[Playtest Report] All Spellcasting Party

[Ratskinner]

It makes it so that easier tasks are really, really easy to hit and hard tasks are really, really hard. The strong central tendency to the dice probability makes your actual bonus a lot more significant.

The first part is just dependent on the DCs and where they are set (for instance, they don't have to be spaced evenly). The second part is the real meat of your thinking, and certainly true.

Sounds like a houserule/module to me. I'd replace d20's with 2d10. I think the 3e UA had a suggestion along those lines, maybe. You could use 3d6 (then you're playing GURPS ), but might have to modify crit rules. I've played a game called Old School Hack, which despite its name wasn't very Old School in mechanics, and it used a 2d10. It was easy to use. My experience with Fudge and FATE indicate that four dice have a little too much centrality and you can just compare bonuses for any extended roll-offs like combat.

This is, of course, a matter of preference for anyone. Attaching adjectives to probabilities like "the average untrained untalented person can succeed about half the time" seems rather squishy to me. (Does that make it "Hard", "Easy", or "Typical"? Won't that depend on the type of task at hand? What about skills that don't make sense to use untrained?)

 

[bganon]

(FWIW, skill DCs are one of my main concerns about Next. When your untrained Fighter with a +0 dex bonus can pick average locks with relative ease, there's a problem in my book.)

Am I reading the same playtest packet?

"Typical" locks are DC 16, and the check can't even be attempted without proper tools.

If a +0 dex bonus fighter is carrying around lockpicks and has enough free time to make 2-4 attempts, I'm totally OK with just saying that they can open the lock and moving on with the story.

 

[ferratus]

Am I reading the same playtest packet?

"Typical" locks are DC 16, and the check can't even be attempted without proper tools.

If a +0 dex bonus fighter is carrying around lockpicks and has enough free time to make 2-4 attempts, I'm totally OK with just saying that they can open the lock and moving on with the story.

I suppose it depends on whether you think skills should be a speed bump or a roadblock. In the case of a locked door, do you simply make all doors fairly easy to open so the adventure to continue, or do you make the PC's find another way through the door? (Finding a key, bending the bars, going to a different part of the dungeon and coming in through the back etc.) In the latter case, it certainly has to be part of adventure design (and spelled out implicitly in the DMG) that there should be multiple solutions to the same problem.

Mostly though (after thinking about it) it becomes clear that the flavour text of their DC's that they gave don't match the bonuses they gave with skills. For example, if you don't have the +3 skill boost, the DC of 25 really is something that only demigods can do with a great deal of difficulty (20 stat (+5) and rolling a 20), So if we are going to have skills grant a +X bonus, we need another DC for the impossible (DC 28), shift the terms up a step, and make skills a necessary part of the core game.

Otherwise, if we want to make skills and feats strictly optional, they can't grant +X bonuses. That means no Weapon or Spell Focus feats, no Iron Will Feat, no skill focus feat or any of the other feat taxes we've had in the past two editions because it buggers up flat math (bounded accuracy). To which I say, I hope so, God willing.

 

[Salamandyr]

Seems to me that something a trained person can only do 50% of the time is hard.

Consider a racetrack that professional race car drivers only make it to the finish of 50% of the time. We'd consider that prettry darn hard!

"Hard" doesn't necessarily mean hard for everyone. It can mean, and seems to in 5e, something that is difficult absent training.