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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6096299" data-attributes="member: 1465">You have to keep in mind a few things to get my point:- never I said that non-combat tasks should be gritty for everyone, only that I like them to remain gritty for those PCs which never bother to invest in them, and that clearly only applies to some task; therefore I am not talking about a game where every non-combat skill is gritty for everyone, but rather I am talking about a game where no one is gonzo at every non-combat skill.- A combat system where all PCs get roughly equally better by level at fighting, is probably the easiest way to ensure that everyone has something to do in combat. I would not mind a game where a PC who doesn't bother getting better at fighting, ends up lagging behind to the point of not being able to fight, but I would hardly expect another person at the same table to share the feeling. That's because in general when there's a fight, everybody fights, at least in the broad sense (i.e. "healing others" and "controlling the battlefield" qualify as "fighting" for me).OTOH non-combat skills are most of the time (not always, but most) individual efforts. Of course there are notable exceptions such as group sneak/stealth efforts, but many many non-combat challenges are assigned to individual PCs to solve. The lockpicking case is one example: it is normally up to one PC to pick the lock, the dedicated lockpicker of the group. You can complicate this, especially in case of failure, by letting the others try too, but then we would get into an impossible discussion. My point is simply that I like a game where, when the primary lockpicker fails, the others aren't just rolling their own lockpicking checks but rather the group as a whole has to think about something different. For me to get that out of the game, a gritty setup for skills (once again, "gritty" only in the sensefor those who didn't bother investing in lockpicking) works much better than a gonzo skill systems where everybody else in the party just have a -5 on the roll in the worst case.Probably I'm not fully getting what you mean with "gonzo" and "gritty", so let me clarify again what I have in mind...I think there are 2 different but very interconnected issues here, which can be addressed to skills or to combat effectiveness, and maybe something else (e.g. healing, knowledge etc).Issue (a) is whether the game allows characters of the same level with a large spread of their effectiveness at something. For example, the dedicated lockpicker VS another PC to have either a small difference in bonus (e.g. 5 on a d20 roll) resulting in both being at least able to pick almost always the same locks, or a large one (e.g. 20 on a d20 roll) which results in some things which are possible for the first remain impossible for the second, or possible for the second but trivial for the first. Call it the "horizontal spread" <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=":)" />Issue (b) is how fast in terms of levels the game should increase the PCs abilities compared to the challenges, e.g. how many levels before a lv1 challenge (monster, trap, lock, whatever) becomes irrelevant. Call it the "vertical spread" <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=":)" />The two are interconnected at least in the sense that if you have a small horizontal spread, then then vertical spread affects all PCs rather equally.Also, because of what I said about combat vs non-combat, this doesn't necessarily have to work in the same way for all possible character abilities in the game. We have all heard about the concept of bounded accuracy that is supposed to decrease the vertical spread of combat, but non-combat challenges might have a different spread compared to combat.So... it's my preference, but probably I like a large horizontal spread and a vertical spread that is small for the worst at something, but since I like a large horizontal spread, then the vertical spread for the best at something actually becomes large.For instance, I don't like the image of getting at a locked door without a Rogue in the party, and the players think "who cares, the cloistered/bookworm Cleric healer can do it anyway". I like to get there and think "damn we should have had a lockpicker here, what do we no now?". And I think I understand that for some gaming group the "what do we do now?" feeling can be a huge disappointment, but for me it's excitement.BTW also a note on the idea of interpreting the cloistered Wizard's high skill with locks (even tho she never picked one) as representing her other ways of dealing with the problem, e.g. through non-spell magic. It's a very smart way of handling the problem IMO, but once again it raises a gamestyle question, not dissimilar to that of abstracting hit points into "luck, and more", and that question is how much you like your game to explicitly connect mechanics with narrative vs how much abstraction you can take.</blockquote>

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