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

[James Gasik]

One of the things I somewhat liked in 3E D&D was how the Epic Level Handbook had epic skill challenge DCs. I don't think it worked that well practically for us (we made it up to level 27), as most of the DCs were so high that they couldn't be achieved.

However, the point I would take from epic DCs is to allow skill checks at DC 30+ to do something that could otherwise not be done with the skill. For example, you could pick a lock or disarm a trap as a bonus action, instead of action, for +5 DC; or the character with high Perception/Investigation can find traps at a glance without actively searching, at say their passive DC, or passive DC -10 when running.

There's ways to let those characters with very high skills shine, but still allow those with decent skill levels to be effective, if the high skill characters are otherwise occupied.

Pretty much, the system should have "degrees of success" to be a thing. Say like:

Epic Fail: the worst possible scenario. If this was a Thieves' Tools check, you not only fail, you set off an undetected trap!

Failure. Try again later.

Success with a complication. You succeed, but you damaged a vital tool, so you'll have a 1d4 penalty on checks until you can repair it during a short rest.

Success. Huzzah, the door opens.

Critical Success: not only do you succeed, but you gain some advantage as a result. There was a trap you didn't notice- but not only did you not set it off, you can pocket a vial of acid or maybe a dart coated in contact poison for later use!

 

[Bacon Bits]

Pretty much, the system should have "degrees of success" to be a thing. Say like:

Epic Fail: the worst possible scenario. If this was a Thieves' Tools check, you not only fail, you set off an undetected trap!

Failure. Try again later.

Success with a complication. You succeed, but you damaged a vital tool, so you'll have a 1d4 penalty on checks until you can repair it during a short rest.

Success. Huzzah, the door opens.

Critical Success: not only do you succeed, but you gain some advantage as a result. There was a trap you didn't notice- but not only did you not set it off, you can pocket a vial of acid or maybe a dart coated in contact poison for later use!

I don't like the knock-on effect that degrees of success has when it's spelled out like that.

Namely, it says that you always have to roll for everything. With a binary system of success/failure, the DM can pretty easily handwave away the die roll and say "you succeed" or "you fail." The DM can know that the obstacle the players are overcoming was not meant to be a challenge, and simply let it them succeed or fail.

With degrees of success, you just always have to roll because you don't just need to know if you beat the DC, you need to know which DC you beat. Even if you have guaranteed success or failure, you still feel obligated to roll because success can give you an unrelated benefit or unrelated consequence. The players will always want that chance of critical success, so instead of looking for creative solutions to the problems, they will look for ways to roll more checks.

In other words, the existence of degrees of success encourages the players to focus on playing the game from their character sheet, which I think is something players already do way too much due to the influences of video games. Due to the limitations of that medium, video games must function that way because every possible option has to be built into the game when it's written. But, one of the strengths of the TTRPG is that they don't need to do that. Not only do the designers not need to know every possible action and interaction when writing the rules, DMs don't even need to know that when they're writing an adventure or an encounter.

It's a similar issue to the meta-currency problem that some games have. Players know they're rewarded by pressing the button over and over, so they look for ways to press the button over and over. They don't try to come up with creative in-universe solutions, they look for creative exploitation of dice rolling. Worse, if it's some obstacle that the PCs must overcome and they've decided they must use a skill to overcome it, then degrees of success encourages sitting there and rolling again and again and again. Completely halting the game until the dice say the game can continue.

Well, I don't want players to look for reasons to roll dice. I don't want them to incessantly hunt for ways to invoke mechanics to get benefits. In spite of the fact that dice are used by the games, TTRPGs are not dice rolling games. They're character role-playing games. I don't want the game to reward the players for thinking about the game in terms of gameplay mechanics when doing so comes at the expense of character role-play or narrative. It's more acceptable for combat to be like that because combat is not really about deep character role-play, but I really don't want that to bleed into other aspects of the game where roleplaying remains king.

