Help me with my rules revisions - Part 1 - Jumping

[Celebrim]

That's why I wrote the Rule of Three - because once the skill bonus exceeds the range of a d20, success increasingly becomes a foregone conclusion, rendering a roll meaningless. It was intended to maintain a degree of chance at all levels - even Carl Lewis screws up sometimes, whether because he's having a bad day, the wind's blowing in his face, or the fates decreed it. Obviously, your opinion differs from mine, and that's fine. It takes all kinds to play D&D.

Sure. I just think that this sort of 'you can always have a bad day' attitude makes alot more sense in a dice pool system like GURPS, tri-d, FASA Star Wars, or whatever. Carl Lewis does indeed screw up sometimes, but the random variation isn't linear and extreme failure should be extremely rare. I think a d20 fortune mechanic, a class system, and powerful and accessible magic is extremely unsuited for a skill system with a 'degree of chance at all levels'.

Jump is inherently different than a skill like Open Lock or Knowledge (or saving throws or attack rolls). With 'Open Lock' or 'Knowledge' there are two outcomes - 'Success'/'Failure'. A linear mechanic like d20 works just fine for that. But Jump isn't linear, because what we really want to know is not, 'Success'/'Failure' but 'How far did he go?'. With skills like 'Open Lock', a 2 is as bad as a 9, if both indicate failure. There is no special meaning attached to either one in terms of the degree of failure. The same is not true of 'Jump'.

I was talking about making a standard long jump into a sand pit, not jumping across an obstacle with the possible outcome of broken limbs and/or death. In that case, no - you can't take 20.

You can't take 20 on one jump period. Taking 20 represents doing 20 or more jumps until you finally manage to do make your best effort. The fact that Carl Lewis is making nearly his best effort on every jump represents an impossibility in the d20 system as written.

 

[Celebrim]

If you want less randomness, you could replace the 1d20 roll with a 3d6 roll or a 2d10 roll.

That's definately a possibility. Right now, I'm tossing back and forth between a system that makes your ranks worth several times more than the dice throw, or resolving the jump using the throw of a 5d4+ranks.

3.5e increased the average distance a character could jump by 5 feet (compared to 3e), which made jumps incredibly unrealistic. You can get more sensible jump distances by rolling back this change.

Almost everything gets more sensible if you roll back 3.5 changes. There are a few things that they got right, but they got far more wrong than they got right. For a system upgrade that was basically errata, they really should have stuck to errata. Almost every change that didn't address a critical balance issue (haste, harm, etc.) or purely clarifying errata made the system worse.

Instead of rolling and saying you jump that far, a better approach would be to declare the distance you are aiming for, roll, and you either make it, or you fall short (a really low roll would represent a stumble). You don't jump to the moon just because you rolled a natural 20 this way.

That represents a much more d20 approach that is more suited to the d20 fortune mechanic, but I don't think it really works in the general case because we can't escape that what we are really interested in is, 'How far did you go'. For example, suppose a character wants to jump a 10' pit. We can assign a chance you succeed and a chance you fail and fall into the pit, so seemingly no problem. But then suppose the clever character wanting to jump the 10' pit announces that he wants to jump 20'. No, there is we agree a better chance that he doesn't go 20' than he has to go 10', but when he fails what we really care about is whether he's in the pit. Eventually, this forces us to resolve that a success of a particular level means a particular distance, and we are back to square one.