Missing Rules

[5ekyu]

Ok. So what is it that the character does differently to allow them to jump further than they can do with certainty?

"Not holding back for increased accuracy, certainty and safety."

 

[pemerton]

It makes the leaps with extra distance usual, not unusual as the rules say.

How do you know? If there is only one 18' chasm in a 20 level campaign, then jumping that distance is not usual at all. And if a player fails every check made to see if his/her PC can clear a distance larger than that which p 64 permits the PC to jump with certainty, then so far from being usual such jumps turn out never to have occurred!

I also prefer that the players to describe their actions to me like [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6779196]Charlaquin[/MENTION]. I'm trying to get one of my players over the bad habit(personal opinion) of just asking to roll certain skills.

As I've said several times upthread, this is not in issue in the current discussion.

The player I'm imagining says "I jump over the chasm!" That's not asking to roll a skill. That's describing an action, an approach to the goal of getting to the other side of the chasm.

 

[Charlaquin]

It doesn't have to be the source of it. Failure just has to have meaning, even if the source of the meaning is attributed to the failure from elsewhere.

But if the failure wasn't the source of the meaning, then the failure, (wait for it...) by itself didn't have meaning. That doesn't mean the failure can't have meaning. It just means the failure needs something else (read: a cost or consequence) to give it meaning.

And I demonstrated that the cost was identical to the cost of doing nothing.

It is identical to the cost of doing nothing, yes, but it is still a cost of the failure. The fact that you didn't get to the top of the cliff doesn't have meaning by itself. The fact that you might get hit by spear attacks if you don't gives it meaning.

 

[5ekyu]

I don't accept that those are different goals. That's reading the mechanics back into the ficiton in what I regard as a highly artificial way. And in fact I don't accept that these are goals.

The goal is to get from A to B (in this thread's example, to get across the chasm). The approach is to jump. (As opposed to vaulting, or climbing down and back up, or springboarding across, or flying, or whatever other approach might be attempted within the magical and heroic world of D&D.)

The notions of distance that can be jumped with certainty and distance that is unusually long for a jump, and hence not able to be cleared with certainty pertain neither to goal nor approach. They are features of the situation which inform the GM's method of adjudication. (Analogous to whether a person is sleeping, and hence liable to have his/her throat slit with no check required; or what a creature's AC is.)

Actually, to me the two different approaches here are "jump the safe, consistent distance i can do quickly" [game terms - no fail, no action used, resolve automatically as part of movement by default" and "jump farther more recklessly knowing i can risk a lot of potential bad results aka setbacks" [Athletcis check, possible setbacks and other bad results.}

Much like how, i can set a goal of "type this message" and an approach of that includes "keep reviewing until it is typo free" or i can just say "reply quickly." Likely others as well.

The potentially different goals can be "jump a specific distance to a specific spot" (targeted jump at/to something) or just jump as far as i can in this direction" or quite a few others. likely others as well.

 

[Maxperson]

Of course there is, or can be.
A skill check can fail - leading to falling down on landing if the Gm so rules or *any other setback* the Gm sees as appropriate including going too far.
A skill check can (often does) take an action not occur as a default part of movement.
A simple read of the sentence under ability checks which tells you what happens if you do not make a skill check can give you some ideas as to why someone would not take the jump check every time.

If a jump matters, it's generally going to be worth the risk of falling to get across by attempting the roll. If it doesn't matter, they aren't going to be jumping the base distance anyway. There will be very few times that they will choose not to push for the extra distance when confronted by a longer(but possible) jump distance.

You are very correct... just like how the rule on casting curelight wounds says it takes an action... but the spell on sorcery metamagic says it might be castable with a bonus action by using quicken spell on cure light wounds.

Similarly, the athletics skill defined in the mysterious "Ability Checks" says you can jump unusually long distances. just like the jump spell increasing your jump distance.

This is a False Equivalence. Every single PC has athletics. It's not some mysterious ability like metamagic that is highly limited. If what you are arguing is true and athletics does just allow you to try for extra distance left and right, there is quite literally no reason for the jump rules to read like they do. You are arguing that the rules for jumping are, "With all of your effort you can go a maximum distance equal to your strength score, unless you want to go further by using your strength score."

The same section about jumping by strength defines your movement using jump as a part of your move... no fail, no check, nothing else at play there... but there are a lot of rules in the game that alter that baseline - one of them is the athletics skill examples.

Athletics specifies that it is unusual for it to happen, which precludes it happening in virtually every jump that's a bit longer than the jump rules allow.

