Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 6853431" data-attributes="member: 6778044">Except that this doesn't take into account that some people are naturally better at some things than other people. Total randomness strains the suspense of disbelief. My real issue is that a somebody with a high skill level shouldn't have to worry about failing what has become a trivial task for them, but one with a lower level of skill should.I totally disagree with the idea that something must change in a person's favor before a retry. For example, picking a lock. There's no reason, unless you break it (unlikely) that you can't just keep trying. If it's within your capability (that is, you can eventually roll high enough to succeed), then you can just keep trying until you do. The variable here is time. If there is no risk, then there's really no need to roll at all. But what if you're trying to pick a lock to sneak into a room before the guard returns? Then you have a fixed amount of time to succeed. Each check becomes important. But instead of re-rolling every turn you look at the task as a whole. That is, you make one skill check, and while the rogue is working on it, the sorcerer is telling him to hurry up while the fighter is watching the guard work his way back to where he's currently working on the door. So you're saying that the only options should be succeed or fail. If he fails then he can't pick the lock at all? I don't believe that's a "better solution" at all. As for the passive checks, you could just use the ability score modifier to judge who is better at what, but basically it's also setting a floor. If you don't want to increase the floor, that's fine. But you still have a passive ability based on the modifier itself. They've set the floor at anything easy is doable without a check. I'm OK with that, but not with the idea that somebody with a high passive ability (Perception being the biggest one) will automatically find everything. But they are more alert than somebody with a lower one. So that's where the "hunch" or "feeling" or "you notice something" comes into play. They have a sense of what's out there, now it's a question of how they figure it out, either through role-playing, or by making an active check. If they roll low on the active check, it might take a while to figure it out (which they may not have) or they may have made a wrong assumption and have bad information to work with (oh, I thought they were behind that tree.)2e for a long time didn't even have skill checks originally. So by that logic we don't need skill checks either. Sure, you can run a game without passive checks, but they are extremely helpful once you get the hang of them.Ilbranteloth</blockquote>

Verification