What makes a character competent? [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Telok

2020-08-27, 02:04 PM

To define competence for a game system you ideally want a baseline snd a scale for a task or action, a consistent level of specificity in the skill/tasks, and a baseline for what both incompetence and competence look like.

Driving a car or riding a bicycle would probably involve getting around locally on a regular basis and occasional long(er) distances, without significant or frequent damage to anything or anyone. But do you expect a competent driver to be able to avoid sudden obstacles or hazards? How often? Shouls a competent bicyclist be able to do tricks, or just get around? Does the system distinguish between the ability to drive cars, bicycles, canoes, and remote operated submarines?

For a competent generalist computer programmer I'd expect passing familarity with a wide array of things and the ability to become proficient in a specific set of tools and activities in a couple weeks. For a competent database or network administrator I'd expect a narrower focus but a deeper understanding of their specialty.

Finally, is there any chance of incompetent people succeeding? Does success look different between competent and incompetent successes or failures? I've seen incompetently build and administered databases. They are things of horror and pain. But they mostly worked, most of the time, for a sort of minimum functionality. Competently done databases can be handed to competent database administrators and you'll be getting useful information in 20 minutes, and complex searches & deep anaylsis in a day or two*.

So how specific are your skills, tasks, and task resolution system? Is the difference between incompetent & competent a simple "may not try vs. may try" or is it "worse at vs. better at"? Is your resolution success/fail or is it degrees of success and failure? These will all change how competency is defined in your game.

Lets say you want to define competency at driving a car as bring able to avoid an acciden you can see coming about half the time. If you have a generic "drive' skill and use a d20+mod vs. dc system then competent is defined as making your mod equal to the dc-10. But that's competence in a vacuum, meaningless without context. Is your scale dc 5 to back out of a parking spot, 15 to avoid a crash, 25 to jump a mile wide canyon? Is it no roll to drive normally, 20 to avoid the crash, 40 to drive on snow and ice? Do incompetent or unskilled people get to roll? Do you calculate the mod just from skill, or from something like skill+stat+1/4th level+car max speed? Do you want compent drivers to also be competent nuclear submarine pilots? Are you doing yes/no success or degrees of success?

Just asking what a competent skill check looks like depends a lot on how the entire system works. D&D these days decided on a rolling system, yes/no successes, everyone rolls for anything, and dc scale first, then tried to fit skills into that. Other systems have chosen dice systems, then defined competency, then set dc scales and the rest of it. Some systems (Paranoia) are intentionally partly to mostly lol-random because they're supposed to produce silly or randon results. Some systems can be deterministic based on stacking mods, effects, whatever because they're about choosing what you use your resources to succeed at.

*Don't use this to judge your local DB admin. If the database contains information from before 2000 there's a decent chance it's one of the nightmare inducing messes and the poor admin inherited it with little or no info on how it is set up. In addition to possible bad data that might just randomly crash it.

Kaptin Keen

2020-08-27, 04:11 PM

Taken generally, what does it mean to you for a TTRPG character to be competent?

To me competence carries with it implications of reliability in the field being so described. It covers the trials the character might face and brushes aside the trivial without a second thought. The character, in their fields of competency, is not unwillingly endlessly in over their head unless the genre or the GM happens to be a horror story.

Yea ... being able to succeed at the things the character was designed to succeed at. That's almost always my only source of dissatisfaction in RPG's: When I feel the game promises me that a style of character is good at something - and then it isn't. Or another style of character is actually better for no apparent reason (eg. wizards are better rogues than rogues are).

evilmastermind

2020-08-27, 04:41 PM

Taken generally, what does it mean to you for a TTRPG character to be competent?

To me competence carries with it implications of reliability in the field being so described. It covers the trials the character might face and brushes aside the trivial without a second thought. The character, in their fields of competency, is not unwillingly endlessly in over their head unless the genre or the GM happens to be a horror story.

Reilability is the one of the two most important things, because it's all dependent on how likeable he or she is to the players. I've seen "competent" characters shamed and abandoned by groups of players who thought that their skills weren't worth bringing them along. So you can be skillful, reliable but you also need that little bit of charisma to be considered competent at your job... it's subjective and in the players/group's minds.

Quertus

2020-08-27, 05:16 PM

This is tricky. Much like "fun", "competent" can be difficult to define. So, instead, let's look at the negative space, to get a feel for the shape of competence.

-----

What can make a character (feel) incompetent?

#1 - the Player.

Lots of what people are taking about in this thread is making good choices, using what you have, evaluating the scenario. Simply put, player skills.

If the player is incompetent, the character is going to feel incompetent,
and there's not much you can do about that. Put me in Warhammer 40k, and it's a safe bet that my character will be incompetent, because that universe just… I haven't seen the elephant.

#2 - the GM

Player: "I put on my pants".

GM: "OK, you put your pants on your head, because you didn't say *where* you put your pants on."

A bad GM can definitely have PCs come across as "pants on head" incompetent through failing to serve as a reasonable interface between the player, the character, and the world.

#3 - the system

Bounded Accuracy has a dozen hobos have a better chance to solve problems than Reed Richards. 5e really pulls a "Captain Hobo" on supposedly competent characters.

Or look at the Warhammer line - most stats are around 30-40, and that's your % chance of success (or half that if untrained), with 96-100 being a botch. I really want to "play it honest", and run through the party trying to order a meal in a restaurant with such a system.

#4 - the character's mechanics

So, I've got this character who *you'd think* could be totally intimidating. And the GM is totally into social things. But, even when I intimidate with perfect timing at great advantage, the character never successfully intimates anyone. Why? Because I "forgot" to put any resources into intimidation. (Never letting anyone be intimidated by that character is one of the best things that that particular GM has ever done).

#5 - the character's personality

Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, is intentionally *not* the Determinator. Or look at :durkon: (at least for most of the strip).

The character could have every mechanical advantage, and a player who *could* make better choices, yet still come off as incompetent (at least, in certain fields), because that's the way that they're roleplayed.

-----

So, now that we've drawn the negative space, what does a competent character look like?

The GM does a good job of describing the scenario. The player has the ability to evaluate the scenario, and make good choices. The character has the tools and wherewithal to act on the player's wisdom. The GM interprets the player's action declaration benevolently, and has the skills to catch and clarify any miscommunications. And the system doesn't get in the way and say "lol, you fail anyway".

NichG

2020-08-27, 06:17 PM

In my mind, competence is less about what a character can do, and more about the character being able to correctly determine what they can do and act or plan accordingly. A incompetent character is one who takes actions that rely on them being able to do things which they can't deliver. I don't expect a competent blacksmith to be able to dismantle the army of angry iron golems, but I do expect them to say 'having me go out there and hammer on an iron golem is stupid, it won't do anything other than get me killed, you need a warrior not a blacksmith'. Similarly, they should be able to speak confidently as to the things they can provide and not mistakenly underestimate that. A warrior who is afraid to get into fights they can fairly reliably win isn't displaying competence to me.

Similarly, if the character could reliably succeed by doing things a certain way, but fails or believes they can't succeed because they can't think of that method or are stuck on a preferred method, it looks incompetent. E.g. if a Fighter says 'I can't take on this demon because it can teleport at will, regenerates, and we don't have anything I could use which would break it's DR' then fine, that's within the sphere of competence - they know their limits. Even if, say, there was a caster who could let them deal with some of those problems, I don't think it's a big mark against their competence as a Fighter to not think 'oh, lets get the Wizard to drop a dimensional anchor and have the Cleric bless my weapon' (though it would be a bit of a mark against their competence if they were presenting themselves as a party leader or strategist/tactician).

If they say 'I can't take on this griffon because it flies and my signature weapon is a sword' then it starts to look incompetent - using a bow is within the range of things that a Fighter is supposed to be proficient in, and using a ranged weapon (even if you're bad at it) against a flier that only has melee attacks is a viable plan. So if they say 'I can't do it' when I can think of ways that they could, that looks incompetent.

Raijinken

2020-08-27, 07:02 PM

Competency? Like what our GM usually, if not, ALWAYS slaps in our faces: The Player behind it!

aglondier

2020-08-27, 11:35 PM

I think that if they can function just fine in their perceived weight class, and regularly punch well above it, then they are competent PCs.
I played a Shadowrun campaign where complementary characters and well-oiled teamwork had just beyond starting characters surviving runs that should have been tpks...

Hmmm...probably helped that the players had been gaming together for years, and two had a near precognitive knowledge of what the other would do in any situation...

Rynjin

2020-08-27, 11:43 PM

I can put a pretty simple numerical value on it: when a character can always succeed at something more than 50% of the time, they are competent with that task. Basically, in a d20 system if a character can Take 10 to consistently complete level appropriate skill checks, or hit an enemy on a 10 or lower die roll, etc. they are competent at skills, or attacking, or what have you. Skills is a particular important one as that level of competence means you can ALWAYS successfully complete that task when not under some kind of undue stress...as someone should be. A trained, competent carpenter shouldn't fail at making a chair even 5% of the time unless there's something distracting them.

Hyper-competence would be about a 70% success rate or higher on level appropriate challenges.

icefractal

2020-08-28, 02:06 PM

I think that depends a lot on what the task is.

50% chance to safely land a heavily damaged plane on a way-too-short improvised runway? Yeah, that's a competent pilot.

50% chance to safely land a plane on a normal runway in normal conditions? Not a competent pilot, would probably lose their job immediately.

Honestly for things that are part of someone's normal job, even a 5% chance to fail is usually too much. Like, how often should a pilot fail to land a plane? I would say in normal conditions, never. Their skill should be enough that they only fail when things go very wrong.

Combat is usually an example of "things going at least somewhat wrong", and so lower chances are acceptable than in most areas. Even then, I feel like a 50% whiff rate isn't going to feel that competent, even if it compares favorably to most opposition. IIRC, WotC did testing on this and found that an average 70% hit rate was the most generally enjoyable, at least in a D&D paradigm where a single hit is seldom decisive.

Telok

2020-08-28, 03:25 PM

.Like, how often should a pilot fail to land a plane

Oh, nobody ever fails to land a plane. It's just a question of how many chunks end up scattered across the landscape and how close to the intended landing spot they are.

In that vein, what do we mean when we say someone is competent? That they can do something well and often that they can do it well with regularity. By that definition any character is competent at anything they can succeed at more than half the time. I’d ignore player & DM contributions to competency as that’s something which is generally outside the scope and control of an RPG system.

If competency is a simple 51% success rate then in the WotC D&Ds and d20 systems pretty much every human in existence is competent at DC 10 tasks, every spellcaster is competent at casting spells (in fact they’re awesome at it because they almost never fail to cast a spell when they try to), and even regular horses are competent to highly competent at DC 5 intelligence tasks. This has the unfortunate side effect of implying things like the act of figuring out how to lift a bar in order to open a gate or barn door being higher than a DC 5 intelligence task*. Perhaps a more accurate conclusion would be that the concept of competency is something that cannot, or maybe should not be expressed with a single mechanic that comes down to what is effectively a random coin flip.

I would argue that you need to consider at least three things in evaluating a character’s competency within a system of game mechanics. The scope of the tasks being considered, the chance of success at the tasks, and the magnitude of success at the tasks.

You want to consider the scope of the tasks that you’re trying to evaluate. Something like ‘hit a low threat rating goblin in an empty room during the day with an attack ability’ is going to be so specific and basic that nearly all possible characters within an RPG system would be considered competent. At the other extreme ‘meaningfully participate in a generic combat scenario’ is so vague and general that, again, nearly all possible characters will be considered competent. The scope of the tasks will also depend on the mechanics of the RPG. A game like Riddle of Steel will care about individual parries and ripostes within a single exchange of blows in combat, games like Fate may resolve a battle involving three armies in a single roll. Even within the current editions of D&D you can consider competency in individual aspects like attacking in melee, defending from physical attacks, and taking damage, versus an overall competency in combat in general. To move the D&D example away from combat you could have a situation where two characters engage in opposed skill checks until one has four more successes than the other or until 10 checks have been made, compared to a situation where one character makes one skill check to determine total success or absolute failure. Any definition of character competence will have to be specific to the mechanics of the system and the scope of the task.

The chance of success is what almost everyone will be focusing on. I’d consider the sustained rate of success to also be important, but it depends on the RPG again. Most games use some sort of resource mechanic, eventually the character runs out of resources and has to stop or else they risk serious harm or setbacks. Compare a system where you have a character resource that improves a character’s chances in a stealth situation with one that doesn’t have skill affecting resources. In the system with resources the character can try to fine tune their rate of success to the situation and may, over the course of several encounters, run out of the resources to maintain a particular level of success or even have any chance of success at all. By comparison the system without stealth skill related resources simply has the same chances of success at all times for an unlimited number of encounters (presuming equality in the difficulty of the encounters there). You can even have systems that mix the two options, D&D has casters who can nearly perfectly auto-succeed stealth encounters a few times a day and non-casters who have a chance (sometimes high, sometimes low) of succeeding in stealth encounters an effectively infinite number of times in a row. A definition of competence will depend on how many times a character is expected to need to succeed between some sort of resource reset and if they need to succeed every time or just most of the time.