What makes things "swingy" is not that binary state of the dice or the fact that you have at least a 30% chance to fail the test. It's that there's a false assumption that passing the test means 100% success, while failing the test means 100% failure. The game should -- and, in fact, it begins to but doesn't go very far -- explain that the DM should not blindly use pass/fail as the narrative outcomes of a pass or fail of a test.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of gamers that love prescriptive game play. It's one of the reasons that Pathfinder 2e has the following that it does. There are a lot of players that want a prescribed rule for every conceivable situation in the book. Players that want their PC to be a series of buttons on a character sheet, and only those buttons interact with the game world. I remember feeling like that in the early 2000s, but... I've been a DM now. Now that idea is anathema to actually playing a TTRPG. To me, that's making D&D into a board game. To me, that's making the game as close to Warhammer Quest as you can possibly make it.

 

[Pedantic]

Pretty much, the system should have "degrees of success" to be a thing. Say like:

Epic Fail: the worst possible scenario. If this was a Thieves' Tools check, you not only fail, you set off an undetected trap!

Failure. Try again later.

Success with a complication. You succeed, but you damaged a vital tool, so you'll have a 1d4 penalty on checks until you can repair it during a short rest.

Success. Huzzah, the door opens.

Critical Success: not only do you succeed, but you gain some advantage as a result. There was a trap you didn't notice- but not only did you not set it off, you can pocket a vial of acid or maybe a dart coated in contact poison for later use!

That's an entirely different gameplay loop than having increasing high DC sets of abilities locked behind skills. @Bacon Bits correctly identifies below that it encourages players to roll for everything, and it requires the successful state be mutable; critical successes/failures have to create new stuff to interact with.

Having abilities that simply scale past the RNG is not at all the same thing. You aren't going to roll to try and hit "balance on a cloud" if you're just trying to move at full speed over a slippery surface, you're happy to take 10 and get it.

 

[James Gasik]

I mean, I suppose with some groups you could run into this behavior- it's kind of foreign to me, as I've played many games with degrees of success and that's not how the players react at all.

When playing Storyteller (White Wolf) games back in the day, everyone was happy to use the "automatic success" rule when allowed (ie, if your die pool = difficulty, the Storyteller could conclude that you were guaranteed to get one success) since there were many times when it didn't matter if you got 5 successes to jump from one rooftop to another (as an example). Although, granted, this was because that system always has a margin for failure.

However, there's another way to do this. The original Legend of the Five Rings TTRPG had a mechanic where you could voluntarily raise the DC of a task in increments of 5 to gain greater rewards, at the risk of failure. Something like that could work here as well (and if there's a risk of having the type of players who would attempt to "game the system", you can neglect to inform them of the DC's before they roll.

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't like the knock-on effect that degrees of success has when it's spelled out like that.

Namely, it says that you always have to roll for everything. With a binary system of success/failure, the DM can pretty easily handwave away the die roll and say "you succeed" or "you fail." The DM can know that the obstacle the players are overcoming was not meant to be a challenge, and simply let it them succeed or fail.

With degrees of success, you just always have to roll because you don't just need to know if you beat the DC, you need to know which DC you beat. Even if you have guaranteed success or failure, you still feel obligated to roll because success can give you an unrelated benefit or unrelated consequence. The players will always want that chance of critical success, so instead of looking for creative solutions to the problems, they will look for ways to roll more checks.

In other words, the existence of degrees of success encourages the players to focus on playing the game from their character sheet, which I think is something players already do way too much due to the influences of video games. Due to the limitations of that medium, video games must function that way because every possible option has to be built into the game when it's written. But, one of the strengths of the TTRPG is that they don't need to do that. Not only do the designers not need to know every possible action and interaction when writing the rules, DMs don't even need to know that when they're writing an adventure or an encounter.

It's a similar issue to the meta-currency problem that some games have. Players know they're rewarded by pressing the button over and over, so they look for ways to press the button over and over. They don't try to come up with creative in-universe solutions, they look for creative exploitation of dice rolling. Worse, if it's some obstacle that the PCs must overcome and they've decided they must use a skill to overcome it, then degrees of success encourages sitting there and rolling again and again and again. Completely halting the game until the dice say the game can continue.

