explains why it seems complicated.

All tasks are attempts to do a certain thing. When there aren't fixed DCs (note, I never gave the pretty lady a DC), you're rolling against unknown odds. Perhaps she was heavily inebriated and a fat, smelly gnome could have gotten her in bed. Perhaps not. I don't have to roll opposed checks, I don't need to set a DC for everything. If a player rolls well, perhaps RPs up their action a bit then I often make my decision, especially in social encounters based on that right there. I don't need the dice to decide for me.

My social encounters typically don't have a fixed DC. Success or failure is based entirely on what the NPC knows, what the players want to know, how the players ask it, and the general personality of the NPC. Good role play goes further than good dice rolls.
 

Tectuktitlay

Explorer
A Democratic Democracy of course.

That...is not actually an answer, unless you mean a true democracy. Which has never worked, and is not likely to ever work. Hence why the US is a republic, and not a democracy. ;)

Yes, and Fiat money has always failed yet people still seem to want to try it out.

What? The fiat system demonstrably works. It worked for a very long time in ancient China, it has worked multiple times throughout history, and it works now better than any other system we've found thus far in the modern era. Might as well say democracy doesn't work, because historically they've all failed in the end?

A more nuanced system is invariably worse then the current system, it takes more time, decreases your chance of success and fails to reward your Nat 20 in any meaningful way.

It might take slightly more time, but it does not inherently decrease your chance of success. At all. On the contrary, it potentially increases it. It is entirely dependent on the DC (or the target number you need to accumulate, if based on multiple rolls). It's like the difference between a 1d12 vs a 2d6. The former is a flat line of the odds of any given roll, but the latter is a bell-curve with the middle being vastly more common than the extreme highs and lows. Hence, the latter gets progressively more accurate the more towards the middle the rolls are, but more difficult at the extreme highs and lows. If you are requiring multiple rolls for a given task, you have considerably more statistical control over over whether or not the party is likely to succeed or fail, while still actually allowing them to succeed or fail. Whereas relying a single roll instead causes any given roll to be potentially extremely swingy. You can tailor every single DC of every roll to the exact 5% increment percentage chance you want them to succeed, yes, but that potentially leaves essentially nothing internally consistent, at which point you might as well just not bother with stats and tell players, "You succeed on an 11-20", "You only succeed on an 18-20", etc. Multiple rolls also allows multiple skills and/or multiple players to share the spotlight, working together to succeed. Instead of having everything constantly rest on one roll by one player.

How should a skill check reward a nat 20, anyhow? A nat 20 (or nat 1) means nothing special in a system where there is no crit success or failure (see: D&D's skill system). And if you DO reward nat 20s or punish nat 1s on skill checks above and beyond, then it has the same pitfalls discussed in another thread about why crit success/failure systems are so skewed: 1s punishes a character who is BETTER at something more than a character worse at it, and 20s reward a character who is WORSE at something more than a character better at it. A major disadvantage of using a single die for a check.

EDIT: To explain the last bit, rewarding nat 20s (or punishing nat 1s): Ricca Suave, swashbuckler extraordinaire, is amazing at diplomacy. She requires an 11-20 on a specific Charisma (Persuasion) check to succeed. She should get a natural 20 on 10% of the rolls she succeeds at, on average. So, 10% of the times she does succeed at that check, she will do so spectacularly well. Bubba Jay Foulbreath, rancid barbarian, can only succeed on that same Persuasion check on a 19-20. So a full 50% of the times that he succeeds, he does so spectacularly well. Meanwhile, Alaister Crow-Lee, aarakocra rogue, fails a Wisdom (Survival) check in the Woody Forest on a 1-10. 10% of the times he fails a Survival check, he fails spectacularly badly. Bear, the actually-a-bear druid, only fails a Survival check on a 1-2 in the Woody Forest. So a full 50% of the time she fails a Survival check, she actually fails spectacularly badly.

You are, in fact, rewarding the unskilled more spectacularly on their successes, on average, and you are punishing the extraordinarily skilled more horribly on their failures, on average. This is why a crit fail and crit success system doesn't work very well in D&D. Not in combat, and not on skills. Granted, it's generally accepted in combat, even when ridiculous: That dragon only misses you on a nat 1, so EVERY time it misses, is misses so badly something awful happens to it. Meanwhile, its goblin slave only hits you on a 20, so EVERY time it hits, it does so for critical damage; it can never do normal damage to you.
 
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Arial Black

Adventurer
It's true that D&D does not use a degrees-of-success system. It's a very simple system, and it's always just been pass/fail. Many people consider it to be a weak point with the game as a whole.

DM: Your 15th level party of paladin/warlock, abjurer, rogue/monk and life cleric are surprised by four mariliths, 12 werewolves and a pair of mated polychromatic dragons. Roll a d20; what did you roll?

Player: ...er...14.

DM: You win! Congratulations!

Players: Wait, what? Just one roll?

DM: D&D has always been a pass/fail system...!
 

JonnyP71

Explorer
It seems that this argument is just going round and round in circles. The simple answer is - the game provides the basics, the rest is up to the DM.

In a recent combat our rogue player decided he wanted to try to intimidate a Chain Devil... he portrays the rogue as a slightly built human aged 19 who looks younger than he is. The party refer to him as 'The Boy'.

So 'The Boy' wanted to try to Intimidate a Chain Devil... on a battlefield, brimstone heavy in the air, with squadrons of Manes advancing on a city. I guess he was going to try to make it nervous and back down from combat, but I immediately ruled that would never happen. I allowed him to roll though, a dismal result. Next round he tried again. And again, and again. Then he got a natural 20.

This only succeeded in making the Chain Devil perceive him as a threat and go straight for him. Not the outcome he wanted. The player pulled a face - should I have warned him that might happen - no of course not. Should I have told him the creature could not be intimidated, again, no of course not. Should I have let him continue to roll - of course - he can choose to attempt whatever he wants.
 

delericho

Legend
Tough. Sometimes success is beyond you and you will never know until you try. Welcome to life: sometimes you do your best and still fail.

I agree with this, with the caveat that if there's no chance of success and the character would know there's no chance of success, I'll flat out tell the player that. (As in your "picking a lock with Handle Animal and a chicken" example.) However, if the player insists on rolling the dice anyway, that's his call - but he'll still fail even on a '20'.
 

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