Different RPG systems have different ways of measuring success. D&D measures combat success by a sustained rate of attack success with variable amounts of effect over the course of multiple attempts, giving you a range from a massively successful combat where nobody on your side took damage or used resources to an unrecoverable TPK. On the other hand, D&D traditionally measures non-combat actions like skills with a binary success/failure mode based on a single roll. Again, something like Exalted with its social combat and a range of outcomes will have a different concept of a competent “face” character than D&D with it’s usual “roll once to persuade/intimidate/deceive and completely succeed or totally fail” model. If a system allows for degrees of success in a task then competency will look different than a system that only checks for absolute success or failure.

TLDR: consider at least three things in evaluating a character’s competency within a system of game mechanics. The scope of the tasks being considered, the chance of success at the tasks, and the magnitude of success at the tasks. Any definition of character competence will have to be specific to the mechanics of the system and the scope of the task. A definition of competence will depend on how many times a character is expected to need to succeed between some sort of resource reset and if they need to succeed every time or just most of the time. If a system allows for degrees of success in a task then competency will look different than a system that only checks for absolute success or failure.

Taking just D&D 5e: Is a competent combatant someone who has a minimum 16 attack stat, 1d8 or larger basic attack, 14+ AC, and a 12+ Con with at least average HP rolls? Is it a character that can always help the team win in any level equivalent encounter? Or is it a character that can encompasses the player’s concept and not be a drag on the party? For example, if they want to play an unlettered and naïve primitive warrior, can that be done without the party being worse off in combat when the character participates? Are any or all of those “combat competent”? And remember, combat is generally the easy area in which to define this.

* I will be accused of ‘not using the skill system correctly’ because you aren’t supposed to roll if there’s not penalty for failure. Fine. The barn is on fire, make your intelligence check to figure out how to lift a bar in order to open the door before you burn to death. The point of the example isn’t about how to use a skill system, but how to define character competency within the mechanics of a skill system.

Vahnavoi

2020-08-28, 04:40 PM

In a roleplaying game, there are two kinds of competence that matter:

1) a priori competence - everybody acts as if your character is competent, because that's what reads on your character sheet. F. ex. your character is stated to be smart, so everyone acts if their decisions are smart.

2) the ability of the player to pursue their goals in the game by making mechanical decisions.

Before you go awkwardly tinkering with mechanics of any game, you first have to decide which type of competency you're aiming for. First of these can be close to independent from player skill, the second cannot be.

Seto

2020-08-28, 04:48 PM

In the context of a rpg character, I tend to understand it as a metagame term rather than in-universe. To me, a competent character (as opposed to a competent person irl) is a character whose mechanics allow them to represent their concept. If I build my character as a cook, they should be able to consistently make good dishes, but their ability in combat has little bearing on whether or not they're competent. If I build a spy, they should be smart, sneaky and have special training.
If, however, I try to build a monster hunter and my character ends up struggling against anything bigger than a horse, I'll be disappointed in my character and consider them incompetent. As in, they cannot reliably perform in situations they're expected to be able to handle.

If we're talking about in-universe, then you're just asking to define "competency". What is a competent person? It's kind of a broad term. I'd say, someone who's good at what they do. They might also exhibit other talents, and be more broadly competent than what might be expected of them. If it's given without context, I'd say it's a person who's giften in several areas.

KineticDiplomat

2020-08-28, 07:59 PM

Assuming this is about mechanics, I think competence can generally be described as a sweet spot where "for the typical challenge the PC might face in this system/setting/character specialty, he has a reasonably solid chance to make it through with reasonable certainty, but may still suffer negative consequences and has an outside chance of failure - the chance of failure and consequence increasing in the case of poor decisions. Major challenges will be dangerous, and possibly lethal (insert system equivalent), but the odds of failure go down with good decisions." If the dice give you a solid foundation to address challenges and the world, but cannot guarantee victory without player decisions, competent.

I would define under-competent as "cannot reasonably expect to survive or contribute to typical challenges." With a caveat that this does not mean every Ph.D needs to be a gunslinger. If the dice cannot reasonably give you a chance at mechanical success no matter the player decision, under-competent.

I would define over-competent as "is sufficiently mechanically powerful that typical situations pose no threat, and major challenges require errors to fail...or anything higher than this." Basically, if the dice and dice alone can win for you, you're probably "over-competent." There is a bit of an issue where people believe that because they can make a hyper-capable character, that is competence, when it is in fact the simple fact that with time and pressure you can find the gaps in a setting and rules and produce ludicrous results. This is because the (usually numerous) authors of the system have to be perfectly iron clad and in unison, often across multiple books years and teams apart, whereas the supposedly "just using RAW competent" character only has to find a few disconnects in a massive system. It's not particularly hard to do.

Alcore

2020-08-28, 08:06 PM

PC, competent and table top...

If competency levels are equal between real life people a competent PC should be successful in area of expertise 50-60% of the time for an average difficultly. Difficulty should be scaled up or down accordingly (which is easier to do in some systems than others) bepending on how niched the PC is.

More broad PCs will face weaker encounters yet the DM doesn't have to tailor a location to make it survivable.

This is just competency that we are talking about; you just need to clear the bar. Or be the bar.

icefractal

2020-08-28, 08:17 PM

Alcore

2020-08-28, 08:44 PM

I'm kind of confused where people are getting 50% from. I think of competent as roughly "professional" level, like people would generally trust you to do the thing in question.

And I can't think of many jobs where a 50% success rate at "average" tasks would be considered acceptable.

It's quite simple really... (and i didn't say tasks, i said difficulty)

A level 2 fighter with str14 and a masterwork weapon has a +5 to hit. On an average difficulty encounter he should be facing something with an AC between 16-14 (roughly 50-60%). This enemy should also being hitting the same (unless damage is far greater) and, ideally, the monster should run out of HP first.

This monster would probably kill most npcs of lower level and some PCs without cunning maneuvers on the PCs part.

Of course the example above involves dungeons and dragons. It is rather clunky in the balance department. Mutants and Masterminds does a better job if a lot more work for the DM.

Rynjin

2020-08-28, 10:17 PM

I'm kind of confused where people are getting 50% from. I think of competent as roughly "professional" level, like people would generally trust you to do the thing in question.

And I can't think of many jobs where a 50% success rate at "average" tasks would be considered acceptable.

On a more purely OOC perspective, I'd say that what makes a PC seem competent at something is:
* Succeeding noticeably more often than failing at it. On screen.
* When everyone is rolling, almost always being better at it than untrained people are. As in, not failing when they succeed.

And a 50% rate doesn't seem to achieve that.

50% is specifically the metric for d20 systems, because typically Taking 10, or "Routine Checks", or some such mechanic exist.

A bare minimum 50% success rate is EXACTLY THE SAME as a 100% success rate when you're not in immediate danger or something, in other words, since you can put in a routine amount of effort and always succeed.

And when you are in danger...well, even competent people can choke in some sort of time crunch when bullets are flying and things are exploding.

Vahnavoi

2020-08-29, 05:25 AM

Probability and percentages for single die rolls or single die rolls are a crappy way of gauging competency. You should be measuring success over real play time - f. ex., what would it take for a character to be successful over a 4 hour session of gameplay? You cannot determine this in a scenario-independent manner - not without turning the characters into spherical cows in a vacuum. In plain terms, to gauge competency, you need to know what the character needs to be competent at.

Florian

2020-08-29, 07:05 AM

This is tricky

Mr. Senility already gave the answer without realizing it.

Warhammer, Traveller and A Time of War (Battletech) use the best approach: Base Skill, Task Difficulty and Time (Coupled with degrees of success and failure).

First, keep in mind the golden rule: At or above 50%, you succeed without rolling.

Take a look at WH40K/D100: Base Chance is based on Attribute, starting out in the aforementioned 20-30% range. Attribute can be raised by further in 4x 5% steps, skills associated with the attribute can be raised by further 2x 5% steps. Beyond that, you can either add or remove one degree of success or failure by further investing in your skill.

Now the interesting part is Task Difficulty. This ranges from +60% to -60% percent, from trivial to hellish.
Time is the second axis, also adding a further +/- 60% to the range.

This gives you a range to work with. For example, having to fix a nuclear reactor right now (-120%) is impossible, having al the time in the world to fix it (0%) will depend on whether the base chance is above or below 50%.

OldTrees1

2020-08-29, 10:10 AM

And when you are in danger...well, even competent people can choke in some sort of time crunch when bullets are flying and things are exploding.

1) In RPGs we tend to model a 99.9% success rate as 100% and even model 97.5% as 100% in d20 systems. The error rate is just too small for the resolution of our RNG of choice.
2) In many professions routine tasks are expected to have very high success rates. 99% is considered negligent. Sometimes even 99.99% is negligent.
3) Yes a higher than normal stress* can decrease the success rate. However dropping from 99.9% to 99% (10x the failures) would still resolve as 100% in a d20 system.
* RPG characters are also competent in things where combat is normal (rather than "higher than normal") stress.

I see skill as growing from "unable to attempt" thru "possible but with a shrinking chance of failure" to "automatic". Running across a chain is something I could not do, much less do in combat. If a character is improving in that direction I expect them to eventually be able to roll, and then later not need to roll. So skill is this ever shifting window that makes new abilities possible and old abilities guaranteed. This lets you build off of those old abilities.

I see competence as checking 3 things:
1) Are the baseline abilities (old abilities that are now guaranteed successes) "level appropriate" for a professional of that field? Does a professional of that rank have a better baseline than the mechanics create?
2) Are the risky abilities "level appropriate" for a professional of that field? Would we expect a professional of that rank to be more reliable in those abilities?
3) Are the impossible abilities "level appropriate" for a professional of that field? Would we expect a professional of that rank to be able to do those abilities?

Now, what does "level appropriate" mean? That depends on the RPG, but pick a reasonable metric, and then be consistent.

Vahnavoi

2020-08-29, 11:52 AM

1) In RPGs we tend to model a 99.9% success rate as 100% and even model 97.5% as 100% in d20 systems. The error rate is just too small for the resolution of our RNG of choice.
2) In many professions routine tasks are expected to have very high success rates. 99% is considered negligent. Sometimes even 99.99% is negligent.
3) Yes a higher than normal stress* can decrease the success rate. However dropping from 99.9% to 99% (10x the failures) would still resolve as 100% in a d20 system.

Every. Single. Thing. About probabilities and resolution space of d20 roll only holds if you're talking about a single die roll, and ceases to be true when talking about tasks involving multiple die rolls, such as combat. It isn't hard to create scenarios where you might have 5% chance to fail a single roll, but below 1% chance to fail the entire combat. Or, put differently, a success rate above 95% but below 100%.

The simple way around "limitations" of your RNG is to not use it in a deliberately crappy way.

Kyutaru

2020-08-29, 12:40 PM

I see skill as growing from "unable to attempt" thru "possible but with a shrinking chance of failure" to "automatic". Running across a chain is something I could not do, much less do in combat. If a character is improving in that direction I expect them to eventually be able to roll, and then later not need to roll. So skill is this ever shifting window that makes new abilities possible and old abilities guaranteed. This lets you build off of those old abilities.
It's something a good DM handles appropriately and another reason that having predefined skill tables is horrible for roleplaying games. Running across a chain is an automatic thing for a high level, highly skilled acrobat. It doesn't require a roll unless there's some reason he might fail impeding his usual mastery. It's the kind of thing DMs only force rolls for when conditions are awful, similar to the difficulty task adjustments mentioned above that reduce the chance of failure till it becomes guaranteed or impossible. Some things simply can't be done and some things can always be done and definitions of competency must have a control value to measure against. We understand that running across a chain is hard. But what about walking across a bridge without falling off? It's pretty easy for anyone to do but I'm sure a drunk might find it a challenging DC.

icefractal

2020-08-29, 01:49 PM

It's something a good DM handles appropriately and another reason that having predefined skill tables is horrible for roleplaying games.
...

I'm confused here, because the rest of your post seems to be an argument in favor of predefined skill tables. At least, they do all the things you mentioned:

Acrobatics:
Drunk w/ no skill: -2
Novice: +4
Expert: +10 (3rd level, +2 dex, +2 item or feat)
Grandmaster: +25 (10th level, +7 dex, +5 item or feats)

Narrow bridge: DC 5
Drunk has a 30% chance to fall off, the others automatically do it.

Stationary chain: DC 20
Drunk can't do it, novice has a 25% chance, expert has a 55% chance, grandmaster automatic.

Swinging chain: DC 25
Novice can't do it, expert has a 30% chance, grandmaster still automatic

Vigorously swinging chain: DC 30
Expert has a 5% chance, grandmaster has an 80% chance

Vigorously swinging icy chain at full speed: DC 40
Even the grandmaster finds this tricky, 30% chance
But a 20th level "goddamn demigod of acrobatics" could probably do it no sweat, as appropriate.

