Imagine if an experienced pilot crashed on every 20th landing.
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Part of the excellent case why you shouldn’t roll for the routine. Take “town downtime activities”.
If a character is a lifetime street urchin, they should be able to find a few “safe marks” versus rolling to snag some risky but lucrative pickpockets. A talented musician doesn’t flub every 20th note, but you can certainly reward bigger rolls with bigger tips.
It's more that it's just more work for the DM in this case. Every time a skill check is called or considered, the DM has to reconsider if the character considers this a routine or trivial task. You can see this in the stats: if the character's modifier is 5 or less than the DC, it's trivial. But you also must consider even without a high mod vs DC, is this a task the character has performed hundreds of times before? I try not to come up with solutions, or utilize WOTC solutions that make a lot more work for the DM. Especially if there's already a rule or slight tweak that makes sense and prevents this work: in this case, no crits for skill checks.
I suppose if the DM is running the game through a rigid preformed structure then yeah, having things make stuff more unpredictable is gonna be hard on the DM, but if they are already choosing to fly by the seat of their pants and roll with the incoming suggestions from the dice, it's totally fine.
There are lots of different types of people that like to DM games. Something isn't automatically worse for all DMs.
That's why I do crit fail confirms. That way an experienced pilot only crashes every 400th landing.
That's still far more than reality though.
D&D isn't meant to be an accurate simulator of reality. It's meant to be fun. If you find 1 in 400 auto failures to be unfun then don't use it.
Indeed.
Also you can take 10 if you're not stressed.
And that's why you as the DM can do passive skill checks (neé "taking a 10") for non-stressful situations. A routine landing is just 10 + ability mod (probably INT on a big plane with full FBW) + PB. It's only with 3 of the 4 engines down, the 4th on fire, the computers are fucked, you're trying to land the 747 on a dirt strip, and oh, there's a hurricane when you need to actually roll for it.
Though I'm also down with Esper's idea of every class having a limited reliable talent. So every character could pick one class skill at level 7 and one at level 14 in which they couldn't roll under a 10. The "expert" classes (rangers, rogues, bards, and artificers) would have additional picks at levels 3, 10, and 17 with full reliable talent being their capstone feature.
I like how Pathfinder 2E does it. A 20 brings your result one tier higher. A 1 brings your result one tier lower. With a high enough base expertise, you can still succeed when rolling a 1, just not as awesome as you normally are. And a 20 isn't a guarantee against really strong foes.
This. Plus, if you beat the DC by 10 or more, you get a Critical Success or if you fail by 10 or more you get a Critical Failure, regardless of the dice roll.
And for opposed skill checks only the player/NPC taking the action rolls a d20, and that's compared against the opposing skill DC (10 + Skill Bonus). This streamlines play and reduces random variability.
So in the example here, only the rogue would have rolled the natural 1 and added 26 for a 27. The paladin's Perception DC would be 16, so the Rogue beat it by 11 and it'd normally be a Critical Success. But since it was a natural 1, the Critical Success is reduced to a Success. They still succeeded at deception, but not quite as well as they could have.
I've had players have this exchange, and then the Paladin decided to ignore the rogue's critical miss, and just roll with it.
Paladin to the rest of the party "I forget what they said exactly, but it was a very convincing argument!"
Critical success and failure has never applied to skills. It was only ever in the rules for attack rolls and (in 5e) death saving throws. Critical success and failure in skill checks is probably an example of the Mandela Effect. Anyway, for the above reasons I don't use them as such. However, on nat 20s I might provide a "path for success" where one may not otherwise have been possible. But it's never a given. More of an opportunity for roleplay.
It's not the mandela effect, it's a common house rule that people express their opinions on.
Yeah, everyone is very aware it's not in the official rulebook, other than in the section of the official rulebook where it says not to treat it as an official rulebook and only something to fall back on if you can't think of something better.
And for anyone that for any small moment of time may not have temporarily been aware that skill crits isn't in the official rulebook, that problem is solved very quickly the second they meet any other player online.
It's not in the rules, but it makes sense. It also does have rules about taking an automatic 10 for low DC stuff, which you usually only do if even a roll of 1 would succeed so it gives a good trade off having nat 1s be a failure even in skill checks when the player opts to roll instead of taking a 10.
I like critical failure.
Skilled people can sometimes choke under pressure.
I've been trying to include failure techniques from DungeonWorld's suddenly ogres in my game. It proposes a few neat ideas for consequences of failure that are broadly applicable to many RPG systems.
Eg, in the example above, maybe the Rogue (truthfully or not) blabs that their source was [ancient evil tome forbidden by the paladin's order]. Now the complication is not that the Paladin disbelieves the rogue's claim, but that they might question the rogue's true intentions.
Edit: Or in the example given about landing a plane. An experienced pilot won't crash 1/20 times, but what if Air Traffic Control did a bad job managing things today? It will take 1h for the plane to be assigned to a gate, but you need to catch the train to Borovia in 1h15.
An award winning surgeon rolls a 1 while giving a routine lecture? The presentation is so fucking boring that half the students fall asleep. Now the surgeon has to deal with the extra office hours of students who don't understand this part of the curriculum.
Yeah, I really like the "success with complications" category (Fate system does something like this, too) to keep things moving when a bad roll would otherwise make 1-in-a-million tragedy happen.
Doubly so if that bad roll would be a session- or campaign-ender.
Surely 1 when landing a plane indicates a go around
I like the idea of a critical role needing another roll to see just how critical it was. That way something crazy can always happen, but it doesn’t need to be a certain doom either.