Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8197793" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, it really just depended on exactly how many skills the GM allowed, and which ones, and to what degree he's flexible about the narrative. It also depends on the extent to which the players have invested in skills and related stuff, exactly what classes and builds they used, etc. I've seen parties that vary wildly in terms of competency in SCs. This is an aspect of 4e design that caused a lot of problems. While skill bonuses increase at half-level, there are also tons of fairly large and stacking additional bonuses that are available. BUT because they're not as critical as combat attack/damage bonuses it is really hit-or-miss if players have picked any up or not. Some classes, like fighter and barbarian, are also very challenged on basic proficiency. So there can easily be 10 or even 20 points of variance at Epic between one PC and another, even when both have proficiency in the same skill! This could be a big issue in 5e as well. It generally has less bonuses floating around, but then you have crazy things like thieves with doubled bonuses, vs other characters having no training in a skill with no bonus AT ALL, which can definitely drive some pretty large variance. OTOH the "you can use any ability bonus" thing complicates everything a bit, though it may tend to smooth out the differences somewhat. The main problem though is what DCs do you use? If they are low enough and non-level-dependent then they will be trivial for trained characters at higher levels. There are no 'good' numbers to use! I guess you could consider 'standard' DCs to be ones anyone could make, at least within reason, and then 'hard' DCs would be more level-dependent and aimed at the trained characters. That might work, though it is a bit weird that the spread between the two is level-dependent. I suppose even the standard DCs can go up some to account for ASIs and some magic/spells/whatever. Anyway, I think SCs will work OK in 5e, with some minor work. They won't be worse than in 4e in terms of variance in success rates. It is a bit of a problem, but overall the goal isn't to make failure that likely anyway. It is to incentivize thinking about how to succeed and generating interesting narrative in the process, with some nail-biters and one or two failures sprinkled in there to add interest. I think that's doable.</blockquote>

Verification