Well, I don't want players to look for reasons to roll dice. I don't want them to incessantly hunt for ways to invoke mechanics to get benefits. In spite of the fact that dice are used by the games, TTRPGs are not dice rolling games. They're character role-playing games. I don't want the game to reward the players for thinking about the game in terms of gameplay mechanics when doing so comes at the expense of character role-play or narrative. It's more acceptable for combat to be like that because combat is not really about deep character role-play, but I really don't want that to bleed into other aspects of the game where roleplaying remains king.

What makes things "swingy" is not that binary state of the dice or the fact that you have at least a 30% chance to fail the test. It's that there's a false assumption that passing the test means 100% success, while failing the test means 100% failure. The game should -- and, in fact, it begins to but doesn't go very far -- explain that the DM should not blindly use pass/fail as the narrative outcomes of a pass or fail of a test.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of gamers that love prescriptive game play. It's one of the reasons that Pathfinder 2e has the following that it does. There are a lot of players that want a prescribed rule for every conceivable situation in the book. Players that want their PC to be a series of buttons on a character sheet, and only those buttons interact with the game world. I remember feeling like that in the early 2000s, but... I've been a DM now. Now that idea is anathema to actually playing a TTRPG. To me, that's making D&D into a board game. To me, that's making the game as close to Warhammer Quest as you can possibly make it.

Dm's best friend countered this problem since the degrees of success could still hadlve benefits and consequences and benefits that may or may not matter later but couldn't simply be ignored because that seemingly inconsequential but if descriptive fluff that the GM added to a degree of success was carried forward outside the sheet as a quantum ogre carried forward by the ongoing fiction that could matter for or against any future check.

By removing both and providing a self obsoleting skill system 5e has marked out a region of BadWrongFun with only a single pointless choice that ensures no check can matter after a point

 

[Retros_x]

Even if you have guaranteed success or failure, you still feel obligated to roll because success can give you an unrelated benefit or unrelated consequence.

I would argue that for actions that normally would not require a roll the crit benefits and unrelated consequences would not matter that much.

"Ok you dress and don your armor"
"wait, I want to roll HOW successfully I bind my shoes together, its a very dexterous task"
"ok, roll on dex"
"NAT 20!"
"gg, you find a copper next to your shoe"

This how it would play out if my player would insist - But I don't think that would happen. I do degrees of success all the time and none of your fears have ever hit. The players still only roll when I ask for a roll and never got the idea of insisting for rolls. We still have a social contract in D&D and agree on good faith of all participants, so your fears are IMO hypothetical. If it really should come to problems like you described at the table, your table has probably tons of other toxic behaviour anyway.

 

[Pedantic]

I would argue that for actions that normally would not require a roll the crit benefits and unrelated consequences would not matter that much.

"Ok you dress and don your armor"
"wait, I want to roll HOW successfully I bind my shoes together, its a very dexterous task"
"ok, roll on dex"
"NAT 20!"
"gg, you find a copper next to your shoe"

This how it would play out if my player would insist - But I don't think that would happen. I do degrees of success all the time and none of your fears have ever hit. The players still only roll when I ask for a roll and never got the idea of insisting for rolls. We still have a social contract in D&D and agree on good faith of all participants, so your fears are IMO hypothetical. If it really should come to problems like you described at the table, your table has probably tons of other toxic behaviour anyway.

There's an assumption in here that leads to the absurdity, which is that any action declaration can be adjudicated by a roll. You can just lay out the time required to don armor and be done, you can write down what skills do and trust they will do those things.

 

[tetrasodium]

There's an assumption in here that leads to the absurdity, which is that any action declaration can be adjudicated by a roll. You can just lay out the time required to don armor and be done, you can write down what skills do and trust they will do those things.

