Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7981006" data-attributes="member: 1465">I welcomed the 3e changes to skills and used the d20 system for 20 years, even though it is far from perfect, so I generally don't miss the % skills.However they DO have an advantageous property of immediately giving you the probability of success. It's not difficult to translate a d20 roll to %, but you need to know the DC, and most DMs won't tell you that. I know that many would say they like a bit of mystery, so not knowing the actual % of success is better. On the other hand, even if you DO know it, you still don't really know if you'll succeed or fail. It's just a more informed decision. That said, it should be easy to convert d20 to %. You start with 50% chance for an average task (DC11) before applying any bonus, then each +1 bonus is +5%, while each DC increase is -5%.I think such system doesn't need to be restricted to thieving skills, if you like it you can use it for every skill (even for saves and attacks if you want to go that far).I think that to appreciate this sort of old-school rule, you need to get into a more gamist/practical state of mind, NOT a simulationist/common sense state of mind. Take the extreme example of listening to doors. Non-thieves didn't get to roll because it was not their ROLE to listen to doors. If you have a thief in the party, it's her duty alone to do that. That's why you want a thief in the party. If you don't have a thief however, it doesn't mean you can't win the adventure, and it doesn't even mean you will certainly fail at hearing something behind a door, it just won't be up to a PC ability to sort it out. The DM might still give the party a chance, but even if she doesn't, it won't be unfair, because it was your choice to have someone else in the party instead of a thief, so you certainly gained something else from that choice. The simulationist / common sense system has its own downsides... When everyone can try to listen at doors "because it makes sense", then if the Rogue tries and fails, it makes sense that all other PC try also, no matter how bad at the roll, until one succeeds, and the laws of probability easily yield a much higher chance if you let 4-5 people roll instead of one (not to mention allowing retries). Then you have to overcompensate by having something bad happens on a failure even if it doesn't have to happen according to the situation, or to complicate the rules just to tame the total probability.There is beauty in the simplicity of a system that just says "one chance" with probability x%, compared to a system with lots of rolls only to generate the same x%.</blockquote>

Verification