IMO, fixed DCs work great. The only benefit to no fixed numbers would seem to be the ability to fudge it - to have the swinging chain be easy or automatic when you want to let the PCs show off, and then turn around and make that same chain a tough roll when it fits the story. And personally, that's not a thing I find desirable as either a player or GM.

OldTrees1

2020-08-29, 01:50 PM

Every. Single. Thing. About probabilities and resolution space of d20 roll only holds if you're talking about a single die roll, and ceases to be true when talking about tasks involving multiple die rolls, such as combat. It isn't hard to create scenarios where you might have 5% chance to fail a single roll, but below 1% chance to fail the entire combat. Or, put differently, a success rate above 95% but below 100%.

The simple way around "limitations" of your RNG is to not use it in a deliberately crappy way.

Was that tone (a period after every word?) intentional? I am going to ignore it since it does not fit the conversation.

I was still talking about single checks. Some of those checks might happen during combat (like running across a chain as part of your movement), but I was still taking about single checks.

Yes, it is possible to increase the resolution of the RNG by increasing the number of checks per check. The 5th level rogue rolls 1d20 for climbing the wall. The 10th level rogue rolls 2d20 at advantage for that wall. The 15th level rogue rolls 3d20 at advantage for that wall. Etc.

However that seems to be excessive resolution rather than just allowing rounding to eventually hit 100%. Taking a single check and tacking on extra checks just to give a chance of failure seems like a "deliberately crappy way" of handling competency. So, using your own advice, I don't see a reason to prevent a single check from eventually rounding to 100%.

[This paragraph is talking about multiple checks unlike the previous post or rest of this post]
I especially don't want to have to roll 27d20 to resolve a 20th level character's movement when a 1st level character only rolled 1d20 for their movement. Eventual rounding to 100% on single checks allows high level characters to have quantitative and qualitative growth in their abilities with only a small increase in the number of dice rolled for the same action. It is much nicer to roll 1d20 each for 3 components of a 20th level character's movement and have automatic passes on the other, now mastered, components to the movement.

It's something a good DM handles appropriately and another reason that having predefined skill tables is horrible for roleplaying games. Running across a chain is an automatic thing for a high level, highly skilled acrobat. It doesn't require a roll unless there's some reason he might fail impeding his usual mastery. It's the kind of thing DMs only force rolls for when conditions are awful, similar to the difficulty task adjustments mentioned above that reduce the chance of failure till it becomes guaranteed or impossible. Some things simply can't be done and some things can always be done and definitions of competency must have a control value to measure against. We understand that running across a chain is hard. But what about walking across a bridge without falling off? It's pretty easy for anyone to do but I'm sure a drunk might find it a challenging DC.

I hear you. I reach a different conclusion but I do hear you.
The player knowing what their character is capable of, and what is automatic for their character is useful information. You don't like using skill tables for that. I see skill tables as a very useful communication aide. However we both agree that the player being informed means the player could know when their character leveled up qualitatively (rather than just quantitatively).

To demonstrate the communication aide, if icefractal was the DM, I would know when my naturally talented specialized acrobat (see icefractal's acrobat) leveled up qualitatively and I would know when my clumsy drunk generalist acrobat (-2 Dex, -2 Drunk, half ranks generalist, no items) leveled up qualitatively. At 13th level or so my drunk could safely be drunk on narrow bridges.

But to reiterate, I hear you. You don't like skill tables, and your gaming is better off without them (as demonstrated in another thread). Different tools for different DMs.

NichG

2020-08-29, 07:37 PM

OldTrees1

2020-08-29, 10:46 PM

I don't think any sort of absolute success or failure rate corresponds to competence (well, except 100% success which I guess gives no room for not being competent). Here's a thought experiment: imagine a character who, for any roll-based action that they might want to do, they can roll first before deciding whether to commit to the action, and based on the result of the roll they can change their mind as to what broad type of action they want to do.

So if they try to then they know in advance that their first three attack rolls will hit a 27, 15, and a 12, no matter who they are attacking or how they break it up. If they try to jump a gap, then their next jump check will hit a 17, whether it's now or next round. Etc.

For me, assuming the player doesn't go forward and choose to fail anyhow, I think I'd be much more likely to perceive that character as competent than one who has exactly the same success chances (whether they're 5% or 95%). For me it's being able to say 'yes, I've got this' or 'no, that won't work' and be right about it.

If it's, for example, a 5% chance of success but with retries allowed, then knowing when exactly that success is going to come lets the character make statements such as 'you need to buy me 40 seconds, that's how long it will take me to get through this lock', whereas if you didn't know then it's almost an even chance to be <10 rounds as it is >10 rounds. 'Buy me some time - wait, nevermind, I got lucky' feels less competent to me than accurately knowing how long it will take, even if it takes repeated failures to get there.

The precog character does feel more competent, but part of that is the precognition. Here are 2 cases where the precognition might be overwhelming the thought experiment.

1) Imagine a task with no time pressure but with a significant penalty for retries. Say Dun the Dungeon Guide is disarming a trap on a lock. Currently they want their bonus high enough to minimize the chance of undershooting the DC by enough to set the trap off. However with precog they could stand next to the trap until they roll a 15. For this specific kind of check, that might be worth +5 or even +8, so we should expect it to feel more competent.

2) Imagine a character under time pressure to do 3 different tasks. An easy, a medium, and a hard task. For example Dun the Dungeon Guide is in a flooding room trap and needs to pull a plug (hard), switch off the water (medium), and heal a dying ally (easy). Each round they check their options from hard to easy. Over 3 rounds that is like attempting the hard task 3 times, the medium task 2 times (assuming the hard one succeeds), and the easy task 1 time (assuming the other tasks pass). All because a turn when the hard and medium tasks would fail becomes a turn when the easy task is attempted.

So what about when there is no time pressure and no penalty for retries? Will that case be more true to the thought experiment? There seems to be no unintended buff from the precognition, so it might be more true to the thought experiment. In this case your example of unlocking a lock seems like a good example. I am shocked. Imagine that, the example given with the experiment seems to be true to the experiment. :smallbiggrin:

3) The unlocking a lock example. Under the precog rules, Dun would only have 1 round precognition on when they would succeed. There is still an element of "Buy me some time. How much? I have no idea, might be 6s or might be 2m." 12s pass. "You only need to buy me 6s more." so it is not much different, however it does let the party make some plans.

In conclusion, I think the precog thought experiment shows the advantages of precognition make a character feel more competent.

NichG

2020-08-30, 01:18 AM

The precog character does feel more competent, but part of that is the precognition. Here are 2 cases where the precognition might be overwhelming the thought experiment.

1) Imagine a task with no time pressure but with a significant penalty for retries. Say Dun the Dungeon Guide is disarming a trap on a lock. Currently they want their bonus high enough to minimize the chance of undershooting the DC by enough to set the trap off. However with precog they could stand next to the trap until they roll a 15. For this specific kind of check, that might be worth +5 or even +8, so we should expect it to feel more competent.

What if you interpret the mechanic as, if they know they will roll a 2 when trying to disarm a particular trap, they can't mess with the random seed to turn that 2 into an 18. They're not getting rid of that 2 until they take the consequences of it. E.g. knowing with absolute certainty 'if I try to disarm this trap, I will just set it off, however the underlying system needs to work in order to make that sort of knowledge true.

In some cases this might even be worse than the base system - normally in the situation you describe you could at least take 10, but if your precog says 'this trap is going to be a 2' then you're stuck taking 2. For me that has a mild effect on the perception of competence (in the sense that someone who can always disarm a razor-blade tripwire will generally feel more competent than someone who can do it sometimes but can't do it other times), but less so than someone who fails randomly without expecting it.

2) Imagine a character under time pressure to do 3 different tasks. An easy, a medium, and a hard task. For example Dun the Dungeon Guide is in a flooding room trap and needs to pull a plug (hard), switch off the water (medium), and heal a dying ally (easy). Each round they check their options from hard to easy. Over 3 rounds that is like attempting the hard task 3 times, the medium task 2 times (assuming the hard one succeeds), and the easy task 1 time (assuming the other tasks pass). All because a turn when the hard and medium tasks would fail becomes a turn when the easy task is attempted.

Yeah, this is hard to resolve without some kind of exploit. If you make the roll per-instance, then when choosing which of 8 mooks to attack the character basically gets 8 rerolls on their attack roll. If you make it per action type then the character can 'burn' the bad rolls on something else.

So what about when there is no time pressure and no penalty for retries? Will that case be more true to the thought experiment? There seems to be no unintended buff from the precognition, so it might be more true to the thought experiment. In this case your example of unlocking a lock seems like a good example. I am shocked. Imagine that, the example given with the experiment seems to be true to the experiment. :smallbiggrin:

3) The unlocking a lock example. Under the precog rules, Dun would only have 1 round precognition on when they would succeed. There is still an element of "Buy me some time. How much? I have no idea, might be 6s or might be 2m." 12s pass. "You only need to buy me 6s more." so it is not much different, however it does let the party make some plans.

In conclusion, I think the precog thought experiment shows the advantages of precognition make a character feel more competent.

Maybe a better example is systems where you have some kind of post-roll resource that you can expend to correct for a bad roll, within certain limits. So e.g. the character who rolls a 2 spends more stamina or body points or whatever to succeed, but when it really matters they can guarantee success (at a cost to themselves). That way you don't need precog to get the same kind of certainty in the outcome, since what you're rolling for is the price of success rather than to answer the question 'do I succeed?'. So an unlucky but competent (in the sense of having a good grasp of whether they can promise success) character might be forced to say 'okay, that's it for me, if you have me keep going I might pull it off but I can't guarantee that anymore' earlier than normal, but they at least know when it's gotten to that point. Some of the within-world interpretation of that is a little weird, especially if the amount you can spend is open-ended (sorry, I really tried hard to pick that one really difficult lock, so now I'm too exhausted to pick a simple one).

OldTrees1

2020-08-30, 01:58 AM

What if you -snip-

Shrug. My point was those 2 examples created unintended side effects that distracted from what I thought your thought experiment was examining. Therefore I discarded those examples.

Maybe a better example is systems where you have some kind of post-roll resource that you can expend to correct for a bad roll, within certain limits. So e.g. the character who rolls a 2 spends more stamina or body points or whatever to succeed, but when it really matters they can guarantee success (at a cost to themselves). That way you don't need precog to get the same kind of certainty in the outcome, since what you're rolling for is the price of success rather than to answer the question 'do I succeed?'. So an unlucky but competent (in the sense of having a good grasp of whether they can promise success) character might be forced to say 'okay, that's it for me, if you have me keep going I might pull it off but I can't guarantee that anymore' earlier than normal, but they at least know when it's gotten to that point. Some of the within-world interpretation of that is a little weird, especially if the amount you can spend is open-ended (sorry, I really tried hard to pick that one really difficult lock, so now I'm too exhausted to pick a simple one).

A post roll resource is a notable buff and thus we would expect it to feel more competent.

While the distractions are distracting, I think I agree that effects that reduce the RNG without adjusting the success frequency would result in the character feeling more competent to a point.

ShedShadow

2020-08-30, 02:18 PM

Appropriate to the question posed, I think it is useful that my textbook be quoted here (Dutch originally, but I am translating as literally as possible).

"The term 'competence' is unjustly perceived as a synonym of the term 'skilled'. There are many interpretations of the term 'competence' in use. We follow the definition that states competence to be: when confronted with an (occupational) activity to be able to consciously show forth related knowledge, skill, and personal qualities; being able to show forth (growing) expertise."

I think this quote from my textbook on 'learning effectively' gives, in the first definition, a couple of neat qualifiers.

1. "Confronted with an occupational activity". For TTRPG's this means the rogue needs to hide, the wizard needs to cast a spell, the druid needs to identify the leaf, etc. No dubious language here.

2. "Able to consciously show forth". This rules out accidental or unintended effects. That is to say, the natural 20 in D&D, or using some loophole to bring about the same result. For example, a wizard casting invisibility is not competent at hiding, but he achieves the same effect of not being spotted. This can be argued with, I realize, but for the sake of the argument I would group this here. More on wizards below.

3. "Related knowledge". Competence thus includes a familiarity with what you are up against. This means a character would need to know if something is hard or easy, common or rare. The player might not know this, and thus this point is interfaced by the DM. When faced with 'does the druid know that bald eagles are not native to this region?' The player might not know, but the DM does because he built the world. If this is common knowledge, the druid will know, even if the player doesn't. This is part of a character's competence.

4. "Related skill". In effect, this is about abilities that are relevant to the task at hand. For example, a dwarf might have bonuses on making stonework because of their background. This contributes to their competence in this area. If they have class features or other abilities that help, then they come here too.