Sure there's an assumption but that cuts both ways. The tie shoes example didn't seem to specify a scenario context and I almost responded to it with one that shows how 5e's self obsoleting & overly condensed skill system limits it's ability to be useful I didn't do that earlier because it seemed a bit too tangential until you made a point that amounts to shutting it down no matter the scenario context.

If you fill in the scenario as the party going to visit (or invade/attack) some high society court event for whatever reason, then "I want to make sure that I lace up our shoes so they match the latest courtly style" instead of "I dress up" is an entirely reasonable thing to expect or call for a check on. Under 5e's mechanical framework it's pretty much guaranteed success and is forgotten or never considered because it's really too large of a penalty/bonus to matter as it's carried forward by the fiction. Back when you had a more fine grained and nuanced framework like DM's best friend you had all kinds of interesting options....

Did Bob fail and do the laces in an out of date style that's going to secretly impose a -2 because it's used by some other faction/nation not particularly well liked? Did Bob succeed but manage to alienate himself from certain NPCs because he presents as trying too hard? Is that style going to be a problem in climbing a castle wall to the next floor or the scuffle with the guards that follows? All of those things are still technically possible with (dis)advantage and "I dress up fancy" but the quantum ogre being carried is too blunt and wields too large of a club to it looks arbitrary and starts fights over if it should matter because the bonus/penalty is so large

 

[Bacon Bits]

Dm's best friend countered this problem since the degrees of success could still hadlve benefits and consequences and benefits that may or may not matter later but couldn't simply be ignored because that seemingly inconsequential but if descriptive fluff that the GM added to a degree of success was carried forward outside the sheet as a quantum ogre carried forward by the ongoing fiction that could matter for or against any future check.

By removing both and providing a self obsoleting skill system 5e has marked out a region of BadWrongFun with only a single pointless choice that ensures no check can matter after a point

I'm sorry but I cannot parse this. Between spelling errors, lack of punctuation, and use of undefined terms, it's complete gibberish.

I would argue that for actions that normally would not require a roll the crit benefits and unrelated consequences would not matter that much.

Of course, but that's not the problem.

The problem is that presentation matters. Once the rule books discuss degrees of success in concrete terms, players expect degrees of success to exist. The very fact that it would be described in the book will alter player behavior towards mechanical over narrative thinking.

In pure mechanical terms or game terms, the existence of degrees of success is perfectly fine. Mechanically, it's not broken at all. The trouble is caused by describing degrees of success in a player-facing book.

This is why it was important to rename Thief to Rogue. It's also why when you sit down at a D&D 2014 table, you assume that Drow Assassin is an available option, while at the same time you do not assume that a Aasimar Death Cleric is even though they're both in the core books.

A game is about the things it chooses to spend time making rules on, but TTRPGs are weird because they're also not. TTRPGs are actually about role-play, so they have to be incredibly careful about how they present mechanical rules. If you spend too much time on combat rules to the exclusion of everything else, then the game looks like it's entirely about combat. 4e D&D made this exact mistake in presentation, which is why it earned a reputation that it wasn't about roleplaying at all. The game spent about 310 of it's 330 pages in the PHB on abilities that were all but exclusively relegated to combat. I guess the game is 95% combat then?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In other words, the existence of degrees of success encourages the players to focus on playing the game from their character sheet, which I think is something players already do way too much due to the influences of video games.

[Citation needed.]

Dungeon World has degrees of success and emphatically does not encourage "playing the game from their character sheet."

The much more plausible explanation is that there is a GM skill issue: present challenges that require or reward creative thinking, rather than dull "do you have a big enough number" challenges.

Furthermore, DW comes with a very clear notice that should IMO apply to genuinely all games: Do not roll unless there are interesting consequences for both success and failure. If success is boring and failure isn't, tell an interesting story about it until both outcomes become interesting again. If success is interesting and failure is boring, just let it happen. Save the dramatic successes and failures for when they really matter. Don't dilute the game's flavor by rolling just because it's theoretically possible some special (dis)advantage might arise.