Almost exclusively (above even a moderate point tho that point grows obviously as the physique and training improve) more power costs precision, more power produces more exhaustion and more power produces greater risk. Anyone proficient with athletics (speaking character) knows this.as they have seen it in play. the key to athletics and exertion is to spend the energy one needs to the task and no more - and jumping is one case where that is actually reflected in the rules with a defined "safe, no fail (except for terrain induced) and as part of movement action economy defined limits" and also a athletics skill check to jump "unusually long" - unusually not referring to the frequency of them making the jump obviously, but the length.

Unless failure = death/serious injury like when jumping, then you try as hard as you freaking can. Only a fool with a death wish is going to use only what they need and no more. It's easy to misread exactly how much you need and fall to your death.

 

[Maxperson]

The player I'm imagining says "I jump over the chasm!" That's not asking to roll a skill. That's describing an action, an approach to the goal of getting to the other side of the chasm.

And the jump rules dictate how many feet you can go. Saying "I jump over the chasm!" doesn't tell me that the PC is doing anything other than a normal jump.

 

[Charlaquin]

"Not holding back for increased accuracy, certainty and safety."

"I already assume you are not holding back. Tell me what you're doing, not what you aren't doing."

 

[5ekyu]

It makes the leaps with extra distance usual, not unusual as the rules say. Do I think it's unrealistic to go variable distances with effort? No. Does it break the game? No. That isn't the rules, though, and this is a rules discussion. I also prefer that the players to describe their actions to me like [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6779196]Charlaquin[/MENTION]. I'm trying to get one of my players over the bad habit(personal opinion) of just asking to roll certain skills. All my asking of "How?" is starting to sink in, and he's catching himself more and more often.

if one is to want to focus on the rules in the rules discussions or seem to perhaps one should look at the rule:

"You try to jump an unusually long distance or pull off a stunt midjump."

the "unusual" applies to the distance not the frequency of the jumps.

 

[Maxperson]

But if the failure wasn't the source of the meaning, then the failure, (wait for it...) by itself didn't have meaning. That doesn't mean the failure can't have meaning. It just means the failure needs something else (read: a cost or consequence) to give it meaning.

It doesn't have to have meaning by itself. It just has to have meaning. That's the ONLY requirement with regard to meaning.

It is identical to the cost of doing nothing, yes, but it is still a cost of the failure.

The fact that you didn't get to the top of the cliff doesn't have meaning by itself. The fact that you might get hit by spear attacks if you don't gives it meaning.

Which is all that I've been saying since the beginning. The cost of the failure is in the failure itself. There is no additional cost of getting hit by spears. You get hit by the spears due only to the failed roll, just the same as if you did nothing. As opposed to trying to jump over a trapped area where if you do nothing, no spears hit you, but if you fail to go far enough, you land on a spear trap ADDING the spear damage to the cost of failure.

Anyway, maybe we should just drop it at this point. It seems like we agree almost entirely on jumping and these rules, but are perhaps squinting at this from slightly different positions.

 

[5ekyu]

"I already assume you are not holding back. Tell me what you're doing, not what you aren't doing."

So, its you deciding for my character that every other time i am always going full out? Wasn't part of this not assuming for the players what and how they were doing things?

You do know that "not holding back" or "going all out" every move is pretty much one of the first thing coaches try to teach out of athletes in many sports except those that involve a mostly complete lack of precision or control? Everything is not a sprint. Sometimes control matters.

Especially in almost anything around combat.

But, thats OK, if your players buy that, thats cool. Some players have higher tolerances for Gm assumptions of how they (EDIT their characters) do things.

 

[Maxperson]

if one is to want to focus on the rules in the rules discussions or seem to perhaps one should look at the rule:

"You try to jump an unusually long distance or pull off a stunt midjump."

the "unusual" applies to the distance not the frequency of the jumps.

Not exactly. It can only be unusually long, if there are lots of jumps where you don't go that far. If there aren't lots of jumps where you don't go that far, then it can't be unusually long.

 

[iserith]

I don't accept that those are different goals. That's reading the mechanics back into the ficiton in what I regard as a highly artificial way. And in fact I don't accept that these are goals.

The goal is to get from A to B (in this thread's example, to get across the chasm). The approach is to jump. (As opposed to vaulting, or climbing down and back up, or springboarding across, or flying, or whatever other approach might be attempted within the magical and heroic world of D&D.)