5. "Personal qualities". To explain this, let me just quote some more:

"Secondly, the term competence includes another element: personal qualities. They comprise aspect of attitude, such as prevalence, being stress resistant, careful [literal translation, but might better be translated as conscientious] and flexibility. [...] It is the working of the personality of the student on the execution of the task." Now, I quote that here because it gives more qualifiers to consider someone competent. Some of these are waived for TTRPG ease, such as conscientiousness, but can be considered useful as roleplaying fluff. The important take-away from this quote are the qualifiers 'prevalence', 'stress resistant' and 'flexibility'.

6. "Prevalence". Prevalent essentially means consistently, often, and repeatedly, and a great number of times repeatedly. For D&D this rules out the wizard for being competent at hiding, taking my example from before, by using the invisibility spell because they can only cast invisibility a handful of times per day. A competent rogue can do so all day long, effectively. In this, the success of the rogue at hiding is prevalent.

7. "Stress resistant". The ability to perform under pressure. In real life we want our firemen to put out real fires, we want out surgeons to perform real surgeries. We do not want them to only be able to do this in sterile, controlled conditions. Yes that was a pun. In effect, we want the surgeon to be able to successfully operate on real people, not just on dummies during practice sessions. For TTRPG, this means that the character performs in a stressful situation. This coincides with previous statements about only rolling when there are consequences. Competence thus means that success should still be expected when there are forces prohibiting an automatic success. This I would gather under the previously mentioned encounter success. I.e. it doesn't matter if the first roll to unlock the door was a failure, as long as the door is unlocked before the guards catch the party. Thus, even in a stressful situation, a competent character can be expected to achieve success when faced with forces that prohibit automatic success.

8. "Flexibility". This means what you think it means. It means to perform in a wide array of circumstances. Competent rogues can hide in the city and in the woods, during the day or night, from the orcs and the humans. This is another argument against spellcasters since a 'hide from undead' spell is effective at hiding them from undead, but not very flexible if the human necromancer happens to walk around the corner. A competent rogue would not be spotted by either the skeletons or the human necromancer.

Those qualifiers are applicable in real life, and to a degree they also apply to systems that attempt to mimic or simulate reality. Hence, these qualifiers also apply for TTRPGs. Granted, at some point they might not hold up as well when we come to things such as being strong enough to grapple dragons, but then they still give a direction to look in. All in all, competence in TTRPGs is closer to real life competence than we perhaps initially assumed.

Kyutaru

2020-08-30, 02:57 PM

Those qualifiers are applicable in real life, and to a degree they also apply to systems that attempt to mimic or simulate reality. Hence, these qualifiers also apply for TTRPGs. Granted, at some point they might not hold up as well when we come to things such as being strong enough to grapple dragons, but then they still give a direction to look in. All in all, competence in TTRPGs is closer to real life competence than we perhaps initially assumed.
Which is why I'd attribute it to more of the 75%+ passing range rather than 51% success chance. Typical DCs are geared towards similar levels of competence. Winning on a coin flip could dip into lousy averages while being triple as successful as not is a clear sign of doing something right.

Tanarii

2020-08-31, 10:04 PM

IMO the answer to that question is naturally a set, because first you have to define categories of things you can be competent at. The most important being "what is this game about?"

To pick some examples:
- Dungeon Crawl Classics has (assumedly) competent bookbinders and farmers etc entering dungeons as decidedly incompetent adventurers.
- Paranoia troubleshooters are hilariously incompetent at their primary job of being a troubleshooter, but how competent they are at the primary game goal depends entirely on the player not the character.
- Exalted 2e and Godbound have starting characters that are almost guaranteed to be competent at being common soldiers/warriors regardless of their focus, but what matters is how competent proto-divinities they are.

A more interesting question to me is:
after how much invested game play should a character be competent at the primary game goal?

With a subtext of:
should being a more competent player make the character significantly more competent?

Duff

2020-09-08, 11:03 PM

I think context is important.
Take a typical D&D wizard at 20th level. Are they a competent brawler? I'd say "No" in most contexts where it comes up. They aren't even close to the actual brawlers in the party, nor to the brawling monsters they fight. Even the cleric will beat them up.
OTOH, in the context of a normal village's annual punch-on where a 1st level character is above average and most are 0 level, yes, they're a very competent brawler with their double digit hit points and their bonuses on hit rolls.

To use soccer, a competent striker in a local team is probably playing as a striker and their team mates try and get the ball to them to attempt to score
In a professional league, a competent striker is probably mostly played in a different position, but if the flow of the game takes them to the right place, they're going to have a better chance of scoring than half the rest of their team. And they are a much better striker than our local lad above

So competent is based on ability to fulfil a role (or job or position), within a context.

icefractal

2020-09-09, 05:57 PM

I think context is important.
Take a typical D&D wizard at 20th level. Are they a competent brawler? I'd say "No" in most contexts where it comes up. They aren't even close to the actual brawlers in the party, nor to the brawling monsters they fight. Even the cleric will beat them up.
OTOH, in the context of a normal village's annual punch-on where a 1st level character is above average and most are 0 level, yes, they're a very competent brawler with their double digit hit points and their bonuses on hit rolls.That's true, and in fact I'd say that the real factor of whether a character seems competent about something is what happens in-game. Whenever the thing comes up, they either confirm or deny the perception of their competence.

Succeed when others fail: Strongly confirm
Everyone succeeds: Weakly confirm
Everyone fails: Weakly deny
Fail when others succeed: Strongly deny

And the less times something comes up, the more each individual outcome matters. For attack rolls in a combat-heavy game, even a small difference will become noticeable over time. But for some obscure knowledge skill that comes up less than once a session? The "learned sage" had better be the one who succeeds at it, because a result of "first time the assassin knew better, second time nobody knew, there hasn't been a third time" feels more like a fake pretending to be a sage.

Quertus

2020-09-10, 06:34 AM

That's true, and in fact I'd say that the real factor of whether a character seems competent about something is what happens in-game. Whenever the thing comes up, they either confirm or deny the perception of their competence.

Succeed when others fail: Strongly confirm
Everyone succeeds: Weakly confirm
Everyone fails: Weakly deny
Fail when others succeed: Strongly deny

And the less times something comes up, the more each individual outcome matters. For attack rolls in a combat-heavy game, even a small difference will become noticeable over time. But for some obscure knowledge skill that comes up less than once a session? The "learned sage" had better be the one who succeeds at it, because a result of "first time the assassin knew better, second time nobody knew, there hasn't been a third time" feels more like a fake pretending to be a sage.

This reminds me of my old way of trying to explain (the perception of) competence.

In some movies that do it well, the protagonist is shown totally acing their area of expertise. Once that is established, then and only then is their counterpart / their foil / their nemesis introduced.

A lot of GMs fail at that first part, at establishing a character's competence in a field, before giving them a challenging challenge.

See also level treadmill.

kyoryu

2020-09-10, 09:30 AM

A lot of GMs fail at that first part, at establishing a character's competence in a field, before giving them a challenging challenge.

This is compounded by two things:

The game part of role playing "game". We want the things we do to be interesting and challenging.
Many systems, especially D&D, have characters start out as not being particularly competent.

Xervous

2020-09-10, 09:45 AM

This is compounded by two things:

The game part of role playing "game". We want the things we do to be interesting and challenging.
Many systems, especially D&D, have characters start out as not being particularly competent.

And some systems stretch the functional progression of low level D&D across the whole span of play, whether intentionally or otherwise preserving the incompetency.

Point buy systems acknowledge flat out that below certain thresholds the PCs will be lacking. A new player to D&D probably doesn’t expect the Slay 5 Rats (kobolds, goblins) but that’s about all the system can really handle when success is a coin flip on just about everything.

kyoryu

2020-09-10, 09:50 AM

And some systems stretch the functional progression of low level D&D across the whole span of play, whether intentionally or otherwise preserving the incompetency.

Point buy systems acknowledge flat out that below certain thresholds the PCs will be lacking. A new player to D&D probably doesn’t expect the Slay 5 Rats (kobolds, goblins) but that’s about all the system can really handle when success is a coin flip on just about everything.

Which ones?

Most non-D&D systems I know of start the players at a higher level of competency than "1st level D&D character" typically looks like. Most systems also don't reach the stratospheric heights of power that D&D (especially 3.x) does, but the equivalent of "level 4-8" seems to be where most games sit, and I think that's definitely in the competent range.

Quertus

2020-09-10, 05:25 PM

This is compounded by two things:

The game part of role playing "game". We want the things we do to be interesting and challenging.
Many systems, especially D&D, have characters start out as not being particularly competent.

That second one? That's fine. Characters who aren't competent (ie, (most) 1st level D&D characters) don't have to and generally shouldn't look especially / unrealistically competent. Although that doesn't mean that they should look "pants on head" incompetent, either.

That first one is trickier.

Yes, D&D is a game. Yes, therefore *some* people (those who engage the Challenge aesthetic) will want things to be challenging. Alternately, the parts of the game that lean heavily on it being a *game* will be challenging.

However, GMs who produce D&D sessions / campaigns that are *exclusively* challenging, that are exclusively *game*, have failed to provide the richest experience that the medium offers (and, IMO, would be better served playing a War Game, as those fulfill the Challenge aesthetic much better & more easily than an RPG does).

If you *only* have challenge, you miss out on all the role-playing opportunities and character-defining moments that explicitly require "not challenge".

If you're stuck on the level treadmill, then the character never actually seems to grow, and it turns the "zero to hero" progression into a "zero to zero" progression.

Or, as I usually say it, I prefer to run my characters under *many* GMs, so that I can experience the full gamut of experiences - and that full gamut done well - to get the full feel of the character.

icefractal

2020-09-10, 07:50 PM

If you *only* have challenge, you miss out on all the role-playing opportunities and character-defining moments that explicitly require "not challenge".

If you're stuck on the level treadmill, then the character never actually seems to grow, and it turns the "zero to hero" progression into a "zero to zero" progression.That's true, and even more the case if this is done by reskinning/ad-hoc adjustments. Like, if the "random, non-famous river pirates" are all 15th level and have DC 40 locks on their doors because the party happens to be high-level when they enter the picture, then you've got the Oblivion auto-scaling effect that was widely disliked.

When there is scaling (and for non-sandbox campaign types it can be necessary), I'd rather see general scaling rather than specific scaling to the party's capabilities. Like, if the party is 5th level but unusually good at stealth, say at effectively 10th level capability for it, then I'd much rather see standard 7th-8th level foes (who will be tough to fight and easy but not guaranteed to sneak past), rather than 5th level foes with pumped-up detection abilities.

KineticDiplomat

2020-09-10, 11:27 PM

Which is yet another reason D&D doesn’t do this well. The level system makes it near impossible to define competence outside a strictly mechanistic sense rather than an “in-world” sense.

If you need to have “level 7-8 guards” just to make sneaking a thing, but level 7-8 means “young dragon or maybe a t-Rex” then all of a sudden any attempt at human scale consistency or defining competence in anything other than “can handle level approrpiate opposition” is rubbish.

Cluedrew

2020-09-11, 07:56 AM

kyoryu

2020-09-11, 10:19 AM

I'm actually going to go with the almost circular definition of a competent character feels like they are competent. In more detail, a mechanically competent character is defined, not by any hard success rate - which would get weirder to define in systems with degrees of success anyways - but whether or not the character feels like a competent person in story.

Which can amount to very different success rates in different situations. For instance if you are a crafty character and you are doing downtime simple crafty stuff I expect the success rate to be near perfect. On the other hand the horror/action setup of a bunch of elite soldiers are trapped in with a bunch of monsters and they don't really succeed but manage to not die immediately I could still buy they are competent.

Yeah, that's why my definition was more like "competent characters have the ability to be able to solve the problems that are placed before them, even if that takes planning and buildup".

Like, the kids in Stranger Things can be competent. Random soldier guy can be competent. Superman can be competent. They're dealing with, generally speaking, different problems.

The Aliens example (sorry, I stamped the serial numbers back on) is an interesting point because the expected "goal" isn't "kill all the aliens". It's "maybe get some of you out alive." That's a setting/scenario expectation that needs to be set in advance.

Not portraying characters as incompetent also goes a long way towards this. Even if characters fail trivial things, it's not because they suck. It's because external effects happened to cause the failure. Not rolling when there's not interesting stakes helps a lot with this, too. If climbing a fence is trivial, don't roll. If you need to climb the fence before the dogs catch you, roll. Now, failure doesn't mean "oh I suck and can't climb a fence". It just means "I didn't climb the fence fast enough to get over it before the dogs got me".

Friv

2020-09-11, 12:38 PM

Yeah, I think my baseline expectation of "competence" is "we can generally trust that the characters are going to be able to handle the usual challenges that they face through their own capabilities and plans, and the primary question is going to be the cost of doing so and whether they want to risk more to accomplish unusual challenges."

"generally" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there; competent people fail sometimes, suffer setbacks, and lose outright, and sometimes a competent person ends up against an unusual challenge that's still too much for them. But unusual challenges, by definition, should be unusual.

