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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5656663" data-attributes="member: 2067">I think the terminology narms me, too. "I have journeyman perception" is meaningless jargon to me (and to any newbies, I imagine), but "When I swim, I roll this dice and get this bonus, and if I get high, I do it well" is pretty intuitive. I think a lot of the methods here are looking for ways to achieve "auto-success."  There's already a way to do that in D&D. It's called Take 10 (or sometimes Passive Skill Checks or sometimes Take 20 or whatever) and it works wonders, since it lets you automatically do easy things, and yet also scales with both your natural skill and your training, and still forces you to try and do hard things. The way that this falters for many, it seems, is that it doesn't permit as much "Auto-Failure." Someone could roll a 20 on the dice and do something extraordinary just 'cuz they're lucky. Likewise, even someone who is good could get unlucky in an instance where they couldn't use a passive skill check. For me, this is a feature. I want my heroes to be capable of great, unexpected success, and horrible, unexpected failure. I want to be able to engage in tension-filled moments with every PC, where they have a chance of accomplishing something. Dramatic moments of exploration and interaction. Auto-Success and Auto-Failure actively work against that, since what you have is what you have. The result -- barring heavy DM intervention -- is said and done with. Now, that's often a useful outcome -- I don't necessarily want to have to make the barbarian roll to move a statue around. But that's what passive skill checks ("Take 10" and the like) are for. They don't fail at providing auto-success, what they do fail at is providing auto-failure. So auto-failure isn't an appealing selling point to me. I don't need to be more empowered to say no. What is an appealing selling point is reducing the skyrocketing DC's on some of the skills. By and large, if my bonus is over +10, there's almost no point in rolling dice anymore, mathematically. I wouldn't mind that curve flattened, but I'm skeptical that this will accomplish that goal, at least without deeper sacrifices to my fun than I'd be willing to make. It's also appealing to me to have everyone contribute in a dramatic skill situation, but this method actually decreases the possibility of that happening, since getting it to happen requires plying the DM, which is deeply unsatisfying gameplay for me. I am a lazy DM. I do not want to have to make thousands of micro-judgments about the permissiveness and results of an action that the rules don't handle. Furthermore, I like players to be empowered to change the world on their own, rather than asking me for permission at each turn. The more active they are, the more reactive I can be, and the easier my job is. So I guess the two things I see this system potentially accomplishing that the current skill system can't already accomplish are both things that would reduce the fun of the game for me. I don't want to adjudicate permissible actions, and I don't desire stronger rules authority to say "No." I don't see this system actually accomplishing much of what Mearls sets out to accomplish in the intro, though I'm on board with some of those stated goals in general.</blockquote>

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