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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6551699" data-attributes="member: 996">That just gets into how you handle individual skill checks.  In 3.5 or 5e or 4e or BRP or any of a variety of systems that happen to have pass/fail skill checks, you can either treat them as a bland roll, or put some thought and description into them.  (You can also - as 5e openly encourages you to - just ignore the system, and base success or failure on how you, as the DM, judge how the players describe or act out their characters' actions, with no reference to the abilities of the characters themselves.  Though that's getting more into freestyle RP than any given system.)Apart from that, some important considerations we can take from experience with past editions of D&D might include:  Old-school D&D had no skills - special abilities like thieves finding traps or rangers tracking, and there were very specific checks for opening doors, determining surprised, or lifting portcullises or the like - but outside of that, any action other than combat or spellcasting consisted of the player describing the action and the DM deciding what happened or if some roll was called for.   3.5:  checks got highly divergent and there was no structure to out-of-combat challenges, so most such challenges ended up being a one-man show, either the guy with the highest stat, or the one casting a spell to automatically accomplish the given end.  4e Skill Challenges provided a structure so that each player was expected to participate, and gave exp for the challenge, which at least tried to give it some of the gravity of a combat challenge - it was a halting start at making non-combat challenges better, but it's been abandoned.  5e 'bounded accuracy' means that, for any given skill check where it's at all plausible, everyone might as well and jump in and roll, because someone might roll high - and, where it's not plausible, it's back to the 3.5 paradigm of it being all the specialist's show - aside from that, it goes back to emphasizing the old-school approach of player description and DM judgement.Each of those have problems, some obvious.  You can't afford to invest a lot of time in a non-combat challenge to make it interesting if it's only going to involve one player.  You can't let the story hinge on a single pass/fail skill check.  You can't generate interest with nothing but simple pass/fail checks, either, even if you do have a lot of them (it helps, but only a very little).  If you do away with checks, you take the character's ability out of the equation, and lose the player-PC connection, character concept/development, and any sense of the player being or controlling the character.</blockquote>

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