If characters are in a game in which every adventure has a high chance of failure, every session has a substantial chance of death, and setbacks are as common or more common than successes, I will have a hard time feeling competent even if the character is, on paper, good at what they do and better than the average joe.

kyoryu

2020-09-11, 01:53 PM

Friv

2020-09-11, 02:18 PM

It needs to be feasible that they can tackle the challenges in front of them. It doesn't mean they always win, especially at the micro-level.

Harry Dresden is competent. He becomes more powerful over time, and as he becomes more powerful he faces bigger challenges. But the challenges he faces are always something that he can conceivably tackle, even if it's an uphill battle.

That also doesn't mean he always succeeds. Really, he fails all the time. But when he fails it's temporary, or because he's facing overwhelming or better-prepared opponents, and he uses that to learn and overcome in the end. But just "failing" doesn't make you incompetent.

I think this is more a terminology thing than anything else. I would say that Harry fails fairly rarely; he suffers setbacks, but they're not usually setbacks that actually cause his goals or plans to fail outright. Individual actions fail, and sometimes he fails to save specific people, but on the broad front he's generally successful in saving the day, defeating the bad guy, and protecting the people he wants to protect.

It may depend on how granularly you're treating the phrase "challenge"; I'm not thinking of it in terms of individual actions, I'm thinking of it in terms of opponents, threats, and situations.

Florian

2020-09-11, 02:55 PM

It needs to be feasible that they can tackle the challenges in front of them. It doesn't mean they always win, especially at the micro-level.

Harry Dresden is competent. He becomes more powerful over time, and as he becomes more powerful he faces bigger challenges. But the challenges he faces are always something that he can conceivably tackle, even if it's an uphill battle.

That also doesn't mean he always succeeds. Really, he fails all the time. But when he fails it's temporary, or because he's facing overwhelming or better-prepared opponents, and he uses that to learn and overcome in the end. But just "failing" doesn't make you incompetent.

That only helps when we talk about systems that are strictly geared towards handling that.

Consider how some of the D100 systems work: You check which skill you used and test whether that skill advances at the end of the session. That simulates "learning".

kyoryu

2020-09-11, 03:07 PM

I think this is more a terminology thing than anything else. I would say that Harry fails fairly rarely; he suffers setbacks, but they're not usually setbacks that actually cause his goals or plans to fail outright. Individual actions fail, and sometimes he fails to save specific people, but on the broad front he's generally successful in saving the day, defeating the bad guy, and protecting the people he wants to protect.

It may depend on how granularly you're treating the phrase "challenge"; I'm not thinking of it in terms of individual actions, I'm thinking of it in terms of opponents, threats, and situations.

I've seen some people basically state that "competence" means "you always win". Not necessarily in this thread, though. That's mostly what I was providing a counterpoint to. While Harry usually is successful at defeating the overall threat, he pretty frequently gets his butt handed to him, he doesn't always save everyone, etc. That doesn't mean he's not competent

That only helps when we talk about systems that are strictly geared towards handling that.

Consider how some of the D100 systems work: You check which skill you used and test whether that skill advances at the end of the session. That simulates "learning".

I'm not really sure how that applies. Competence is mostly around what you're doing at the time, not necessarily growth. The point with him gaining power is less about "learning = competence" and more about the fact that he always faces "appropriate" opposition, and that many of the challenges he faces in later books would not have him be "competent" if he faced them earlier in his career.

OldTrees1

2020-09-11, 10:32 PM

I've seen some people basically state that "competence" means "you always win". Not necessarily in this thread, though. That's mostly what I was providing a counterpoint to. While Harry usually is successful at defeating the overall threat, he pretty frequently gets his butt handed to him, he doesn't always save everyone, etc. That doesn't mean he's not competent

I'm not really sure how that applies. Competence is mostly around what you're doing at the time, not necessarily growth. The point with him gaining power is less about "learning = competence" and more about the fact that he always faces "appropriate" opposition, and that many of the challenges he faces in later books would not have him be "competent" if he faced them earlier in his career.

Interestingly enough the rate of competent success can also depend on the intended characterization in each field / subfield.

I created a mid level dungeon guide that was going into a mid level dungeon. They were trained in dungeoneering, stealth, mobility, and combat. However the characterization of those fields aimed at different levels.

They were characterized as being a professional dungeoneer hired to handle that task (traps, ambushes, & hazards). While there might be limitations on costs and consequences, success was not intended to truly be in doubt in the long run as long as they were careful. They were there to attempt 100 consecutive checks without collateral damage to any of the tourists that hired them. Their professional curiosity flaw got them forcibly teleported out of the dungeon near the end, but not before getting the tourists past the final trap and in possession of the final key.

They were characterized as being good at stealth. They joined the party in the middle of an overpowered lethal deadly jungle and thus presumably snuck safely past all sorts of dangers. Later they demonstrated how to sneak a party in and out of a fortress. However that was meant to be the reasonable but not infallible limit to their ability. Failure was intended to occasionally occur as a result of luck and specialization on the other side.

They had some mobility tricks including extra dimensional bags and the ability to spiderclimb. Furthermore they had some talent in mobility skills. However this was an area where they would expect to be consistently out done by any specialist and would face occasional failures even when attempting less ambitious risky maneuvers.

Finally combat. They were intended to be bare minimum competency at combat. Ideally every other character would outperform them during combat. It was even in the contract, "the hiring party is responsible for handling all enemies encountered during the service period of the dungeon guide" or something to that effect.

So that character had a continuum of competency expectations. That continuum ranged from "specialist that will succeed but perhaps at a cost" when it came to dungeoneering to "amatuer that is just good enough not to endanger the party" when it came to archery.

Of course, the mechanics (5E Arcane Trickster 5th - ~14th) used did not perfectly instantiate this character. Dungeoneering was fairly precise & accurate with mechanics matching the characterization. That was due to Player - DM cooperation and communication. Stealth started about right, but increased faster than intended. Mobility was luck based but could out perform a specialist. Combat was way too skilled.

kyoryu

2020-09-12, 12:52 PM

Interestingly enough the rate of competent success can also depend on the intended characterization in each field / subfield.

Sure. We expect characters to be competent in the areas that they're portrayed as competent in.

We don't expect the wizard to be a top-notch swordsman. We don't judge their competence based on that, because it's not something they do.

icefractal

2020-09-12, 02:07 PM

If you need to have “level 7-8 guards” just to make sneaking a thing, but level 7-8 means “young dragon or maybe a t-Rex” then all of a sudden any attempt at human scale consistency or defining competence in anything other than “can handle level approrpiate opposition” is rubbish.Oddly enough, I see this as a feature, not a bug.

In a lot of systems, it's very easy to fall into the "relative skill" trap. That is, the PC hacker has a +15, so the GM thinks "well I guess enemy hackers have +10-20 then". And if the PC hacker had +5 then foes would have +0-10, if they had +30 then foes would have +25-35, and so forth. So in fact, the numbers are meaningless, the character sheet should just have "hacking: flip a coin" on it, and any mental energy the player put into the numbers was a waste.

This doesn't need a malicious or incompetent GM either, it can happen quite easily from the GM just being a bit hurried and/or not having an idea what the baseline should be.

Saying that "10th level guard means they can beat up a t-rex" anchors things. Now it's obvious that a 10th level guard isn't just some average guard, that in fact they're incredibly skilled and wouldn't likely be working as an ordinary guard, and if this is "some random merchant guild, not a big or powerful one" then they probably shouldn't have 10th level guards. And therefore that a character with enough stealth to require 10th level opposition is very stealthy and can infiltrate most places undetected. Whereas a character with only 3rd level or so stealth abilities is much more limited. Hey, the numbers mean something again!

In a way it's the same thing with combat. If the GM says "Oh yeah, these orcs actually have the stats of cloud giants, but in-fiction they're just normal orcs" then most players would be annoyed with that. Like, why even have stats at that point? Just play a rules-light game where power doesn't matter much (there are many) and be honest about it.

OldTrees1

2020-09-12, 03:49 PM

Sure. We expect characters to be competent in the areas that they're portrayed as competent in.

We don't expect the wizard to be a top-notch swordsman. We don't judge their competence based on that, because it's not something they do.

You might also have thoughts on the rest of the post. I was talking about how a character, in the areas they are competent in, might require wildly difference success rates to represent those areas of competence.

The dungeon guide required a very high bar of excellence for them to feel competent at dungeoneering but required a very low bar for them to feel competent at combat. Both were areas of competence. Even in areas of specialization, the dungeon guide had a very high bar of excellence for them to feel competent at dungeoneering, but did not require nearly as much excellence or consistency when it came to feeling competent at stealth. Both were areas of specialization.

Cluedrew

2020-09-12, 06:10 PM

The Aliens example (sorry, I stamped the serial numbers back on) is an interesting point because the expected "goal" isn't "kill all the aliens". It's "maybe get some of you out alive." That's a setting/scenario expectation that needs to be set in advance.That wasn't even the example I started with; which is why I scrubbed the serial numbers off in the first place.

In a way it's the same thing with combat. If the GM says "Oh yeah, these orcs actually have the stats of cloud giants, but in-fiction they're just normal orcs" then most players would be annoyed with that. Like, why even have stats at that point? Just play a rules-light game where power doesn't matter much (there are many) and be honest about it.Does reskinning the scaled up orcs as cloud giants make it better? It never seemed to me the essential experience changed at all. Maybe the old versions of the game went a bit too far with it but does getting into bigger and flashier combat encounters really create this great ark of character growth?

NigelWalmsley

2020-09-12, 06:15 PM

Maybe the old versions of the game went a bit too far with it but does getting into bigger and flashier combat encounters really create this great ark of character growth?

It certainly can. But there are diminishing returns. Going from fighting one orc to fighting ten orcs feels like character growth. But going from fighting ten orcs to fighting twenty orcs doesn't, at least not to the same degree. Similarly, going from fighting generic orc raiders to fighting Grummsh's elite Bloodsworn feels like a step up, but if you reveal that there are even more elite Goresworn, that feels stupid. Things need to change in substantive ways for it to feel like character growth is occurring, and that definitely can happen in combat.

Quertus

2020-09-12, 09:49 PM

Does reskinning the scaled up orcs as cloud giants make it better? It never seemed to me the essential experience changed at all. Maybe the old versions of the game went a bit too far with it but does getting into bigger and flashier combat encounters really create this great ark of character growth?

I can lift some number of bricks. Let's pretend Superman can (only) lift the same number of tanks. Does reskinning those tanks as bricks make Superman seem weak?

I would say yes, having the firepower to blast through adamantine is more impressive than the firepower to blast through wet tissue paper. I would say yes, dragons going from "thing that kills thousands of me without breaking a sweat" to "thing that I can solo", that going from lifting a hundred bricks to a hundred tanks does show development of the character's capabilities.

That said, there should be both a quantitative and a qualitative difference to fighting goblins vs dragons. Dragons shouldn't just be "bigger numbers"; fighting dragons should feel like a different game.

Telok

2020-09-13, 12:10 AM

It certainly can. But there are diminishing returns. Going from fighting one orc to fighting ten orcs feels like character growth. But going from fighting ten orcs to fighting twenty orcs doesn't, at least not to the same degree. Similarly, going from fighting generic orc raiders to fighting Grummsh's elite Bloodsworn feels like a step up, but if you reveal that there are even more elite Goresworn, that feels stupid. Things need to change in substantive ways for it to feel like character growth is occurring, and that definitely can happen in combat.

In addition there are systems that, correctly or not, have in effect or appearance a "level appropriate" design that keeps the things characters roll for at roughly the same success rates. This tends to make it feel that the characters are just the same, but with more adjectives or just another zero on the end of your numbers.

I find a good example in th Starfinder space combat stuff. The party spaceship levels up with the party, as do the space fights. The skill DCs are all things like 15+(1.5 * level). So you get DCs of 16 at level 1 and DCs of 45 at level 20. A character might start at +8 and end up at +39. That's a highly competent character by the system, but they really only "grew" from needing an 8+ to a 6+ on a d20. It's also the character's main attribute, boosted at every opportunity, maxxed skill, and some other bonuses probably from the character class and background. And if they stray from the approved stat-class-skill paradigm they'd get less competent as their levels increased (generally if it's an off-stat it starts about 2 less and ends about 3 or 4 less, if it's not a skill with a class bonus it loses 5 to 6 as the levels increase, and not a class skill is -3 all the time).

One benefit of that system would be that a chatacter is, by 10th level, significantly better at their chosen skills than a random CR 1/2 space goblin. But the CR & encounter system says that you don't see those any more at 10th level. You see CR 10 +/- 3 <fancy adjective> space goblins (or whatever monsters) that got the same +1.5 * level skill bonuses that the the other skill DCs got. Go all the way to 20 and you get super ultimate king elite space goblins with +39 skills like yours.

While such PCs will generally feel competent if they are the only person rolling, the fact that "being really good at something" is capped at the level of npcs who aren't bad at it makes you really feel the Red Queen's Race that you're in trying to keep ahead of slowly becoming incompetent. So your character is competent, if not significantly any better than any NPCs you meet, for as long as they keep upgrading themselves to the max at every opportunity. But you never really feel any progress in anything because you're locked into the "level appropriate" paradigm.

