Rewarding high skills/modifiers without rewarding luck

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

After thinking again about a few discussions on 4e regarding critical hits and background skills, I begin thinking about how to reward "skilled" characters, possible without also rewarding luck.

So, my first idea on this was to simply state different degrees of success for all skills (IIRC, there is something about this approach in the DMG or PHB) by defining what beating higher DCs means (good, extraordinary result and so on). But I disliked the idea of having to put the DCs in writing or recalculating them, and I also wanted to avoid just rewading those with luck.

So, instead, this is the approach I have taken:
o First, determine success at useful. If succesful, look at your "natural d20" roll:
- if between 16-20, you have one result point or a simple success.
- if between 11-15, you have two result points or a good success.
- if between 6-10, you have three result points or an extraordinary success
- if between 1-5, you have four result points or an perfect success.

Characters that succeed by pure chance, not by skill, get less result points. Characters that succeed due to their skill (succeeding despite a low roll) get more benefits.


What can you do with these "result points"?
Well, if you got only one, you gain nothing special. You just succeeded.

If you got more, here are some suggestions (it's a rough sketch, and to use it consistently in the system, you might want to change a lot of things):
Craft/Profession:
Divide the time needed or multiply the amount of worth generated by the number of result points.

Balance/Climb/Swim:
Multiply your normal climb/swim speed with the result points to get your effective speed. (You can't get faster than your base speed or twice your natural speed of that movement type)
Tumble:
Negate one AoO for movement per result point. (Remove the normal rule that you can ignore all AoOs)

Attacks:
You may spend each result point beyond the first to gain one of the following benefits:
o Roll weapons base damage (dice only). Useable up to once per point of critical threat range. (Critical Ranges larger than 17-20 are useless this way)
o weapons fixed damage bonus (strength, enhancement and so on), but no more often then their Critical Multiplier -1. (Critical Multipliers larger than x4 are useless this way).
o Any remaining points may be used to add +1 point of damage. (okay for weak weapons)

A natural 20 is still an automatic hit, but the normal critical hit rules do not apply.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

To reward skill, but not luck, base the degree of success or failure of a skill check on the number of ranks that the character possesses.

The character's skill check (in cases where he can't just take ten or succeed automatically) is still determined by his die roll... But the degree of his success (or failure) is determine purely by the number of ranks that the character has in the skill in question.

So, for instance, if a character who has 15 ranks in Jump fails his jump check, he still fails to leap the distance, but he might be so skilled at jumping that he is able to guage the distance and his speed and abort the jump before he falls into the bottomless pit... or whatever.

Of course, that means that the higher degrees of success (and lesser degrees of failure) are going to be restricted to higher level characters... I'm not sure if that's something that you want to do.

Later
silver