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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9285345" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Surprising. It's quite rare for a 5e fan to actually take any issue at all with how swingy it is. Most either deny that it is swingy in the first place, or defend it (often the former becomes the latter, I find.)My main problem is, I genuinely don't think everyone should have a chance, on the one hand, and yet on the other hand I very much think an expert should truly outgrow some challenges, becoming not merely quite likely but guaranteed to succeed. That is, in many ways, how we judge degrees of competence at a task, after all--how much a person's success depends on making the right choices/taking the right actions, rather than on luck or happenstance. A climber who fails 20% of perfectly ordinary climbing attempts is someone I would consider not very good at climbing, especially if he's supposed to be an &quot;expert.&quot;For you. (A message you've been quite keen to make to me in the past, I'll note.)Oh, certainly, degrees of success would be lovely. If only we had some kind of system that could judge group-level degrees of success, say, by succeeding or failing at various checks along the route toward a final goal. Or if we had, say, a page or two in the DMG going over what typical tasks are like, so we could get a sense for what near-success or near-failure is, and thus graduate from e.g. costly failure to general failure to almost-successful to barely-passing to passing comfortably to passing with flying colors. Those tools would be incredibly useful, but alas, they're definitely totally impossible and no edition of D&amp;D has ever even attempted such an unachievable dream.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 9285345, member: 6790260"] Surprising. It's quite rare for a 5e fan to actually take any issue at all with how swingy it is. Most either deny that it is swingy in the first place, or defend it (often the former becomes the latter, I find.) My main problem is, I genuinely don't think everyone [I]should[/I] have a chance, on the one hand, and yet on the other hand I very much think an expert should truly outgrow some challenges, becoming not merely quite likely but [I]guaranteed[/I] to succeed. That is, in many ways, how we judge degrees of competence at a task, after all--how much a person's success depends on making the right choices/taking the right actions, rather than on luck or happenstance. A climber who fails 20% of perfectly ordinary climbing attempts is someone I would consider [I]not very good at climbing[/I], especially if he's supposed to be an "expert." For you. (A message you've been quite keen to make to me in the past, I'll note.) Oh, certainly, degrees of success would be lovely. If only we had some kind of system that could judge group-level degrees of success, say, by succeeding or failing at various checks along the route toward a final goal. Or if we had, say, a page or two in the DMG going over what typical tasks are like, so we could get a sense for what near-success or near-failure is, and thus graduate from e.g. costly failure to general failure to almost-successful to barely-passing to passing comfortably to passing with flying colors. Those tools would be incredibly useful, but alas, they're definitely totally impossible and no edition of D&D has ever even attempted such an unachievable dream. [/QUOTE]

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