NigelWalmsley

2020-09-13, 07:15 AM

The skill DCs are all things like 15+(1.5 * level). So you get DCs of 16 at level 1 and DCs of 45 at level 20. A character might start at +8 and end up at +39. That's a highly competent character by the system, but they really only "grew" from needing an 8+ to a 6+ on a d20.

The skill system is one area where I think Bounded Accuracy (or something close to it) might be good for the game. The DC to Bluff the super-elite Imperial Guard doesn't need to be any higher than the DC to Bluff the local town guard, and if it's not your Bluff expert can have real progression over the course of the game, rather than going from rolling +6 against DC 16 to +20 against DC 30.

But the CR & encounter system says that you don't see those any more at 10th level. You see CR 10 +/- 3 <fancy adjective> space goblins (or whatever monsters) that got the same +1.5 * level skill bonuses that the the other skill DCs got.

This is one of the reasons that I think having periodic fights where the PCs just get to cut loose against an army of chaff can be really good for providing a sense of progression. If your 3rd level fight is an Ogre, and your 10th level fight is a Fire Giant, that can feel like running in place. But if your 3rd level fight is an Ogre, and your 10th level fight is thirty Ogres, that provides a very visceral feeling of progression. This is one of the reasons I think 4e's Minions were a bad design choice, as they mean that the Ogre hoard monster is fundamentally different from the Ogre miniboss, preventing that sense of progression.

Cluedrew

2020-09-13, 09:00 AM

I can lift some number of bricks. Let's pretend Superman can (only) lift the same number of tanks.I described the cloud giants as scaled up orcs for a reason. There is a fundamental difference between bricks and tanks. Similar things can be said of the situations where lifting bricks is useful is very different from a situation where tanks is useful (tanks don't come up in construction very much). Honestly I don't know if the same can be said for orcs and cloud giants. What separates a cloud giant from a scaled up orc? See Telok's post on level appropriate encounters.

OldTrees1

2020-09-13, 09:02 AM

The skill system is one area where I think Bounded Accuracy (or something close to it) might be good for the game. The DC to Bluff the super-elite Imperial Guard doesn't need to be any higher than the DC to Bluff the local town guard, and if it's not your Bluff expert can have real progression over the course of the game, rather than going from rolling +6 against DC 16 to +20 against DC 30.
For opposed checks, maybe. Although you will probably decrease progression rather than increase it. Bounded Accuracy (and similar) put a limit on how much you can progress. When you are at the level where you are bluffing the Imperial Guard, you might also occasionally bluff the local town guard. How much progress do you want leveling to have on lower level checks? Bounded Accuracy caps that progression.

For unopposed checks I do not see a reason to cap the progression. There is real progression from being able to do DC 10 tricks occasionally to being able to always succeed on DC 15 tricks.

NigelWalmsley

2020-09-13, 09:31 AM

What separates a cloud giant from a scaled up orc?

The Cloud Giant has some level of elemental magic. In 3e it's kinda crappy, but in 5e he gets Control Weather and Telekinesis. The Cloud Giant is also Huge. So it's a giant monster you fight in the middle of a thunderstorm. Seems reasonably different from Orcs. And if you were writing a new game, you could easily tweak that some more to give him flight, or something like Call Lightning.

For opposed checks, maybe. Although you will probably decrease progression rather than increase it. Bounded Accuracy (and similar) put a limit on how much you can progress. When you are at the level where you are bluffing the Imperial Guard, you might also occasionally bluff the local town guard. How much progress do you want leveling to have on lower level checks? Bounded Accuracy caps that progression.

Sure. But my point is that a lot of skill checks genuinely don't need progression. There's no reason that it should be harder to convince the king of the elves to help you because he is personally harder core.

For unopposed checks I do not see a reason to cap the progression. There is real progression from being able to do DC 10 tricks occasionally to being able to always succeed on DC 15 tricks.

Sure, but is there a need to have +40 checks and the associated DC 50 tricks? Bounded Accuracy doesn't have to mean no progression, it just means that progression stops at some point.

OldTrees1

2020-09-13, 10:44 AM

Sure. But my point is that a lot of skill checks genuinely don't need progression. There's no reason that it should be harder to convince the king of the elves to help you because he is personally harder core.

It sounds like you are saying "Higher level characters (including NPCs) are not necessarily better in everything". The king of the elves is not necessarily harder to convince, because their DC is not necessarily higher. Belkar did not get better at convincing others despite gaining many levels. If that is what you are saying, then it seems tangential to bounded accuracy. Bounded accuracy changes nothing about the cases where neither DC nor ability increased. Bounded accuracy only changes the effect of increases.

Sure, but is there a need to have +40 checks and the associated DC 50 tricks? Bounded Accuracy doesn't have to mean no progression, it just means that progression stops at some point.

Is there a need for DC 50 tricks? Probably not. Depends on the size of your RNG (d10? d20? d100?) and on what your other progression systems (Monsters, Spells, etc) look like.

Bounded Accuracy, as I understand it, is having the change in modifier be dwarfed by the size of the RNG. For example I would not describe 3E skills as bounded accuracy because the change in the modifier was 1.5x to 2x the size of the RNG.

That expands the question, what does the ratio of "change in modifier" : "size of the RNG" say about progression in that system? AND how does that progression compare to other progressions you have across those same levels. Well that ratio tells you how long it takes to master a task. Now look at the other areas of progression or ask yourself, how long does it take to master a task in another area of progression? How long do I want it to take in this subsystem?

Oh! But you might have noticed a hidden variable. How much variance in ability do you imagine characters having? Is it "crit fail you baked a poisonous gas" to "crit success the god of baking fell in love with you" or is it "with a 1 you made only 11 loaves of bread. You will need to make another batch" to "with a 20 you made 13 loaves of bread. You enjoy the extra loaf.". That degree of variance can impact how big a ratio you want in "change in modifier" : "size of the RNG".

For the variance I use, I think a ratio of 1.5 (for non opposed checks) over 20 levels (aka 1d20+5 to 1d20+35) works well compared to monsters ranging from Goblins to Red Dragon fight literally inside a lake of lava. For opposed checks I want a smaller ratio.

------------------------

To phrase it all another way (2nd way is usually clearer):
0) You have a skill system you are designing and the RPG has other forms of progression too.
1) Take another progression system and make a continuum from first to last level.
2) On that continuum place some level appropriate examples from the skill system. Remember the purpose of mentioning the other progression system was to help you create level appropriate examples with that other system anchoring & calibrating your expectations.
3) Next draw on the continuum the minimum and maximum effectiveness you want a 5th level specialist in the skill to have. Can a nat 20 hit above a 10th level usage? Can a nat 1 hit below a 1st level usage? The longer this line segment the higher the variance your RNG will represent. You can make it narrow to have very consistent skill usage or long to have wild crazy luck.
4) Now take that line segment and compare it to the total length of your continuum. What is that ratio? For me that ratio falls around 2.5x so I have the modifier grow by 1.5x the size of the RNG so I can fit 2.5 line segments on that continuum.

icefractal

2020-09-13, 02:34 PM

I don't find that Bounded Accuracy helps with this, personally. It's better for the opposite purpose really - making sure that low-level / unskilled people still have a chance in most cases.

Personally I would say that if you want to emphasize "Bob is really good at lockpicking", then you want both of:
1) Bob can nigh-effortlessly pick locks that novice lockpickers can handle at all.
2) Bob can, not guaranteed but with a reasonable chance of success, pick locks that other people have no chance to succeed at.

Bounded accuracy really doesn't do the latter - most things can be done by a lucky novice, and anything that can't is going to be very difficult for even a master.

What Bounded Accuracy does do is support both "DCs are what they are, they don't scale by the PCs level" and "PCs always have a chance to fail the rolls". But I'm here to contend that the second one isn't necessary or even desirable:

It's totally fine and not a problem with the mechanics if PCs can auto-pass many rolls related to their area of expertise.

I mean, this is what spells do. Fly auto-passes pits or sticky terrain. Teleportation auto-passes doors. And while people have different ideas about how easily this should be achieved, it's usually not to the extent of "at no level should a spell ever bypass an obstacle". If I wanted to play a low-power game where characters stay in normal human limits and magic is subtle, there are many, many options for that which aren't D&D.

Ditto in combat really - a high-level Cleric is just not threatened at all by a squad of ordinary zombies, and that's fine.

So if at a certain point, one of the PCs is "the master of unlocking" and just auto-picks 99% of locked doors the PCs come across, that's completely ok. It's not a problem that needs to be solved. There are still the many other skills and attributes where they aren't godlike to make them struggle, and if you're doing a spotlight arc you can introduce the Mercane League of Merchants interdimensional vault with truly godlike locks. Not every single skill check needs to be the source of suspense.

Quertus

2020-09-13, 10:44 PM

Bounded Accuracy, Starfinder, Storm Giants, oh my.

So, let's say you're trying to be a Simulationist, and model Reality.

You would need to understand how many "steps" / "tiers" there are for any given skill, and just how much a member of each tier should outclass the preceding tier.

So, let's suppose that, for chess, we look at everyone from noobs to the best grandmasters. Let's pretend that we find 5 people who sit exactly at the line of "can utterly crush the person beneath them 99/100". In 3e, with the "taking 10" mechanic, that's +10 to the roll for each tier, for a +0 to +40 expected range of "chess skill" to simulate IRL. If the skill is "roll once" / if we are measuring at what we want the "atomic" level of a single skill check to represent.

Or, you might find it's better modeled as 7 tiers with a 75% success rate, do math to find that's a +X skill difference, and expect a 6X range in skills. If the skill is "roll once" / if we are measuring at what we want the "atomic" level of a single skill check to represent.

Repeat this for MtG, and Fort Night, and hide & seek, and "take this stone from my hand", and poker, and writing instructions that people can follow, and obstacle course driving, and skiing, and thermonuclear astrophysics, and anything else where you can objectively test "better". See what patterns develop in measurable win rates, and determine how to model that with your skill system.

Personally, I doubt that 5e Bounded Accuracy will model much IRL, if we actually did the math.

Or you might say, forget realism, let's make this a good game.

OK, but… what *does* make for a good game?

I'll argue that a "level treadmill" of reskinned foes does not, and that "hire a horde of Hobos for pennies, because they give smarter answers than the genius expert" does not, either, for most genres / feels of games.

So, what does?

I am of the school of thought that the default desire should be "get better people" rather than "get more people", that the PCs should be better at solving most problems in their area of expertise than the more numerous townsfolk / hirelings / redshirts. To facilitate PCs accomplishing things themselves being the default, experts should be better at solving problems than even large numbers of less-skilled individuals.

I like the progression of one Orc to 10 Orcs or an Ogre to 10 Ogres or a Troll and so on. However, while the King's Army may be a boon against the army of Orcs, those soldiers - who cannot anticipate lightning and dodge raindrops, who cannot walk on clouds or outrun thunder - should be useless even in functionally infinite numbers when facing a Storm Giant. Yes, the Giant has bigger numbers, but it should also be playing a fundamentally different game. Just like the high-level PCs.

Now, you may disagree with my assertion that no number of fighters can take out a fully operational battle station the size of a small moon, but remember: no ship that small has a cloaking device. That battle station ought to be able to play completely different games, where only the tide (or the bandwidth requirements of its occupants' Twitter posts) will tell of its presence.

kyoryu

2020-09-14, 09:26 AM

So, let's suppose that, for chess, we look at everyone from noobs to the best grandmasters. Let's pretend that we find 5 people who sit exactly at the line of "can utterly crush the person beneath them 99/100". In 3e, with the "taking 10" mechanic, that's +10 to the roll for each tier, for a +0 to +40 expected range of "chess skill" to simulate IRL. If the skill is "roll once" / if we are measuring at what we want the "atomic" level of a single skill check to represent.

I believe you cannot Take 10 in situations where there is stress... aka any actual conflict with opposition.

Or, you might find it's better modeled as 7 tiers with a 75% success rate, do math to find that's a +X skill difference, and expect a 6X range in skills. If the skill is "roll once" / if we are measuring at what we want the "atomic" level of a single skill check to represent.

Math aside, this is actually how most rating systems work, with a bit more extra math to adjust skills.

Personally, I doubt that 5e Bounded Accuracy will model much IRL, if we actually did the math.

I'm not sure it needs to. D&D, at the end of the day, does not promise to simulate everything. It's about heroic adventurers doing heroic things. And while 3.x edged into the "generic system" territory, it frankly did it pretty poorly.

Or you might say, forget realism, let's make this a good game.

Indeed.

OK, but… what *does* make for a good game?

I'll argue that a "level treadmill" of reskinned foes does not, and that "hire a horde of Hobos for pennies, because they give smarter answers than the genius expert" does not, either, for most genres / feels of games.