The notions of distance that can be jumped with certainty and distance that is unusually long for a jump, and hence not able to be cleared with certainty pertain neither to goal nor approach. They are features of the situation which inform the GM's method of adjudication. (Analogous to whether a person is sleeping, and hence liable to have his/her throat slit with no check required; or what a creature's AC is.)

We're back to approach it seems. There is no ability check without a goal and an approach that the DM has determined to have an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence of failure. If you want to jump an unusually long distance, you have to say how. At least, according to the rules in which the Jump and Strength (Athletics) rules are nested. There's really no way around it short of running the game like D&D 4e where players just say what skills they want to use and the DM fills in the blanks. Which is fine if that's what you're into, but I can discern no support for that in the D&D 5e rules as a whole.

 

[5ekyu]

Not exactly. It can only be unusually long, if there are lots of jumps where you don't go that far. If there aren't lots of jumps where you don't go that far, then it can't be unusually long.

"So, if i get you right, if you chose to define "unusual" as 1 in 10 or 1 in 100, by your attempt to apply "unusually long" to frequency of jumps, then everytime i needed to jump 18 instead of 15 with my 15 strength, i just need to do 100 3' warm-up jumps to get ready so i keep the 18' try at "unusual"? Or does your "frequency of jumps taken" ruling only apply for you when it gets you the answer you want?


Does anyone actually run a game this way?

 

[Xetheral]

I, as a DM, assume your character is trying the best they can at all times unless you say otherwise. Frankly, I think it would be pretty silly not to. Can you imagine failing a check because you didn't explicitly state that your character was giving it your all? Or having a character fail a roll, then ask to try it again with advantage because they're trying harder this time?

Why would a character ever give their best effort on a long jump if they know that best effort isn't needed? If the distance to be cleared is (e.g.) 5', why would a character instead try to jump 20'? A character is only ever going to try to maximize their jump distance if they think they have a need to jump that far. Saying that characters try to jump as far as possible whenever they jump just seems bizarre, not to mention also unnecessarily using up movement speed for the round.

If you give a DC every time they say "Hey, I just want to roll athletics to go farther," they will do so every single time they hit a jump that is longer than their base distance. That means that going farther isn't going to be unusual, it's going to be the norm. There's no reason not to try to jump further at every single distance that's longer than automatic.

Given the potential consequences of failure on jump checks (not infrequently including death for low-level characters), repeatedly trying to jump distances that require a successful check to clear is a self-limiting phenomenon. It can't become the norm because the character will roll too low at some point, and either won't be able to make future checks, or presumably will have a visceral reminder of why it's unwise.

Besides, why should it at all be surprising that characters who encounter a jump longer than they can clear with a auto-success may want to try it anyway? That's the entire point of ability checks: to model the resolution of tasks that have a chance of failure. To paraphrase: there's no reason (other than consequences of failure/opportunity cost) not to try to <insert ability check> at every single task that's too hard to permit an automatic success.

I think one of the things going on here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the jump rules. They are not how far you can jump easily. There may be no roll, but the very first thing that is said in the jump section is, "Your strength determines how far you can jump." Not how far you can easily jump. Not how far you can jump with no effort. Just how far you can jump, period. If you have an 18 strength, all of your effort will garner you 18 feet. If you want to go an unusually far distance, you need to use athletics to presumably, do something athletic like jump off of a rock, or jump and pull yourself further along by grabbing a stalactite.

I entirely disagree. Task resolution in 5e has three possibilities: auto-success, ability check, auto-failure. Usually the breakpoints are up to the DM, but in this case the jump rules specify that anything under a distance equal to your strength score is an automatic success. Anything beyond that is the realm of an ability check, both under the default rules and due to the inclusion of jumping longer distances as an explicit example of a Strength (Athletics) check.

Also, if your Strength score in feet was truly the maximum it was possible for your character to clear with a jump, the difficulty would be so high you'd need to roll a 20 to succeed, not so low that a DC doesn't even need to be set.

Unless failure = death/serious injury like when jumping, then you try as hard as you freaking can. Only a fool with a death wish is going to use only what they need and no more. It's easy to misread exactly how much you need and fall to your death.

If it's less than your Strength in feet there is zero danger of misreading how far you need--it's an auto-success! By definition, you only run into the problem of potentially failing because you misread the distance if the jump is far enough that the outcome is uncertain.

 

[Charlaquin]

What if the DC set is Medium (as I suggested uphread for making an 18' jump with a STR 15), and the character is not trained in Athletics and so has a +2 bonus on the check. The chance of success there is not reasonable - it's 40%. (And there is an obvious consequence for failure, namely, falling down the chasm!)

