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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 9526295" data-attributes="member: 6777737">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.</blockquote>

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