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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 6857081" data-attributes="member: 6778044">But part of the world making sense is that you actually get good at something. Picking that simple lock may be difficult for somebody that's never picked a lock before, but you've got the training, experience, and have done it a number of times, that it's just simple now.Just like you don't make a skill check to see if you can walk across the room. Or drive a car/ride a horse. If you learn to play an instrument, even playing a simple song is a challenge. But once you've worked past a certain level of skill, even an intermediate song is simple and wouldn't require a check. On the other hand if somebody tells you to play a song correctly with a gun to your head, the circumstances have changed to such a degree that you might make a mistake on even a simple song.A blacksmith can make horseshoes all day. But a suit of plate armor, that's different. Sure they'll have different DCs, but once you've made 1000 horseshoes, probably more like 100, I think it's pretty safe to say that you'll never fail your check again.If you have a character with a smithing ability, and you need to make new horseshoes, I think the passive score is sufficient to say, "yes, while in town you can make new shoes for your horses before the next leg of the journey." Partially because they have the skill, and partially because even if they make a mistake, they can just keep working at it until it's done. There's no time element at play. Their passive skill indicates they are capable of completing the task.*  If there's something that alters the DC to something above the easy, then make a roll. But even if you aren't requiring a roll, I think it's important for the player to realize that the reason they are opening the lock is that they have the skill to do so.While traveling across a rocky steppe, one of your horses throws a shoe, or a shoe breaks. The party is being tracked, but you have at least a half-day head start. One of the characters used to be a smith, or at least an apprentice, so it's an opportunity to use his skill. He can attempt to reforge the pieces to repair it enough to make a workable one. That would need a skill check. If he fails, there's really no reason why he can't try again, so I would go with just a time element. Since forging a horseshoe doesn't use the same time-scale as combat, I might say the delay is measured in 10-minute, or even hour increments. Complicating matters is that the party has been traveling dark, not making fires, so as not to be seen at night. So the work must be completed before dusk and the fire put out.Random situations introduce fun, but random for everything isn't. For the world to make sense, the randomness needs to make some sense too. The skill, in particular the increasing skill of the character should be taken into account. Yes, it's taken into account by the check modifier, but at some point they get good enough to not require a skill check.Introducing randomness also introduces the possibility for failure. A lot of times that doesn't make sense and is unnecessary. Or if introducing the randomness (a die roll) will have no impact on the outcome, it's also unnecessary. Overusing the technique can reduce the value of the technique. If 90% of the time a die roll is irrelevant and you're making them roll them anyway, it reduces the effectiveness of rolling the dice. Then rolling the dice reduces the fun.In addition, anytime you roll the dice you are shifting your focus from the action in the game to the game itself. Your attention is drawn from the immersion of the characters and what they are doing in the world, to the mechanics outside of that world. That's OK to a degree, and that degree will vary from player to player and table to table. For some people the mechanics, the "game" part of the game is really fun. Just like some people really enjoy a "highly tactical" approach like the 4e combat system, others, like me, prefer the combat, or the mechanics of the combat, to intrude on the action in the game as much. Muchkinizers/min-maxers/optimizers tend to like more skill checks for example.Like anything, it's a balance, and that sweet spot will vary, but from a mechanical viewpoint for most people the sweet spot is related to how much is at stake when you make the die roll. It doesn't really matter if the players know that they can't fail or not on a given die roll. What matters is how frequently they make a die roll that succeeds and/or fails.For example, if every die roll is 50/50 (and it plays out that way), people will feel they have little impact on what's going on. It's literally a coin toss. We're going to enter this battle (or pick this lock, or whatever), and we'll fail as often as we succeed.If the general chance was 75%+ failure, they'll eventually stop trying things that are dangerous, because it's safer to not do it. Without an actual study on the matter, I'd guess the sweet spot is somewhere around 80% success on average. More often than not they will succeed at what they attempt. But there is a chance, and a decent chance, at failure. So choose your actions wisely.Having them roll for every lock may or may not alter this fact. I don't know how often you have locks that are easily within their capability to open within their passive score. The answer to finding this sweet spot lies not within your decision to make them roll for every lock. They might come across a lock once or twice in a session, or maybe 20 times. The answer as to whether this has an impact is related more to how many times you roll the dice in a session, and what the average outcome is. It's more a function of the role of the dice in the entire session than for a single type of task.On a different but related subject - if you think that the passive scores are too easy, then make it 8+ the modifier, or 5+, or even just the modifier. Another alternative would be to say that a check isn't required if your passive score is at least 5 higher than the DC. It's really a question of how things work in your game, but I do think too many checks is as bad as too few. Possibly worse. It's sort of like crying wolf. If most of the time you roll the dice, you succeed, and then you do it once and you fail, it doesn't feel as fair.Or increase the DC. The DC definitions make some sense, as long as you're using the standard array for abilities. That means that for a proficient skill in your highest ability you have a +5 (+30%) chance of success over somebody average with no ability in that skill. That puts even medium tasks within a level of automatic success. Is that reasonable? Well, If you're a commoner and a blacksmith, and all you do is smithing, and you're proficiency is in your smith tools, your strength is 15, plus your racial bonus bumps it to 16 or 17, yeah, you'd probably be able to make all but the difficult items on a regular basis.To put it a different way, somebody who is not proficient (trained), but is capable of performing the task, can succeed at the easy tasks, but a trained person succeeds at medium tasks. That sounds fairly reasonable based on the design goals of 5e.Even if you're more likely to hand-wave checks as a DM as unnecessary, the passive score at least gives you an objective measure as to when that's appropriate. *Note that the current rules don't differentiate between proficient and non-proficient tool use. They assume that if you have the tools, you can complete the task, and that the proficiency bonus differentiates between the two. This also applies to skills. It's part of the idea that anybody can try, and potentially succeed at anything. It's also part of the concept of bounded accuracy to keep the difficulty of even the most difficult task within reach of more people.This is an entirely different discussion, but if you don't like the way trained/untrained works in this edition (and I don't), one solution is to allow passive checks only for skills with proficiency. That reduces the randomness for somebody trained, but keeps it for those that aren't. I also think that some tasks would require training regardless. Sure, I can buy all of the tools needed for forging a sword. But without any instruction on how to do so, I'm not likely to be successful.I'll have to think through these options - reduce the passive score base, increase the DC, or not allow passive checks if non-proficient, and see which fits my concept of "realistic." There are pros and cons to each approach.Ilbranteloth</blockquote>

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