The outer loop (level treadmill) is much less important than the inner loop (combat and encounters). Also, since the game is aimed at "heroic adventurers", hiring a horde of hobos is kind of not the issue, since the game is player focused.

IOW, you're still applying simulationist logic even when attempting to talk about the game from a more gamist POV.

So, what does?

I am of the school of thought that the default desire should be "get better people" rather than "get more people", that the PCs should be better at solving most problems in their area of expertise than the more numerous townsfolk / hirelings / redshirts. To facilitate PCs accomplishing things themselves being the default, experts should be better at solving problems than even large numbers of less-skilled individuals.

And they are, essentially. Now, it's pretty true in 5e that an army of X size composed of Y ability individuals will be equivalent to a party of 4-6 adventurers of N level and a particular class makeup. That's been true all along - the only thing that has changed is the values of X, Y, and N.

But even if said army exists, then 4-6 adventurers are a better choice - they're more mobile, less obvious, and require less concern about logistics.

I like the progression of one Orc to 10 Orcs or an Ogre to 10 Ogres or a Troll and so on. However, while the King's Army may be a boon against the army of Orcs, those soldiers - who cannot anticipate lightning and dodge raindrops, who cannot walk on clouds or outrun thunder - should be useless even in functionally infinite numbers when facing a Storm Giant. Yes, the Giant has bigger numbers, but it should also be playing a fundamentally different game. Just like the high-level PCs.

And here we get to the real issue, since "anticipating lightning and doging raindrops" is not something that is in any way "simulationist". You have a preference for, essentially, superheroic level play, and the power level that is associated with it (which is, realistically, almost orthogonal to being "competent"). Bounded accuracy ruins that for you since it means that rather than the pure power fantasy of 3.x, you end up with a more grounded, but still frankly kinda extreme, power fantasy.

The issue isn't really that you want an infinite number of hordes to die against a storm giant. You want a PC to be worth an infinite number of "normal" people.

And that's okay. But it's not universal. To some people, that's a feature, not a bug.

Now, you may disagree with my assertion that no number of fighters can take out a fully operational battle station the size of a small moon, but remember: no ship that small has a cloaking device. That battle station ought to be able to play completely different games, where only the tide (or the bandwidth requirements of its occupants' Twitter posts) will tell of its presence.

I do disagree with your assertion - or, more accurately, your presumtpion that it is the ideal mode of play.

You seem to be falling into the trap of trying to prove your preferences. You don't need to, and you can't (since they're just preferences).

Telok

2020-09-14, 08:22 PM

So I've been thinking about this. The best way I can come up with to quantify 'compentence' is to phrase it as a question: "Would you trust the character to <activity>." Where the <activity> is something like "be a lifeguard at the local pool for your children", "represent you (legit innocent) in a court of law", "not harm you during a circus knife throwing act", "tame & train a lion for you", or "hunt to provide food for your family". I chose this format because things like "competent warrior" or "competent negotiator" are too general to quantify and "competent to swim the English Channel" or "competent to shoot a 50 yard target with a 30# pull compound bow" feel too specific to be useful. The best I came up with is an activity that, as presented, involves you and/or something you care about and has a potentially serious penalty for failure but where most people have a reasonable agreement of the expected level of success (pool lifeguards are expected to keep drownings to a negligible number, knife throwing acts almost never end with a knife in the eyeball).

Most of the common systems we all know don't have any problems creating characters that are competent at basic combat. They might not always produce fun characters for all combats, or characters that are more competent in anything but the most basic combats, but in general the characters in modern systems all pretty much manage the basic level of combat that the system presents. Granted this may look like "the party full of fighters has to be locked in a small room with the dragon and just spam basic attacks because nothing they do really affects critters that much bigger and stronger than them" but if that's the basic combat format that the system presents and the fighters manage to get the expected outcome (some systems do expect them to lose, there have been plutonium dragons) then that's working as intended.

Therefore the questions about competence are pretty much always about non-combat stuff and I think, most often, it ends up depending more on how well the system/books communicate their expectations and methods than it does on the actual dice mechanics. The result of the mechanics of 1d20+3 vs 10, 1d20 under 18, 6d10 keep 3 vs 20, 13d6 want 3 or more at 5+, and 1d6 to roll 2+, are all about the same. They're all roughly a 15% +/-2% failure rate. Which, frankly, is pretty terrible if 1/6th of the time the result of the lifeguard getting out of the chair because someone is horsing around results in dead bodies floating in the kiddy pool (Paranoia games excepted of course, that's what clones are for).

So our first step is what are you rolling for. Is the character rolling to be able to climb, or for how fast they can climb? For being able to tame a lion, or for how well it's trained? Some things we expect a novice to be able to do, children can often climb a fairly large range of things even before they master language. Others we expect to require training in order to attempt anything at all, like flying jet airplanes, or advanced mathematics. Then comes the number of rolls and the success rates. Are you rolling once to hunt for food for the entire month at a 15% fail rate, or is it rolling every couple of hours at a 50% fail rate to find a week worth of food? Structures like X successes before Y failures, amount per success towards a goal, and margins of success all modify this. Last step is to check the variance in results between 'competent' and 'incompetent' characters, because that's part of our perception of competence. We expect a competent lion tamer to produce a rather different set of results than an incompetent lion tamer, prehaps most notable there should probably be rather less blood loss by the competent lion tamer.

Prehaps the last thing I would consider is the difference between community discovered 'best practices' and what people who aren't aware of those best practices are getting from the system/books. This, unfortunately, probably can't be quantified in any meaningful way. It would require a method of surveying the people who are not plugged into the communities of people (like GitP, Enworld, RPG.net, etc.) who search for and talk about better ways of doing things or dissect in detail what the intent behind the published system. The best we can get is anecdotes about what we've seen happen with other non-networked GMs and players. We here know that three 30% chances are not equal to a 90% chance of success, that having a thief roll stealth 5 times is pretty much assuring failure, that rolling for everyone driving to work every day at 99% success gives you insane accident rates. We understand that most game systems don't really call for swimming checks in calm lakes by people who know how to swim and that hobbit vs. ogre arm wrestling shouldn't be a single 1d10 vs. 1d10+2 "who rolled higher?" check. But not all the game books come out and say those things, or they don't always say it explicitly, or it's stuck in a single sentence half way through the book in a section of vague general advice. So while the people here understand to avoid the "roll for pants" syndrome that's not everyone playing for running the games. Again, unfortunately, there's no quantifying that.

So, let me try to apply this to the system I'm currently working with. It's a roll & keep of exploding d10s with the characters being slightly super-powered, starting a good notch above the common folk in their areas of expertise, and ending up in full on super hero type territory. Both skills and attributes go from 1 to 5, roll both and keep the attribute. They get a few built in rerolls each session and the ability regularly to boost their rolls, but those are more the slightly super-powered starting point. Mostly they just have overall higher starting stats and skill options compared to regular people & basic soldier types. In theory the "average" target number for anything is 15 which roll 3 and keep 2 hits about 47%, but with work a character can start at the near max of 10 keep 5 which doesn't drop to a 50% fail rate until somewhere between target numbers 40 & 45. Since 3 keep 2 is where even the lowest end non-combatants have their 'day-to-day living' type checks and the basic regular soldiers have 4k2 fighting skills that's probably baseline "competent" for normal, daily, un-heroic activity that you shouldn't be rolling for anyways. Let's see, straight ability checks contain not being afraid of hordes of zombies at 15, nerving yourself up to charging into machine gun fire at 20, putting yourself out when you're on fire at 15. Not bad chances for getting multiple tries on say, roll 3 and keep 3, which gives you about 65% chance of making the DC 15 each time. Check with skills include stopping someone from bleeding out with 6 seconds of work at 20, 30 if you're both trying to run away while doing so, unjamming a gun while being stabbed is 15, giving an effective motivational speech to the crew of a starship in combat is a 20, various space navigation stuff is 20, casting a basic spell is 15 but you want some wiggle room because of how the magic system works, pulling an airplane out of a stall is a 15, driving about 40 mph on a sheet of ice is about 20 after modifiers. 6 keep 3 puts out at about 82% for the 20s and 96% for the 15s, since an assistant gives a +5 on the skill checks (not all checks are appropriate for it though) and you get multiple checks one several of those that's probably pretty good for "competent" at almost all of of the system. However, it's a hideous mutant system thrown together by a random guy on the internet. There is literally no explanation of what DC 15 arcana, lore, tech-use, pilot, medic, or perception check should look like, let along what a DC 30 means beyond a descriptor of "heroic". It is missing anything on when to roll stuff and different types of checks (things like 5 success before 3 failure, or 100 points of rolls over DC 20). So, absolutely and completely not new-GM friendly since it totally lacks useful advice and sets of examples (I had to go through four sections of two book to get that spread of DCs to look at). You definitely run the risk of getting "roll for pants" syndrome from DMs who don't understand probability. On the plus side since the dice generate a bell curve probability set your reasonably confident of beating someone with both fewer rolled and kept dice that yourself, even if you only get one roll and almost certainly if you get 2 or more opposed rolls.

Quertus

2020-09-15, 02:12 AM

Prehaps the last thing I would consider is the difference between community discovered 'best practices' and what people who aren't aware of those best practices are getting from the system/books.

We here know… that having a thief roll stealth 5 times is pretty much assuring failure,

Although this is a much-maligned example, I, personally, always loved this mechanic.

It wasn't a question of *whether* the thief would be found, it was a question of *when*.

This had major impact on what "competence" looked like for a Thief. They had to have good risk management skills, and good ability to adapt to unforseen circumstances to create an exit strategy. And, of course, on those rare occasions where the Thief in question actually *did* make all their rolls, they looked substantially more competent in comparison.

I believe you cannot Take 10 in situations where there is stress... aka any actual conflict with opposition.

Hmmm… we may be interpreting that differently. I could be wrong.

The outer loop (level treadmill) is much less important than the inner loop (combat and encounters).

I feel I'm missing context to understand this sentence.

Are you suggesting that a noob experiencing an x% success rate against non challenges, leveling through a master experiencing x% success rate against top-end challenges will result in feelings of competence? That, no matter my current climb skill, any narratively-appropriate climb checks always having an x% success rate somehow invokes a feeling of competence?

If so, I'm not buying it.

Also, since the game is aimed at "heroic adventurers", hiring a horde of hobos is kind of not the issue, since the game is player focused.

And smart players hire a horde of Hobos, get a better result than the party experts could have, pocket the extra cash, and feel really competent in their decision-making skills.

That's Determinator play right there.

It doesn't feel like "heroic adventurers" to me. It doesn't feel like the system encourages "heroic adventurers" to me.

IOW, you're still applying simulationist logic even when attempting to talk about the game from a more gamist POV.

That sounds like me :smallredface: :smalltongue:

And they are, essentially. Now, it's pretty true in 5e that an army of X size composed of Y ability individuals will be equivalent to a party of 4-6 adventurers of N level and a particular class makeup. That's been true all along - the only thing that has changed is the values of X, Y, and N.

"Immune to nonmagical weapons" gives voice to the untruth of that statement.

"DR 50/+3" comes pretty close, too.

I'm less certain for systems that aren't D&D though.

But even if said army exists, then 4-6 adventurers are a better choice - they're more mobile, less obvious, and require less concern about logistics.

The army costs less. The adventurers hire the army, and pocket the leftover funds.

And here we get to the real issue, since "anticipating lightning and doging raindrops" is not something that is in any way "simulationist".

Strongly disagree. I never said that i was stimulating *this* world! :smalltongue:

Still, I'm not actually seeing the relevance for whether or not our rules *successfully* model "dodging raindrops" with acceptable versimilitude… to that piece of the conversation.

You have a preference for, essentially, superheroic level play, and the power level that is associated with it

Guilty as charged. Sort of. I'm intentionally exaggerating for effect, to try to ensure that people know which *direction* I'm headed.

(which is, realistically, almost orthogonal to being "competent").

I mean… I've got a manager who has shown approximately zero growth since he started with the department. I tend to consider that "inability to grow" to be a sign of a certain lack of competence.

So, yes, I associate "growth" and "competence" - perhaps more than it is reasonable to, but I refuse to believe that they are unrelated, that "I *cannot* grow significantly better than the clueless noob" could possibly produce something worthy to be called "competence" - at least, for anything even remotely relatable given my experiences in this world.

Bounded accuracy ruins that for you since it means that rather than the pure power fantasy of 3.x, you end up with a more grounded, but still frankly kinda extreme, power fantasy.

Eh, pardon this genius for saying, but the 3.x skill system felt kinda a "weakness fantasy" in terms of how much growth one could expect from level 1-20 (let alone on this supposed "e7" world) in terms of representing "tiers of skill" for "odds of winning against someone of lower tier" (for single-roll contests).

I await anyone posting any real-world numbers on any actual studies that have been done in any fields, but… my instincts say 3.x didn't go far enough in the *math* (and, worse, simultaneously went, at times, "too far" in the effects. So that dissonance was jarring.).

The issue isn't really that you want an infinite number of hordes to die against a storm giant. You want a PC to be worth an infinite number of "normal" people.

