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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8276837" data-attributes="member: 6779196">No, I literally could have done better, if I had rolled anything else. You can rule that I’m not allowed to try again until circumstances change if that’s how you prefer to run the game, but it’s an objective fact that I could have done better.Difficulty isn’t what I’m concerned about here.That’s not what I do. DCs aren’t just out in the wild, existing independently of actions. There’s no difficulty to compare to unless there’s an action being performed that could succeed, could fail, and has a consequence for failure, and in that case what I compare it to is the result of the player’s actual roll, not to the best they could have rolled. However, if there’s no chance of failure or no consequence for failure, there’s no DC and no comparison. I just narrate the results of success.It’s not purely binary - some actions have costs that must be paid to even attempt them, and some have consequences on a failure that result in progress with a setback. Some tasks even have different consequences at different thresholds, though I generally try to avoid using that.This is the only defense I’ve ever seen of the “your first try represents your best attempt technique” and I don’t find it compelling because I don’t see any gameplay value in modeling that.Well, sure, sometimes you get a great roll. That’s the nature of dice.Again, I’m not advocating for take 20. I don’t like take 20. It’s a sloppy attempt to make best DMing practice (only calling for rolls when there are sufficient dramatic stakes to warrant it) and turns it into a player-facing mechanic. In so doing, it causes weirdness like comparing the best possible result to the difficulty of every task, which also necessitates the nonsense that is having naked DCs absent an specific action they’re being used to resolve. Take 10 has similar issues, though not as bad. There are at least some situations where it can be useful to represent the average result of a task performed repeatedly over time with a 10 + relevant modifiers.</blockquote>

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