You misunderstand what I mean by "reasonable chance of success/failure." I set the DC based on my assessment of the likelihood of the stated approach achieving the stated goal only after determining if there is a reasonable chance of success, reasonable chance of failure, and consequence for failure, so whatever the odds of rolling equal to or above the target number, they are within the bounds of what is meant by "reasonable" in this context. I say "reasonable chance of success/failure" instead of just "chance of success/failure" is to avoid absurd results that one could argue are technically possible. Yes, you could fail to tie your shoes correctly, but no, it's not worth rolling for because it is neither likely nor interesting.

I don't understand why you think that people can never do better, in physical endeavours, than what they are capable of achieving with certainty in those endeavours.

I don't. I give the PC the benefit of the doubt and assume that they perform at the best of their ability when it matters. I like players to succeed and fail by their choices, not by factors outside their control like whether or not they focused on their breathing properly, or got distracted, or thought about their hips and thighs enough.

 

[Maxperson]

If it's less than your Strength in feet there is zero danger of misreading how far you need--it's an auto-success! By definition, you only run into the problem of potentially failing because you misread the distance if the jump is far enough that the outcome is uncertain.

My point is that going your strength in feet involves your full effort, not because you gave it the minimum effort you thought it needed. That's why the jump rules say that, "Your Strength determines how far you can jump." and not "Your Strength determines how far you can easily jump." People don't use minimum effort to jump over dangerous pits and chasms. They want to be sure they go beyond the lip on the other side so as not to be hurt or killed.

 

[Charlaquin]

Why would a character ever give their best effort on a long jump if they know that best effort isn't needed?

If their best effort isn't needed anyway, it doesn't really matter if they give it their best effort or not/

If the distance to be cleared is (e.g.) 5', why would a character instead try to jump 20'?

This isn't something I've ever said would happen...?

A character is only ever going to try to maximize their jump distance if they think they have a need to jump that far. Saying that characters try to jump as far as possible whenever they jump just seems bizarre, not to mention unnecessarily using up movement speed for the round.

I didn't say characters try to jump as far as possible whenever they jump. I said characters put in their best effort at all times. Your best effort to jump 5 feet looks pretty different than your best effort to jump 50.

 

[Xetheral]

My point is that going your strength in feet involves your full effort, not because you gave it the minimum effort you thought it needed. That's why the jump rules say that, "Your Strength determines how far you can jump." and not "Your Strength determines how far you can easily jump." People don't use minimum effort to jump over dangerous pits and chasms. They want to be sure they go beyond the lip on the other side so as not to be hurt or killed.

If the distance is so short that you don't need to roll, I don't think it can possibly qualify as dangerous: you literally can't fail.

If the distance is great enough that failure is a possibility, I absolutely agree that they'll use maximum effort.

 

[Maxperson]

I entirely disagree. Task resolution in 5e has three possibilities: auto-success, ability check, auto-failure. Usually the breakpoints are up to the DM, but in this case the jump rules specify that anything under a distance equal to your strength score is an automatic success. Anything beyond that is the realm of an ability check, both under the default rules and due to the inclusion of jumping longer distances as an explicit example of a Strength (Athletics) check.

Also, if your Strength score in feet was truly the maximum it was possible for your character to clear with a jump, the difficulty would be so high you'd need to roll a 20 to succeed, not so low that a DC doesn't even need to be set.

A few things. First, "anything beyond that is the realm of an ability check" is false. Only the DM determines if an ability check is called for, so some attempts to go further can be auto success or auto fail. The player doesn't get to decide. At least not if playing by RAW. Second, my feeling on the jump distance = strength rule is that they made it that way to speed up play, and so that you didn't have PCs falling into pits because they rolled badly. Nothing was worse than needing a 3 or better and rolling a 2. Just make it a flat rate and if you can, you can. If you can't, you can't. Then add in an athletics check if you do something really cool with the environment to enable you to go farther.

 

[Maxperson]

If the distance is so short that you don't need to roll, I don't think it can possibly qualify as dangerous: you literally can't fail.

Because of maximum effort. Again, the rule says that your strength determines how far you can go, and then proceeds to tell you how far you can go in the jump rules.

If the distance is great enough that failure is a possibility, I absolutely agree that they'll use maximum effort.

If they don't use maximum effort, they aren't going to go strength distance. It's only auto succeed because of the maximum effort.