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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 9261181" data-attributes="member: 20323">Yeah, I appreciate you endeavoring to come up with specific examples, because I think those are the most illustrative when we're talking about table practices. Even if it's hard to remember an exact situation, being able to aggregate your GM experience and distill how you handle skills into prototypical scenarios is still really useful.To use your example of Jumping, we can use <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/table-practices-for-handling-skills-in-5e.702529/page-2#post-9261030" target="_blank">my 3-axis graphic</a> (which I'm sure is flawed and doesn't include all the potential axis that we could talk about) to just look at how 5e treats jumping.It seems relatively transparent on the Y-axis (transparence/hiding), right? You have a pre-defined number of feet you jump depending on your Strength and whether you have a running start, with a few class features interacting with that.On the X-axis, well when it comes to making a check to jump (more on that below), we don't have specific guidance on what the strict interpretation of a failed jump check would be. So the strict interpretation might be "you fall." Whereas another GM might use degrees of failure, so "you fall" if you fail by 5+, but if you fail by 1-4 then you just manage to grab the other side dropping something or being in a compromised position when initiative rolled.On the Z-axis, jumping is radically different from how most of 5e's skills work... So someone might argue "well jumping isn't a skill check." Which is technically true, but not holistically totally true. Because we have the Athletics skill described as "...covers difficult situations you encounter while climbing, jumping, or swimming... You try to jump an unusually long distance or pull off a stunt midjump."Now that's interesting, because jumping now bridges 2 things:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">"Normal Jumping" which is not a check, but an automatic thing governed by Strength.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">"Unusual Jumping" which IS a check... if you're performing or a stunt and that seems (but is not explicitly stated to) involve exceeding that hard-codified Strength distance.</li> </ol>In a way Jumping is a two-tiered skill like Detect Magic is to Arcana, but in that case, it's flipped where the normal info is the Arcana check, and then the unusual info is the spell.So perhaps we can establish in 5e that one of the skill typologies is "The Two-Tiered Skill."</blockquote>

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