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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5694745" data-attributes="member: 54877">There is a huge assumption in all of your reasoning.  Namely, that all choices will and should reduce down into a single number, this will model what we want to model, and doing so will not cause any kind of game play or handling issues. It has been my contention from the very beginning of the Legend and Lore exploration of skills that a problem with existing D&D systems (3E and on) is that reducing down into a single number introduces all kinds of bad side effects, and the waffling around trying to escape those side effects causes more trouble than addressing them head on. But even with that, in practical terms, your example leaves too much out.  Quick, which is better, an attack that needs a 13+ to hit, does 1d8, and dazes (save ends) or one that hits on 14+, does 1d6, and dazes until the end of the attacker's next turn?  You may be able to answer that off the cuff, but a lot of people will not.  And that is about as easy as it gets, and doesn't even take into account the circumstances or what the rest of the party is capable of doing. Now, I'll grant you that in 4E as written in a skill challenge, handled crudely and without regards to the ongoing story, it comes down to finding that higher roll.  A success is a success is a success, right?  Not in my game.  Some successes are nice.  Some are meh.  Some take the narration where the players want it to go.  Some, not so much.  And surely, even crudely run, the manner of the successes can have some effect on the end narration (browbeating the mayor for his map, versus talking him out of it, versus stealing it, versus copying it and leaving it, versus doing without it, and so on, ad infinitum.) If a designer is going to reduce a task down into a single check, then I will freely grant that communicating it through the relevant numbers is almost always the correct answer.  (The exceptions are too esoteric to even apply to any version of D&D that would be acceptable to most players.)  Even then, it is useful to at least provide a bit of a chart and explanation for what various likely odds mean, in both game and game-world terms.  But sure, on the character sheet, put the number. However, if you have seemingly intractable problem with modeling skills in a game, I suggest that revisiting the base assumption is the first order of business.  (And as a related but here unsupported assertion, I'll say that the proposed musings thus far don't go far enough, because they only have two dimension to the check.  You need at least three.  But I suppose a discussion of that belongs in a forked topic.)</blockquote>

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