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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8281044" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Oh, sorry, I mean to say I narrate failure if it isn’t possible that they’ll figure it out.I think we’re getting too far into philosophy and too far removed from actual play here. Yes, the roll represents the overall attempt to do the thing. But once the roll has been resolved and the overall attempt to do the thing has failed, what’s stopping the player from declaring exactly the same action? If it’s a tangible thing in the fiction (like if you don’t have enough time, or some necessary tool has been rendered unusable as a consequence of failure, or the NPC has caught on to your tricks, whatever), fine. But if the only reason is “that roll already represented your best effort,” I don’t buy it. Maybe that means it’s good practice to make sure there is something tangible in the fiction that prevents you from trying again. In fact, I would say it absolutely does.Cool, we’re on the same page there.Interesting. So you haven’t had the experience where after working at something and getting stuck, you take a break, try at it again, and make more progress?I don’t find rolls interesting in and of themselves, so making more checks with different skills wouldn’t make resolution more interesting for me. What’s interesting is the tension created by the consequences for failure, and “you can’t try again” isn’t a very interesting consequence in my opinion.I prefer to encourage varied approaches. Sure, picking a lock will always involve thieves’ tools, but there are many other ways to open a door, some of which may play better to your character’s skills, or even circumvent the need to make a roll entirely.That makes sense. A success ladder is not something I generally want out of D&D, and also not something I think it does particularly well (because of the binary nature of skill checks combined with the swingyness of the d20.)Ok, interesting. So, I see the value in using the dice to determine how long a task takes (provided time is somehow limited or under pressure), but due to the binary nature of skill checks, I don’t think that’s easily doable in just one roll. You can make it take a certain amount of time on a success and take a different, longer amount of time on a failure (for example, “make a DC 15 Dexterity check. On a success you’ll get it open right away, but on a failure it will take you 10 minutes”) but that doesn’t leave any room for granularity - it takes one amount of time or the other amount of time, with no room in-between. Alternatively, you can have one roll represent a certain amount of time, with success meaning you complete the task in that timeframe and failure meaning you don’t, and allow multiple checks (for example, “it’ll take 10 minutes and a successful DC 15 Dexterity check to open”). I use both of these options in different contexts, depending on if the additional granularity of the latter option is desirable. Generally I favor the latter in situations like dungeon exploration where every minute matters and the former for more abstract time intervals (I would be more likely to say “on a failure conseqence X will happen before you finish” than “you’ll get it done in X minutes”).A third option might be to tie each roll result to a specific amount of time - for example, maybe it’s instantaneous on a natural 20 and each point lower adds an extra minute to the time. Or maybe you do something more like how @lovedrive does it, where on a result of X-Y you succeed right away, on a roll of N-R you succeed after a certain amount of time, and on a result of A-B you spend that amount of time and still fail. Or something like that. I don’t care for these options because they’re rather significant exceptions to the way skill checks generally work in D&D and in my view unnecessarily complicate an otherwise very simple, elegant system.</blockquote>

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