D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[CreamCloud0]

I like it (pardon the pun).

What it saves are hundreds of posts sayng nothing but "I agree" or "Hear, hear!".

Hear, Hear!

 

[Maxperson]

I'm interested how you determine how many checks you need for this more granular style - we all know that the more checks are made, the lower probability of success is.

See my above post to @Hussar. What the players do will often cut down or even eliminate checks altogether. If they can describe to me a way that would simply work, they can succeed without any roll. For instance, if the cook is asleep in the kitchen and one of them casts silence, there's no roll for anything, even the perception check in the kitchen to see if they bump into something noisy or not would be negated, because there's no noise to be had.

Consider a simpler example - let's assume 5.14 and the character attempting to sneak up on a target at the end of a long city alley at night. The target is relying on passive perception to detect the approaching character.

The GM narrates that there is a decent amount of cover (boxes, refuse and so on) and is 150 feet long. It is plausible that there are animals or even maybe a passed out drunk or similar in the passageway that isn't immediately visible to the character as they are completely obscured. The character approaching the target has a Stealth (Dexterity) bonus of +10 and the target has a passive perception of 15.

We can treat this in a number of ways - perhaps we make a single roll to approach. Perhaps we make rolls depending on the movement rate of the character (so for this, a reasonable number is 5 checks, once per 30 ft of normal movement). Perhaps we decide instead to make a number of checks based on the number of major obstacles in the path (let's say for the sake of argument there are three)

In the first case we get a success probability of 80%, for the second about 33% and for the third about 50%. I'll note we can quibble about disadvantage, but the pattern remains the same - we'd get the same idea in 3.x even if the exact values change.

I'd argue that the largest determinator of success is therefore not the skills of the characters or even the fictional situation (as above, all three approaches are congruent with the fiction) but how many rolls the GM decides are needed before success. It risks a kind of "soft" railroading, whereby failure can be enforced by simply requiring more rolls - I've certainly experienced this and done it, albeit inadvertently.

It's useful therefore to come up with a heuristic for how many tests are needed that's beyond the fictional situation (as demonstrated above, the same fiction can reasonably deliver multiple possible values)

I get that. Whether it's a lot of rolls, a few rolls, or no rolls is almost entirely in player hands. It's up to them to describe to me what they do and I go from there.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Do you truly not understand that when someone is talking about the differences between two styles of play that he isn't saying there's one way to handle things or that it's true for all of D&D?

Do you not understand that asking @pemerton what would have happened on a success in his example is not a comparison of two games? It is a question about a specific game, and it is one that makes no sense… because as I stated, we can only guess what may have happened if the roll succeeded instead of failed.

As far as the rest of my post, it’s relevant because you guys are mixing up real world processes and fictional events when it comes to cause and effect. You’re attributing the cook or the guard to real world processes, but not the farrier.

 

[Maxperson]

Do you not understand that asking @pemerton what would have happened on a success in his example is not a comparison of two games? It is a question about a specific game, and it is one that makes no sense… because as I stated, we can only guess what may have happened if the roll succeeded instead of failed.

As far as the rest of my post, it’s relevant because you guys are mixing up real world processes and fictional events when it comes to cause and effect. You’re attributing the cook or the guard to real world processes, but not the farrier.

When @AlViking asks him what happens when.... It's from the perspective of his playstyle. He's really saying, "This wouldn't work for me, because..." He knows that a success wouldn't result in the guard coming in @pemerton's game. The question is more rhetorical to illustrate the differences between the two styles of play.

 

[JConstantine]

Alright. I'll bite. How often do things go badly with a success?

Well, in games that use "success with a complication", pretty darn frequently. Though that is one of the more common reasons cited when people bounce off them.
The cook example given seems more like success with a complication to me than fail forward as I understand it. With fail forward, I would expect something more like the rogue fails to pick the lock, but the cook opens the door to investigate the sound of metal scraping on metal.

 

[JConstantine]

The brain is very good at detecting patterns.

Indeed, it is so good that it can find patterns that aren't even there.

Er, others have those players too, right?

 

[hawkeyefan]

When @AlViking asks him what happens when.... It's from the perspective of his playstyle. He's really saying, "This wouldn't work for me, because..." He knows that a success wouldn't result in the guard coming in @pemerton's game. The question is more rhetorical to illustrate the differences between the two styles of play.

There is no way to know if a guard would have arrived onna success. He doesn’t know that. We don’t know what didn’t happen.

 

[JConstantine]

Asking @pemerton what happened if the player succeeded on their roll to sing is a mistake.

I don't think that's a mistake, for two reasons.
Firstly, understanding how things would play out on a success gives a contrast to how things play out on a failure that aids in understanding the rules and/or playstyle.
Secondly, as established in the tangent with @EzekielRaiden, such questions are viewed as necessary for establishing trust with the GM.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There is no way to know if a guars would have arrived onna success. He doesn’t know that. We don’t know what didn’t happen.

Doesn’t someone have to know the consequences of both success and failure before you roll the dice? Otherwise it’s just a case of throwing an icosahedron and making something up.

 

[JConstantine]

Another difference between the two styles is that there is even more granularity with our style. Even if you successfully pick the lock and the cook doesn't hear it due to a failed perception check, she will get another chance when you open the door and make a new noise, and when you enter the room(possibly in opposition to stealth), and possibly if the PCs collide with pots or dishes in the dark. One check isn't going to cover everything.

In actual play, do you really call for that many checks? I mean, I have a preference for task resolution over conflict resolution, but that seems excessive. It's pretty much setting the PCs up to fail on sheer probability.