Close. I want Shakespeare to be better than a thousand monkeys - whether the PCs are Shakespeare or the monkeys in this example.

If the PCs are all dance noobs, they cannot expect to fumble their way to dancing better than the dance master just by virtue of getting more attempts.

If the PCs are all programming noobs, they cannot expect to out program the programming expert just by virtue of getting more attempts.

If the PCs are all writing noobs, they cannot expect to write a better novel than the top novelist just by virtue of getting more attempts.

If one of the PCs is an expert on thermonuclear astrophysics, the rest of the party cannot expect to out theorize their one expert, just by virtue of getting more attempts.

I don't even want to see the world-building that would result from such a baseline, where numbers are King/Trump.

I then tried to make the example more obvious and over the top, about dodging rain drops and moving faster than thunder. Although "can only be harmed by magical weapons" might have served me better as an example.

And that's okay. But it's not universal. To some people, that's a feature, not a bug.

Eh, we're probably too far afield for me to pick apart which pieces of that are true, and how.

I do disagree with your assertion - or, more accurately, your presumtpion that it is the ideal mode of play.

You seem to be falling into the trap of trying to prove your preferences. You don't need to, and you can't (since they're just preferences).

There certainly are issues where I could be more clear which pieces are "my preference" and which are "I consider this universally best" (and which are "I'll call this 'universally best' even though I should know better, just because… I haven't *seen* anything better / I cannot easily describe a more accurate depiction of the actual state".

But I think that there are (or should be) "you must be this tall to ride" barriers to entry on various challenges. Someone who had neither grown teeth not developed language skills is ill equipped to be a professional taste tester judging fine cousine on the Food Network, for example. If the Death Star was a functional "scry and die" stealth platform, a rag-tag fleet of fighters should not be expected to be an adequate defense against it. If a Storm Giant could sense anything the storm touches and hurl lightning unerringly at any foe who so much as touched a rain drop within miles of its position, how many random peasants would you consider to be a match for it?

I know that I'm still struggling to make my point, but I'm talking about the notion that higher levels of skill involve playing a completely different game, that the toddler who struggles to stand or put on shoes and Hamilton choreography are worlds apart. That the crayon that they struggle to hold and press to paper and the works of Van Gogh are worlds apart. Even if the child is prolific, and makes 100x more scribbles than Van Gogh made paintings.

Florian

2020-09-15, 03:41 AM

I'm not really sure how that applies. Competence is mostly around what you're doing at the time, not necessarily growth. The point with him gaining power is less about "learning = competence" and more about the fact that he always faces "appropriate" opposition, and that many of the challenges he faces in later books would not have him be "competent" if he faced them earlier in his career.

Ok, let´s differentiale between "learning" and "experience".

To make this easy, let's use coding as an example.
You might know a system and programming language inside and out (learning), but unless you have worked on multiple projects (experience), you don't actually know what is expected, how the actual procedure is and so on.

Someone with with low learning but high experience will be highly functional within his field of knowledge, but mostly fail when outside of it. Someone with high learning and low experience will be hit and miss.

Harry is a case of low/high. As a character, he is highly experienced, but mostly acts outside of his weight class. Each "loss" increases his learning, bringing him up to the point that he can bring his experience to bear. He's an "old dog learning new tricks", so to speak.

In D&D terms, high/low is rolling on a skill and trusting on luck, while low/high is take10/take20.

Hence, that is why I mentioned D100. You can try you luck and either succeed or fail, but your character has the chance to learn from failing, by doing so, overall increase "power".

That also brings me back to the original topic. A competent character has a certain routine covered. The example low/high coder will reliably do his work, unless something exceptional is asked for.

Democratus

2020-09-15, 07:44 AM

I consider a character competent if they successfully fill their story role.

A bumbling, but funny, character is competent if their role is to bring comic relief.

kyoryu

2020-09-15, 10:26 AM

Although this is a much-maligned example, I, personally, always loved this mechanic.

It wasn't a question of *whether* the thief would be found, it was a question of *when*.

It's fine, if intended. The problem is that most of the time it's not intended.

I also don't buy that the checks are actually completely independent... checks cover a lot of things, and a number of those things are going to be the same across those checks. I think handling it as a bonus is realistic, but either way can work. Just understand the math.

Hmmm… we may be interpreting that differently. I could be wrong.

https://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/usingSkills.htm

When your character is not being threatened or distracted, you may choose to take 10. Instead of rolling 1d20 for the skill check, calculate your result as if you had rolled a 10. For many routine tasks, taking 10 makes them automatically successful. Distractions or threats (such as combat) make it impossible for a character to take 10. In most cases, taking 10 is purely a safety measure —you know (or expect) that an average roll will succeed but fear that a poor roll might fail, so you elect to settle for the average roll (a 10). Taking 10 is especially useful in situations where a particularly high roll wouldn’t help.

Emphasis mine.

I feel I'm missing context to understand this sentence.

Are you suggesting that a noob experiencing an x% success rate against non challenges, leveling through a master experiencing x% success rate against top-end challenges will result in feelings of competence? That, no matter my current climb skill, any narratively-appropriate climb checks always having an x% success rate somehow invokes a feeling of competence?

If so, I'm not buying it.

I'm suggesting that being able to effectively tackle the things that you're dealing with will result in "competence", and that the in-the-moment feel is more important to "competence" than progression.

And smart players hire a horde of Hobos, get a better result than the party experts could have, pocket the extra cash, and feel really competent in their decision-making skills.

That's Determinator play right there.

It doesn't feel like "heroic adventurers" to me. It doesn't feel like the system encourages "heroic adventurers" to me.

I see that as a failure to engage in the basic idea of the game. IOW, yes the game about heroic adventurers breaks down when you don't use it to play, you know, heroic adventurers. Go figure.

"Immune to nonmagical weapons" gives voice to the untruth of that statement.

"DR 50/+3" comes pretty close, too.

I'm less certain for systems that aren't D&D though.

D&D is a bit of an outlier, yes.

But even so, armies don't attack giants with swords. They attack them with trebuchets and ballistae.

The army costs less. The adventurers hire the army, and pocket the leftover funds.

"Game designed to be fun when played as a small group of heroic adventurers doesn't work well when used as an economic army management simulator. News at eleven."

Strongly disagree. I never said that i was stimulating *this* world! :smalltongue:

Still, I'm not actually seeing the relevance for whether or not our rules *successfully* model "dodging raindrops" with acceptable versimilitude… to that piece of the conversation.

You're assuming it's a goal.

I mean… I've got a manager who has shown approximately zero growth since he started with the department. I tend to consider that "inability to grow" to be a sign of a certain lack of competence.

So, yes, I associate "growth" and "competence" - perhaps more than it is reasonable to, but I refuse to believe that they are unrelated, that "I *cannot* grow significantly better than the clueless noob" could possibly produce something worthy to be called "competence" - at least, for anything even remotely relatable given my experiences in this world.

Meh. They're likely related (at least in the real world), but there's a difference between "competent at doing the thing I need done right now" and "is an employee that will grow". They're not totally orthogonal, but they're not the same.

Eh, pardon this genius for saying, but the 3.x skill system felt kinda a "weakness fantasy" in terms of how much growth one could expect from level 1-20 (let alone on this supposed "e7" world) in terms of representing "tiers of skill" for "odds of winning against someone of lower tier" (for single-roll contests).

Maybe? Though I don't think that, realistically, "grandmaster chess player beating noobs" is really within the range of things they're trying to model.

Any model simplistic enough to run at a table is going to fail in places. The best we can realistically hope for is a model that behaves reasonably well in the defined range of "interesting" things.

And, usually, that means that people do get better over time, and ideally that characters don't have to be specialists to have any chance of doing things.

If you really wanted to do "Chess Wars: The RPG" you wouldn't resolve a chess game in one match. Like combat, there'd be enough rolls and enough stats behind it that you'd get the results that combat gives you (where, barring TO, a level 20 will smushify a level 1).

I await anyone posting any real-world numbers on any actual studies that have been done in any fields, but… my instincts say 3.x didn't go far enough in the *math* (and, worse, simultaneously went, at times, "too far" in the effects. So that dissonance was jarring.).

I think you're giving it an impossible task. I think the question is "under what scenarios does the skill system need to give interesting results, and what do we want those properties to be."

You're saying everything and I firmly believe that it's unachievable to actually model that, especially in a situation where you want non-specialists to be able to do anything at all.

And I don't think that's actually relevant for actual, at-the-table play, to feel competent. Apparently, you do. You seem to want to know that, mathematically, these things will be handled by the system, even if they'd never come up at the table.

Close. I want Shakespeare to be better than a thousand monkeys - whether the PCs are Shakespeare or the monkeys in this example.

If the PCs are all dance noobs, they cannot expect to fumble their way to dancing better than the dance master just by virtue of getting more attempts.

If the PCs are all programming noobs, they cannot expect to out program the programming expert just by virtue of getting more attempts.

If the PCs are all writing noobs, they cannot expect to write a better novel than the top novelist just by virtue of getting more attempts.

If one of the PCs is an expert on thermonuclear astrophysics, the rest of the party cannot expect to out theorize their one expert, just by virtue of getting more attempts.

I don't even want to see the world-building that would result from such a baseline, where numbers are King/Trump.

I then tried to make the example more obvious and over the top, about dodging rain drops and moving faster than thunder. Although "can only be harmed by magical weapons" might have served me better as an example.

Though the "magical weapons" thing isn't really about the characters.... an army outfitted with magical weapons would be effective...

Again, these are white room examples. Your issue seems to be that in white room cases, you might be outperformed. Does this actually come up?

In systems I tend to run, this is mostly handled by a few things (and I'll agree, the D&D skill system in most cases is not my favorite).

1. Narrative permission - "what you can do" and "how likely you are to accomplish it" are handled by separate widgets. So, no, a newb cannot fix a nuclear reactor.
2. Focusing on "do you get what you want". No, a newb dancer will not "out-dance" an expert in any meaningful way. However, they could impress the judges more with their "raw, fiery display", even as the judges. If the result is framed as "who does better", then the experts should win all the time. "Do you impress the judges" is a different situation.
3. Not rolling at all when the result is obvious - yes, the grandmaster will beat the newbie. Why even roll?
4. Not handling actually dramatic things with a single roll, but instead expanding them to a larger sequence of rolls.
5. Bell curve results.

Eh, we're probably too far afield for me to pick apart which pieces of that are true, and how.

There's no need to pick anything apart. It's simple - you want a game experience where a character can defeat literal armies, and that's important to you. To me, not only is it not important, but the idea of that system actually kind of turns me off of it a bit (presuming that we're talking roughly the same type of things, which is the case in D&D. In an RPG about playing gods, obviously it would be different).

There certainly are issues where I could be more clear which pieces are "my preference" and which are "I consider this universally best" (and which are "I'll call this 'universally best' even though I should know better, just because… I haven't *seen* anything better / I cannot easily describe a more accurate depiction of the actual state".

Subjective: The skill system should give these results under these systems
Objective: The skill system is effective at creating the results given by the subjective criteria

But I think that there are (or should be) "you must be this tall to ride" barriers to entry on various challenges. Someone who had neither grown teeth not developed language skills is ill equipped to be a professional taste tester judging fine cousine on the Food Network, for example. If the Death Star was a functional "scry and die" stealth platform, a rag-tag fleet of fighters should not be expected to be an adequate defense against it. If a Storm Giant could sense anything the storm touches and hurl lightning unerringly at any foe who so much as touched a rain drop within miles of its position, how many random peasants would you consider to be a match for it?

The critic thing? I mean, like, they do that in a lot of cases, right? Bring on somebody that's not an expert to give color or whatever, though not to the extreme in your result.

And to get to the point, you again seem to be conflating "power" and "competence". For you to feel competent, you have to be tackling things that nobody else can even touch. And that's fine, but it's clearly not universal, given the sheer number of settings and games that don't do that.

I know that I'm still struggling to make my point, but I'm talking about the notion that higher levels of skill involve playing a completely different game, that the toddler who struggles to stand or put on shoes and Hamilton choreography are worlds apart. That the crayon that they struggle to hold and press to paper and the works of Van Gogh are worlds apart. Even if the child is prolific, and makes 100x more scribbles than Van Gogh made paintings.

I play a lot of Fate, and that's mostly handled through scale and sheer narrative denial (which is something that doesn't exist in D&D). I think the range of scales in the game world is also fairly orthogonal to the idea of competence, unless your literal ideal of competence is superheroism (which would preclude things like the Kids on Bikes genre from ever having competence, which I think is an error).

That also brings me back to the original topic. A competent character has a certain routine covered. The example low/high coder will reliably do his work, unless something exceptional is asked for.

Which indicates actual areas of competence - if doing the areas they have things covered, they're competent. If they're pushed outside those areas, they're not.

Which is why I'm describing competent in a relative way - "can the character realistically impact the obstacles in their way, and the challenges they face?"