Common issues with DC based skill systems

[Zuras]

In the Pathfinder discussion thread, there is a vigorous discussion about the Pathfinder 2e skill system, particularly issues with arbitrarily set difficulty levels.

I’m interested in everyone’s general experience with DC based systems, but rather than clutter that discussion further, I decided a separate thread was in order.

What problems do you regularly encounter with DC based skill/resolution systems?

I’ve seen many people complain that they can make RPGs devolve into a game of mother-may-I, and while I clearly see how this could happen, it’s not something I’ve ever encountered myself. Even in systems where you’re literally making everything up as you go along, like FATE, the table always reached a consensus that a given task difficulty was fair and the aspects a player applies to it made narrative sense.

The problems I *have* encountered, and have to periodically guard myself against as a GM have actually been:

a) forgetting that requiring a series of multiple successes dramatically worsens the odds for any task, and

b) Instinctively scaling up challenges so there is still some chance of failure, without any in-universe logic. I have to guard myself against making every lock in town suddenly masterwork difficulty after the rogue gets Reliable Talent.

c) Relatedly, accidentally gating all non-specialist characters out of participating by setting the DCs to be a reasonable challenge for the party expert (especially in games with constant scaling/no bounded accuracy). This is fine for tasks like developing a cure for the plague virus, but terrible for many social and exploration tasks where other PCs should reasonably be able to participate.

[False God]

a) forgetting that requiring a series of multiple successes dramatically worsens the odds for any task, and
See I personally don't see this as problematic, and I often run skill challenges as "three successes before 3 failures" and it helps substantially with your secondary problem. It also can break a scene down more incrementally, it can be useful in occupying a character's time while the enemy acts making choices more important and scenes more dynamic. You can add levels of "the next roll is easier because you succeeded" or "its harder because you failed" without having to say "Oh you failed at the lock now you're done." on a single check.


b) Instinctively scaling up challenges so there is still some chance of failure, without any in-universe logic. I have to guard myself against making every lock in town suddenly masterwork difficulty after the rogue gets Reliable Talent.
D&D and d20 systems teach DMs to have rolls for everything. Frankly, if the DC is lower than a characters skill points, that character doesn't need to make a check. Challenges can also be "scaled up" with the multi-roll method without actually increasing the DC, and IMO, multi-stage checks often result in better challenges.


c) Relatedly, accidentally gating all non-specialist characters out of participating by setting the DCs to be a reasonable challenge for the party expert (especially in games with constant scaling/no bounded accuracy). This is fine for tasks like developing a cure for the plague virus, but terrible for many social and exploration tasks where other PCs should reasonably be able to participate.
Again, I find it far more useful to gate than to not, even when it may seem unreasonable to do so. The Party has, in MTG terms "card advantage" and I prefer to gate than to simply let them throw dice at the challenge until someone breaks through. I've had far more unhappy players in situations where their specialist character was overwhelmed by someone else's lucky dice and they're denied the ability to do the thing they basically built a character for.

If the non-specialized party members want to help, they can help the specialist. Secondary roles "lab assistant", "backup dancer", "useful idiot" and more are all grand ways to assist specialists during gated events. There are also other tasks available during most skill checks, everyone should be able to do something they are good at, even if they aren't participating in what they feel is the "main event".

----
I think one big failing of the d20 system is that it encourages "umbrella" checks, "Roll Nature to detect nature stuff." when you could both "gate" and allow group participation by allowing a multitude of checks, "Nature", "Geography", "Local", "Appraise", professions like hunting or woodworking, could all be used to allow everyone to pick up different elements around them, rather than either gating half the people out or brute-forcing it with a bunch of rolls against a single skill.

The nature of the "one roll, pass or fail" system d20 games encourage results in a lot of meaningless mundane rolls, and very few important but highly difficult rolls. Often resulting in players feeling "bogged down" with little unimportant minutia, and then feeling stonewalled when it comes to elements that actually matter.

[kyoryu]

lve into a game of mother-may-I, and while I clearly see how this could happen, it’s not something I’ve ever encountered myself. Even in systems where you’re literally making everything up as you go along, like FATE, the table always reached a consensus that a given task difficulty was fair and the aspects a player applies to it made narrative sense.

Practically speaking, this matches my experience. I also play a lot of Fate, so that's unsurprising :)

I'm not sure what the actual problems with this are. There's a lot of "values" tossed about, but I haven't seen a lot of "this actually has made the game worse" kinds of things.


a) forgetting that requiring a series of multiple successes dramatically worsens the odds for any task, and

b) Instinctively scaling up challenges so there is still some chance of failure, without any in-universe logic. I have to guard myself against making every lock in town suddenly masterwork difficulty after the rogue gets Reliable Talent.

c) Relatedly, accidentally gating all non-specialist characters out of participating by setting the DCs to be a reasonable challenge for the party expert (especially in games with constant scaling/no bounded accuracy). This is fine for tasks like developing a cure for the plague virus, but terrible for many social and exploration tasks where other PCs should reasonably be able to participate.

Yeah. I've seen all of these actual problems show up, frequently.

[NichG]

In the Pathfinder discussion thread, there is a vigorous discussion about the Pathfinder 2e skill system particularly issues with arbitrarily set difficulty levels.

