D&D (2024) Should Bounded Accuracy apply to skill checks? Thoughts on an old Alexandrian article

[CreamCloud0]

I think Rogues should have just been subclasses of Fighter. Or Rogue should have a lot more fighting prowess and be a "light fighter" or "archer" with a Thief subclass.

personally i think the classes of rogue, fighter, monk, barbarian and the more martial half of the ranger all ought to get thrown in a blender together and redistributed out, with each new class chassis focusing more on a mechanical role through different distributions of shared mechanics with subclasses bringing the flavour.

 

[Parmandur]

Which is fine. But a rolled character in a balance discussion is generally a poor example, since the focus becomes the rolled stats, not the class features.

Well, that seems counterproductive, since the game's balance math accounts for rolled stats.

 

[TwoSix]

Well, that seems counterproductive, since the game's balance math accounts for rolled stats.

I mean, I'm not overly concerned with balance (barely at all anymore), but I don't know if I would say the game's math accounts for it. Personally, I think it mostly ignores it.

 

[TwoSix]

Coupled with the idea in 5E of "not failure" but "failing to make progress" or "success at a cost", the problem is worse.

If a PC has a 60% chance, but can always just "try again" without issue, much of the time why even bother having the check??

Yea, I definitely don't do that. I don't roll checks if there's no downside to failure, generally, unless we're just doing goofy stuff.

 

[Emerikol]

I certainly don't need magical rangers. If I had to put together a "stripped down class" framework to capture most D&D tropes, I'd do:
Adventurer
Priest
Psychic
Sage
Sorcerer

With a lot of subclasses, multiclassing, and PrCs.

I'd just stick with Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling. (I'd come up with class names for the races of course but you get the idea).

I'd just have Rogues fight as well as Fighters and most light versions of fighter would in fact be a Rogue. Fighter would be the heavily armored type.

 

[Parmandur]

I mean, I'm not overly concerned with balance (barely at all anymore), but I don't know if I would say the game's math accounts for it. Personally, I think it mostly ignores it.

100%, 5E math assumes rolled stats and worls fine without any shenanigans: the array and point buy are just subsets or the balanced range.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't think so. If the DM is creating DCs based on player level and not what DCs actually are, then yes you are correct. However, if the DM is making moderate tasks DC 15 regardless of whether the PC is level 1 or level 20, then the overwhelming majority of DCs will be in the 10-15 range. 20 will be uncommon, 25 rare, and 30 very rare.

Expertise isn't a must have for games like that, since you aren't encountering those high DCs very often unless you the player are going out of your way to try and do really hard things for some reason.

I very much agree.

There is quite a difference between setting DCs in order to "challenge" the players in finding ways to overcome that mechanical obstacle because of whatever their character's stats are-- versus setting DCs based upon the actual fiction in the narrative and how easy or hard it would be for anyone to try and do it within the world. To me, the former is putting the gameplay on a pedestal and which to me is the opposite of using the RPG format to its fullest.

It's the age-old question we always would see here: Someone would post how one of their players took every mechanical boon they could find in the game to get themselves like a +20 Perception... and they would ask us how were they supposed to "challenge" that player? As if making sure there was a chance to fail a die roll was the entire purpose of the game. And other people would respond with "Look, if this player wants to play a character that will practically never fail a Perception check... then just go with that! That's who this character is within the game world. And it doesn't really matter whether or not they could fail."

After all... so what if there's a character in the world that sees everything? What's the problem with that? It makes for an interesting story! This character will have so many other ways they will fail at doing things (since they put all their boons into that one Perception basket)... that it's no big deal that they won't fail in this one. But too many times I think that some people who put the mechanics first find that possibility of not failing to be a failure of the game itself. That the purpose of having a game is the possibility of failure, and if you can't get that, then it's not game at all. They think that a game you can't lose isn't actually a game.

Which I can intellectually understand why they would think that... but emotionally I just fall back to "Why are you using a roleplaying game to try and scratch that win/lose game mechanic itch? Why do you forsake the fact that we add a story onto these game mechanics, rather than lean into it?" If one leans into the story-- if one assigns DCs based upon how easy or hard it is to do something in the world, rather than making sure you "challenge" the one player's character by setting a DC purely to give them a chance to fail a die roll-- you no longer have to keep getting annoyed at the game mechanics that were given to us.

 

[Staffan]

I'd just have Rogues fight as well as Fighters and most light versions of fighter would in fact be a Rogue. Fighter would be the heavily armored type.

That's sort of what Monte Cook did in Arcana Unearthed: threw Rogue and Fighter in a blender and extracted three different classes from them. The Warmain is the "heavy": heavy armor, heavy weapons, lots of hp, kind of class. Then there's the Unfettered, who is sort of like a swashbuckler: good at fighting in light armor, sneak attack, moderate skills. And finally there was the Akashic, who had lots and lots of skills but with a somewhat mystic bent by drawing on knowledge from the "Universal Unconscious" or something like that.

 

[Emerikol]

I very much agree.

There is quite a difference between setting DCs in order to "challenge" the players in finding ways to overcome that mechanical obstacle because of whatever their character's stats are-- versus setting DCs based upon the actual fiction in the narrative and how easy or hard it would be for anyone to try and do it within the world. To me, the former is putting the gameplay on a pedestal and which to me is the antithesis of it being an RPG.

I agree. Would anyone consider it a difference between trad and neo-trad?

I want world consistence at almost any cost so I am definitely agreeing with you.

 

[James Gasik]

You could take 10 if there was no penalty for failure. You could, for example, take 10 on an open lock roll because the penalty for failure was just that nothing changed (the lock remains locked) while you could not take it on a hide check because the penalty for failure is being spotted, or on a balance check because the penalty for failure was falling. Take 10 was only usable in non-adventuring scenarios or in ones where the idea was to speed up multiple rolls.

(Take 20 was similar, except it took longer and you had to be able to fail multiple times without penalty. It was essentially abstracting rolling 20 times until you got a Nat 20).

All this is important because it's what the rogue is built on when it comes to skills. A rogue who isn't any better with skills is a dexterity fighter. And if the rogue loses his edge over skills, you might as well give the fighter a few extra skills and let him subsume the Rogue.

I brought up "take 10" mostly because of this Rogue ability.

Skill Mastery​

The rogue becomes so certain in the use of certain skills that she can use them reliably even under adverse conditions.