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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KesselZero" data-source="post: 5839856" data-attributes="member: 6689976">The way I envision it, having skill effect rolls would make levels of mastery more or less unnecessary, or at least baked in. I've always been a little wary of putting hard caps on when someone  simply can't even attempt to do something. Obviously in some examples  given, like speaking Illithid, I agree, but in many cases I'd like to  see a less-trained PC at least be able to make an attempt-- think, for  example, of a young musician who writes a classic song without any  formal training. In addition, in skill checks, I'm much less interested in a roll for "are you successful or not," and much more interested in determining degrees of success.So we'd have a system where the levels of mastery are set: DC 8 Simple, DC 13 Difficult, DC 20 Incredible, DC 25 Legendary (or something like that). Then we'd have a much flatter progression of skill ranks, maybe maxing out at +12 for a Grand Master type character, with each higher rank taking more skill points to achieve so you can't just blast through the levels (and to encourage stretching out to new skills). Finally, each skill rank or two gives new effect dice, from +0/d4 to +12/2d12 or something like that.The "tier" effect is maintained in that a top-ranked PC wouldn't have to roll for Simple or Difficult tasks, could perform Incredible tasks somewhat reliably, and could achieve Legendary tasks a decent amount of the time. (Obviously all these exact numbers would be tweaked.) Meanwhile, a non-master PC would still have an incentive to at least attempt checks for most of these tasks.Regarding effect dice, then, it would have two effects. One, a high-ranked PC could get jobs done much quicker. For example, I could write a chorale but it would require sitting down with all my old music theory books from college (bonus from tool use!) and really thinking about everything, whereas Mozart could poop that stuff out in his sleep. Second, it would be a way to differentiate quick tasks from long-term ones (as in many of [MENTION=1122]Frostmarrow[/MENTION]'s examples) so a complex lock could be represented as either DC 15, 2 HP (a skilled rogue could pop it quickly but an unskilled rogue might not be able to open it at all) OR as DC 8, 12 HP (a skilled rogue could still open it easily, and an unskilled rogue could open it eventually, but it would take longer). This gives the DM more tools to use for adventure design based on how he wants to simulate a part of the world and what in-game effect he wants to have (a door that probably can't be opened without getting the captain's key versus a door that can be opened but with a high chance of getting wandering monsters while you do). A more complex system, most definitely, but with the benefit of more flexibility for the DM and more usefulness for less-skilled players.As a side note, I do agree with a basic trained/untrained split, and in this fledgling system, if you had any ranks you would count as trained. So even a +1 in Speak High Illithid would let you attempt to convince your new overlords not to eat your brains, though it wouldn't be very fluent speech. A +0 would be the only case in which you couldn't make an attempt at all, and that would only be for special skills like languages, Rocket Science, etc. Anybody could make an Athletics check.Whew!</blockquote>

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