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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5727141" data-attributes="member: 54877">What are the practical limits of using d20+mod versus DC? (I'm actually interested in the limits for any mechanic, but we need one to focus on, and the d20 version is a popular and easy one. Feel free to diverge.) By practical limits, I mean that we can set mods and DCs however we want, but at some point it becomes rather silly. For example, if the greatest mods you can ever get, outside of leveling, are +0 or +1, then the luck of the d20 and the DC relative to your level, become the important factor. At the other extreme, sometimes we hear less than perfect satisfaction with d20+40 or other such high numbers, on the grounds that the high mods practically wipe out whole swaths of difficulties, making the roll irrelevant. Naturally, there is some wiggle room by how one sets the DCs, and how the game scales. But I think we can put that down to mainly flavor. You can get a working model that doesn't scale, and a working one that scales rapidly. You can scale evenly or not. This will affect what you can do with the mods on the margins, but will it make any significant difference? (I could be wrong about this.) For any given category of mods, a certain amount may be presumed into the scaling. For example, a low-level 3E fighter with, somehow, a 22 Str is ahead of the curve, but not +6 ahead of it. Assuming for a moment that the above is correct, then that means that the mods are where the action is. So what are the limits on those mods? If I have a system where you can get, say, a maximum mod of +3 from stats, +3 from magic, +5 from special abilities and situational modifiers, then what does that effectively leave me for skill (however represented in the system, but not counting scaling/level)? I'm already up to +11. If we go +4 for skill, then that means a maxed out character is at d20+15 versus an appropriate DC. Though granted, "situational modifiers" and other things that won't always be present would presumably be the interesting game play space.  Finally, I ask because I'm interested in how a game would feel if you managed to take out any scaling aspect from the mod categories, but kept some of the flavor as contrained bonuses. For example, a D&D fighter would be presumed to get a certain amount of attack bonus from "strength", but "being above average strength" would be more of a trait that granted a small but set bonus. And yes, I am thinking about the nature of Basic D&D as I write this. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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