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Skill Checks (non time sensitive) homebrew fixes
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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7553447" data-attributes="member: 1465"><p>I do not endorse this idea of "verisimilitude" at all.</p><p></p><p>If you think about it, what is <em>not</em> realistic is the fact that there is a dice roll in the first place. </p><p></p><p>If you try IRL to pick a lock or climb a tree, it's not <em>really</em> random whether you succeed or not... if you fail your first attempt is because you do something <em>wrong</em>, and when you retry, you simply have learned something from your previous failure, and that can either (a) make you succeed or (b) make you realize you cannot succeed.</p><p></p><p>The dice in a RPG is an abstraction of the whole process, not a realistic representation of it! For me, the skill check does not represent the "small-scale randomness" of trying casually until it works (which doesn't exist IRL) but the "large-scale randomness" on whether you encountered a lock/tree that you can manage or one that you cannot. The minutia of how many times you have to turn the lockpicking tool into the lock before it works, or how many times you have to backtrack your way a little bit down the tree because you're stuck, are hidden because they are uninteresting.</p><p></p><p>If you can embrace this view, you don't have problems accepting when you get <strong>one chance</strong> only, and also you don't have problems accepting that sometimes only <strong>one character</strong> is allowed to try to pick that lock. And if you go this way, you'll spare yourself from more problems down the road, no matter how much time you invest tinkering with house rules to increase "verisimilitude".</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 7553447, member: 1465"] I do not endorse this idea of "verisimilitude" at all. If you think about it, what is [I]not[/I] realistic is the fact that there is a dice roll in the first place. If you try IRL to pick a lock or climb a tree, it's not [I]really[/I] random whether you succeed or not... if you fail your first attempt is because you do something [I]wrong[/I], and when you retry, you simply have learned something from your previous failure, and that can either (a) make you succeed or (b) make you realize you cannot succeed. The dice in a RPG is an abstraction of the whole process, not a realistic representation of it! For me, the skill check does not represent the "small-scale randomness" of trying casually until it works (which doesn't exist IRL) but the "large-scale randomness" on whether you encountered a lock/tree that you can manage or one that you cannot. The minutia of how many times you have to turn the lockpicking tool into the lock before it works, or how many times you have to backtrack your way a little bit down the tree because you're stuck, are hidden because they are uninteresting. If you can embrace this view, you don't have problems accepting when you get [B]one chance[/B] only, and also you don't have problems accepting that sometimes only [B]one character[/B] is allowed to try to pick that lock. And if you go this way, you'll spare yourself from more problems down the road, no matter how much time you invest tinkering with house rules to increase "verisimilitude". [/QUOTE]
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