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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 6906776" data-attributes="member: 6778044">That's exactly the problem I had. 3/3.5e was enough of an evolution that it made sense. But when playing a video game and I have a 163 AC I have no idea what it means. Same thing with the way 4e worked.Really, I think the key for bounded accuracy is that the numbers reflect something in the world. A suit of armor = x AC. It completely separates the level of the characters and monsters from the world around them.The abilities and skills of the characters and monsters then act upon those things. A higher level character naturally has a better chance of succeeding. The challenge in the design is working within a scale that makes sense.In the past, other games used percentile dice to give more granularity. But the d20 is the die in D&D at this point. Even non-gamers know what a natural 20 is. So that limits the scale to 5% increments (which is not that bad actually). The bigger factor is that by using a d20, everything number has an equal chance of succeeding. A 3d6 approach with a bell curve would make critical successes and critical failures less common. But we have a 5% chance of either each time the die is rolled.When you consider the numbers, a 20th level character with a 20 Ability Score and Expertise can have a +17 to their ability. With a 30 in the ability it could be as high as 22. And there are magical ways to increase that. That puts the ceiling well above the 30 that they've noted as Practically Impossible. So I would say that 30 and below are those things that a normal creature without magical assistance might be able to accomplish.That +17 = 85% better chance than your average person without proficiency, and a 75% better chance than somebody with the most basic training. That's pretty significant.Where I think it's potentially lacking is the difference between trained and untrained. The 10% difference at 1st level isn't horrible for some things. But there are a lot of things that it feels like an untrained character shouldn't be able to succeed at all, or it's nearly impossible. I've tried a number of possibilities to address this. The easiest is to assign disadvantage when attempting an untrained skill. It's consistent, and there is no DM adjudication needed. You aren't trained? Roll with disadvantage. But another option is to consider the DC. If the DC descriptions (easy, hard, nearly impossible) is describing the task in relation to a trained character (and it doesn't specify that it is), then the DC for an untrained character can be different. For example, climbing a cliff that has an overhang that you must traverse, hanging from the bottom. For a skilled climber that might be considered hard. But for an untrained climber you could consider that nearly impossible. This solution seems like a good option, particularly with 5e, because the DM can determine under the specific circumstances whether the difference would be significant, and by how much.</blockquote>

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