NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8634041" data-attributes="member: 82106">What does making a check in 5e MEAN? I'm playing a character, and I have an intent, something I want to achieve. I think up some sort of action that might take me closer to accomplishing that intent. How much closer will I get if I succeed? How much further will I be from it if I fail? We don't know! My character decides to swim across the lake. How many checks, and of what kind can I expect to have to make in order to get across? There's literally no way of knowing! The GM can ask for all sorts of things, or heck, he can just say "Oh, its easy, your on the other side." Checks thus have no 'valence'. At least in combat its an orc, it has N hit points, and I do X damage if I hit, its pretty clear, but 5e abandoned even the pretext of OOC checks meaning anything at all. They're color, literally. "Oh, OK, you're crossing the lake, you make a swim check, good, you haven't drowned yet!" Clearly if the GM is operating in good faith then success is advantageous in some degree, but good faith is not really enough. I mean, what are my chances of making it across? If I'm asked to pass 1 check at 85% success, that's easy enough, but how about 3, of varying difficulties? And what happens if I fail the swim check, or the survival check, or whatever? Do I just die? Who knows?Again, this is why I call check 'color', they HINT at something, they kind of bump the GM a bit towards "something nice" or "something nasty" but the 'mechanics' are toothless. This is poison to something like Story Now. In fact its aimed squarely at support of a kind of Illusionism or Participationist play where the GM smiles and tells you what happened every time you do something! If failure doesn't suite him, then he says "oh oh, you're in trouble, make a CON check! Oh, lucky you, you've passed that, you manage to drag out on the other shore, close one!" If success doesn't suite him "Oh, well, its a long swim, roll another swim check. Gosh, you start drowning and sink to the bottom of the lake..." Sigh.I mean, it does work in a fair number of cases where things are reasonably clear-cut, did you set off the trap or not, that sort of thing, assuming the GM is really disciplined and/or the players really grill the DM every time they make a check and make him describe the full outcome before any dice are thrown at all, ever. Elegant it ain't.</blockquote>

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