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Why doesn't the help action have more limits and down sides?
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<blockquote data-quote="Wyvern" data-source="post: 7447758" data-attributes="member: 2374"><p>YOU may not be arguing for it, but Ovinomancer was. Those were the examples he used, and that was what Veteran Sergeant was objecting to. Maybe you're willing to assume that he didn't <em>really</em> mean to suggest that he thinks players should be expected to roll the dice when changing a diaper, but it's not fair to accuse V.S. of "addressing a strawman" when all he did was take Ovinomancer at his word.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Except that they're not. The only examples of an Easy task that have been offered so far are the examples Ovinomancer came up with. If you want him to discuss "Easy tasks an adventurer might do that do have an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence of failure," then I think that *you* should give some examples of what sort of tasks you would consider Easy for an adventurer, so that we're all on the same page here.</p><p></p><p>IMO the problem is that people are seeing the word Easy and assuming that it means a task which almost anyone should be able to do automatically with no chance of failure, when it's clear that's not what the designers meant -- otherwise they wouldn't have assigned "Easy" a DC of 10. You can criticize their choice of terminology if you like, but don't try to tell me that skill checks are too difficult based on a flawed interpretation of the difficulty scale. You need to recalibrate your expectations, and understand that in context, "Easy" doesn't mean "guaranteed success", it means that someone with minimal competence has a better-than-even chance of succeeding on their first try, and an expert will nearly always succeed on the first try. If "Easy" meant guaranteed success, there would be no reason to have a "Very Easy" DC.</p><p></p><p>I'm reminded of how the Fading Suns rules got a lot of criticism because a person of "average" skill and ability level attempting an "average" task will fail 50% of the time. The problem is that "average" means different things in different contexts. A 50% can be excellent, mediocre, or terrible, depending on whether you're talking about a batting average, a star rating for a movie, or an exam score.</p><p></p><p>When Ovinomancer suggests that players should make fewer skill checks, he's right for the wrong reasons. If his GM is actually making him roll for tasks equivalent to driving to the store or changing a diaper, he's doing it wrong. It shouldn't be incumbent on the player to try to find ways to get out of making the check so that they don't risk failure, it should be incumbent on the GM not to ask them to roll skill checks for such trivial tasks in the first place!</p><p></p><p>And yes, using a d20 for skill checks gives very swingy results. That's just the nature of the beast, and if you're going to play D&D you just have to learn to live with it. If you can't, there are plenty of other games to choose from.</p><p></p><p>Wyvern</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Wyvern, post: 7447758, member: 2374"] YOU may not be arguing for it, but Ovinomancer was. Those were the examples he used, and that was what Veteran Sergeant was objecting to. Maybe you're willing to assume that he didn't [I]really[/I] mean to suggest that he thinks players should be expected to roll the dice when changing a diaper, but it's not fair to accuse V.S. of "addressing a strawman" when all he did was take Ovinomancer at his word. Except that they're not. The only examples of an Easy task that have been offered so far are the examples Ovinomancer came up with. If you want him to discuss "Easy tasks an adventurer might do that do have an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence of failure," then I think that *you* should give some examples of what sort of tasks you would consider Easy for an adventurer, so that we're all on the same page here. IMO the problem is that people are seeing the word Easy and assuming that it means a task which almost anyone should be able to do automatically with no chance of failure, when it's clear that's not what the designers meant -- otherwise they wouldn't have assigned "Easy" a DC of 10. You can criticize their choice of terminology if you like, but don't try to tell me that skill checks are too difficult based on a flawed interpretation of the difficulty scale. You need to recalibrate your expectations, and understand that in context, "Easy" doesn't mean "guaranteed success", it means that someone with minimal competence has a better-than-even chance of succeeding on their first try, and an expert will nearly always succeed on the first try. If "Easy" meant guaranteed success, there would be no reason to have a "Very Easy" DC. I'm reminded of how the Fading Suns rules got a lot of criticism because a person of "average" skill and ability level attempting an "average" task will fail 50% of the time. The problem is that "average" means different things in different contexts. A 50% can be excellent, mediocre, or terrible, depending on whether you're talking about a batting average, a star rating for a movie, or an exam score. When Ovinomancer suggests that players should make fewer skill checks, he's right for the wrong reasons. If his GM is actually making him roll for tasks equivalent to driving to the store or changing a diaper, he's doing it wrong. It shouldn't be incumbent on the player to try to find ways to get out of making the check so that they don't risk failure, it should be incumbent on the GM not to ask them to roll skill checks for such trivial tasks in the first place! And yes, using a d20 for skill checks gives very swingy results. That's just the nature of the beast, and if you're going to play D&D you just have to learn to live with it. If you can't, there are plenty of other games to choose from. Wyvern [/QUOTE]
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