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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sheadunne" data-source="post: 6124449" data-attributes="member: 27570">Yay, I make terms up it seems and fail to clarify them lol. Sorry about that.Just a picky point. DC was 15 for rough water. I think the player had a +2 maybe (never bothered to put in any ranks in swim or climb if I remember correctly, it was years ago). And the rolling was horribly bad which added a bit to the tension of the scene and probably caused way too many rolls. There were only two players in the game at the time so it wasn't a usual D&D situation. It obviously wasn't a played encounter either which would have made a difference in how it was presented.I agree. It was an usual situation. I don't find the 4e approach particularly satisfying at the table. I don't think it adds anything significant to the game. Tacking on the success/failure to the d20 skill system doesn't really do that much for me. That's a good encounter. I might have to borrow it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />There was a lot of meat, which is why it was fun. The awkward part was having to use DM fiat to keep the swimming player alive because of a series of bad rolls with a slightly below average chance of making those rolls to begin with. I'm not sure how the rolling could have been different to keep the drama but not kill the player, which is why I started this thread to begin with. Unlike combat, in a skill encounter scenario there isn't an "enemy" in the classic sense. The ocean is there, the height of the ship is there, but they aren't actively trying to kill the player (perhaps passively though since there is a risk of dying). Which I think makes combat's roll a d20 different than swimming's roll a d20. Both have a risk of death, but one can only kill you if you roll bad, the other can kill you even if you roll well. The drama is there in combat regardless of your die rolls. I don't know, I'm just working through it in my head now. Roll and done is what can often happen in skill checks. If you succeed you're done with the encounter. It can remove the drama before it happens. Which is fine is many skill rolling situations, but when it's a high drama encounter, I don't want it to end with a single die roll, nor do I want an endless repetition of d20 rolls. And while I understand what you're saying about the description and story elements being roleplayed out during the encounter, I certainly do that often enough, I just would prefer the mechanic to be a little more dramatically synced, if that makes any sense, and I'm not sure it does. But I feel there is something different when you roll a d20 to hit a creature and then roll other types of dice when you deal damage. Damage feels different than attacking, even though it's still rolling dice and adding numbers. I think what I want is something more like the different feeling of attack and damage. Skills should feel different than making an attack roll. I don't know, just thinking out loud.Yes, it's there, but it's not there very well. I find it can drag the encounter on to the repetitious stage more often than support the dramatic tension. It certainly helps though when it's all you've got. Again, I don't have anything better to replace it with, so it's what I use, but I just feel that there should be a better way of handling skills than a d20 roll. I'm not against using other dice or systems. While I like the unified d20 mechanic, I don't have a problem with having the mechanics different based on the activity (d20 roll for combat and a d6 roll for skills, as a poor example) as long as it's consistent so players know that when you using skills you roll this and when you're in combat you roll that. Not that I'm advocating this type of divide, simply that I'm not limited in my thinking to sticking with Mr. d20 for skills. I think climb and swim are the worst offenders with climb being at the top and you described the issue spot on. Thanks for helping me get my mind around some of the issues I'm having.</blockquote>

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