Being interrupted is not failing to be able to open the lock via the lockpicking skill. It's failing due to being interrupted which is different. If you want to add that into your personal game, that's fine, but it's not part of 5e RAW.
No one said anything about being interrupted. The scenario was that the thief made enough noise while picking a lock that the cook heard it. When the thief opens the door, there’s the cook.
As for RAW, if you haven’t caught on, I don’t care what RAW says.
If it made sense, I would probably like it.
As it stands, though, you're adding something to the lockpicking skill that isn't written there. All that's written is the attempt to open the lock with the tools. Then succeeding or failing at that with the die roll.
Yea, it’s not written in the very sparse description presented in the book. I’m using common sense and creativity to come up with another way to handle the outcome of the attempt to pick the lock.
If I stuck to RAW then no thief would ever make too much noise when picking a lock and all locks would be capable of being picked in six seconds… which are absurdities.
One of the good things about having a GM is that they can help with rulings where the rules don’t quite handle things on their own.
Because RAW lets you pick a lock in 1 action, which means all it takes is 6 seconds or less for an attempt with no penalty to the roll.
Yeah, that’s just dumb.
I rarely make a mistake here. The players let me know where they are heading and which route they want to take. It's pretty hard to go wrong, though on very rare occasions they do change it up for some reason or other.
So you only ever accomplish one hex in a game session? There’s never more than one such decision point made by the players per session?
And what about in more specific locations? Not wilderness travel, but dungeon exploration? Do you use random encounters there? If so, how can you possibly predict all their potential movements to the point where you have all the possible random encounters ready to go ahead of time?
Searching doesn't trigger a roll. Time does.
And searching takes…?
Because some of us like sandboxes and/or living, breathing worlds. We don't wait and have the world and it's inhabitants spring into existence when the PCs show up.
Except farriers!
"CHECKING FOR RANDOM ENCOUNTERS
You decide when a random encounter happens, or you roll. Consider checking for a random encounter once every hour, once every 4 to 8 hours, or once during the day and once during a long rest-whatever makes the most sense based on how active the area is. If you roll, do so with a d20. If the result is 18 or higher, a random encounter occurs. You then roll on an appropriate random encounter table to determine what the adventurers meet, rerolling if the die result doesn't make sense given the circumstances."
I’m gonna tag
@AlViking here. Al, this is the kind of legacy rule I was talking about. Read the above. There is no actual system there. There are multiple suggestions for methods to determine a random encounter but they basically cover the gamut. You can simply decide or you can roll every so often, or that often, or this often.
And this doesn’t connect to other elements of play the way it did in earlier editions. Searching a room for treasure or a secret door took time, which meant you risked a random encounter. It created a decision point for the players.
Now, it’s just a suggestion to the DM to either make something happen or roll some dice to see if something happens… whatever you want!
Show me where it says that you have to roll in the moment for those time intervals. I roll for the same exact time intervals that a DM rolling in the moment does.
It doesn’t. Nor does it say you should roll them ahead of time. As I just explained to
@AlViking above, that whole section is so vaguely worded as to allow for pretty much anything, and that’s intentional… because they wanted existing players and GMs to read their own method into it. Most such come from prior editions, most of which said to roll in the moment.
Frankly the idea that you can make all such rolls ahead of time seems strange to me, but I believe that you and some others do so. I don’t think it’s by any means the norm. And as far as processes go, that’s fine! But this part of the discussion was about how rolls are used to determine elements of play during play rather than ahead of play, so I don’t think your change to this is relevant in the broader sense.
Then it maker even less sense. A skilled person isn't going to make a lot of noise compared to a more skilled person.
I don’t know why you continue to compare two people. There’s only one thief. It’s about failure and what that means versus success and what that means for that thief and no other.
You are also I think mistaking what the die roll is for. The die roll doesn't represent the quality of the attempt. Meaning that a 5 isn't less quality than a 19. It's that the number represents the best attempt that PC can make being enough or not.
How is “best” not a quality of the attempt?
A roll of 5 means that the best attempt isn't enough. A 19 plus modifiers represents the best attempt being enough.
Sure. I don’t think this is contradicting what I’ve said.
My point is that on a 5, instead of simply failing to pick the lock, instead the thief makes enough noise to attract the attention of the cook.
An expert lockpicker isn't going to be putzy 25% of the time just because the die rolls low that often.
Okay.
Not by RAW.
I'm not saying you can't rule that way. I'm saying your homebrew isn't applicable in a discussion about the game rules.
But we’re literally talking about ways to do things differently than have been done traditionally. So yeah, it’s absolutely relevant. And insisting on RAW being the only thing that matters misses that point entirely.
I thought it was pretty self-evident. We're calling what we do quantum as well. Us quantum. You quantum. That's both sides.
And we aren't applying either as a criticism. We're saying that for us personally, one is okay and the other isn't.
Right and it’s that inconsistency that’s the issue.
Except that I do have an agenda of not making the characters'(and players') lives boring, which can be done in conjunction with fidelity to the prepared setting.
Well are you a neutral arbiter?
Or are you making all decisions with the principle of “make the characters lives not boring”?
Those two things are at odds.
This is a wild claim. It assumes that fidelity to a character must be measured externally, as if there's an authoritative benchmark. But that's an odd standard. It dismisses a person’s ability to assess their own thoughts and intentions.
Lacking some external signifier, how would Mike ever know or think that Mary is playing her character unfaithfully?