I’m interested in everyone’s general experience with DC based systems, but rather than clutter that discussion further, I decided a separate thread was in order.

What problems do you regularly encounter with DC based skill/resolution systems?

Yes to all the problems you mentioned, but in addition:

- Whether or not retry is possible/whether its possible to make retry trivial becomes an overly important thing the bigger the variance on the dice gets with respect to modifiers/DCs. So you have to almost have two different designs - a set of DCs appropriate for things that are usually one-off checks, and a separate set of DCs (usually a quarter or half dice size higher) for things that are usually going to be able to be retried at leisure. When those 'usually' assumptions get broken, it ends up being very impactful, maybe overly so compared to what you're trying to have skill represent.

- More subtly, DC based skill systems push one into a binary success/failure mindset, which tends to have a much smaller dynamic range with regards to differences in character skill. If 'failure' is the only stakes then you either have e.g. professionals frequently totally failing to do certain things that should be rote for them OR basically skill advancement has to be such that the variance of the dice can easily be made negligible, in which case once you've hit that level of skill there's sharply reduced returns for becoming even more skillful, and before you hit that level its almost like 'don't bother trying'.

So something where the roll determines the cost to succeed or the extent of success or even just numerical parameters of the outcome can be a lot smoother with regards to how it feels to advance/be skilled/be a novice/etc, while still letting characters be consistent and predictable in what they can achieve when it makes sense. E.g. rather than 'pick the distance you want to jump, roll to see if you can jump it', it'd be more like 'roll to see the distance you can jump for free, and spend 1 stamina point per +1ft you need to add to that' or 'you do/do not have the skill to jump it; if you do, then roll to see if you lose an action regaining your balance after landing'

[PhoenixPhyre]

The big issues I see are

1. Rolling where there aren't interesting consequences for both/all results. Consequences that move the story along and change the scene. Retrying a check shouldn't really ever be a thing, at least not straight up. If it deserves a roll, the outcome of that roll should matter.

2. Along with that, lumping too big of outcomes on single points of failure. Interesting consequences should be incremental. In a D&D-like, you wouldn't tie the outcome of an entire combat to a single attack roll. Or generally shouldn't. Each small check moves the combat onward; missing has consequences because it lets the other person do bad things longer. But missing once doesn't mean you failed. And it's not an arbitrary count of sucessess/failures. "Skill challenges" should have a similar structure--a sequence of things to interact with, possibly in parallel. Something everyone can interact with, the success or failure of each of which influence the final outcome more than just modulating check difficulty. Embrace the branches.

3. The multi-headed hydra party. Where everyone has their specialty and is incompetent outside of it, so the DM lets them swap in the specialist for every check but otherwise act like one creature. Everyone faces skill challenges; everyone should participate. He who asked the question deals with the check. In social situations, the NPCs may not always respond to the person with the highest social skills. Yes, that means that dumping those skills has negative consequences and a well-rounded person is generally better than a narrow specialist. Adventurers are generalists, not specialists.

4. "Me too" checks, where everyone acts like one success is enough for the whole party (a variant of #3). In those cases where there's no reason why they wouldn't talk, either do a group check (50+% have to succeed to succeed) or just give them the information based on the best person's outcome.

[kyoryu]

See I personally don't see this as problematic, and I often run skill challenges as "three successes before 3 failures" and it helps substantially with your secondary problem. It also can break a scene down more incrementally, it can be useful in occupying a character's time while the enemy acts making choices more important and scenes more dynamic. You can add levels of "the next roll is easier because you succeeded" or "its harder because you failed" without having to say "Oh you failed at the lock now you're done." on a single check.

I think the issue is more like "multiple rolls in a roll into you succeed/fail scenario". Best of 3, x successes before y failures, etc. are good ways of handling multiple rolls. "You have to sneak past 10 guards, they each get their own roll" probably isn't.



I think one big failing of the d20 system is that it encourages "umbrella" checks, "Roll Nature to detect nature stuff." when you could both "gate" and allow group participation by allowing a multitude of checks, "Nature", "Geography", "Local", "Appraise", professions like hunting or woodworking, could all be used to allow everyone to pick up different elements around them, rather than either gating half the people out or brute-forcing it with a bunch of rolls against a single skill.

Agreed. In general I prefer the approach of "tell me what you're actually doing and I'll tell you what to roll."



- Whether or not retry is possible/whether its possible to make retry trivial becomes an overly important thing the bigger the variance on the dice gets with respect to modifiers/DCs. So you have to almost have two different designs - a set of DCs appropriate for things that are usually one-off checks, and a separate set of DCs (usually a quarter or half dice size higher) for things that are usually going to be able to be retried at leisure. When those 'usually' assumptions get broken, it ends up being very impactful, maybe overly so compared to what you're trying to have skill represent.

My preference is, generally, to set the stakes of the roll such that failure means "you've hit the failure/decision point". This doesn't work well in systems that clearly define what "failure" means.


- More subtly, DC based skill systems push one into a binary success/failure mindset, which tends to have a much smaller dynamic range with regards to differences in character skill. If 'failure' is the only stakes then you either have e.g. professionals frequently totally failing to do certain things that should be rote for them OR basically skill advancement has to be such that the variance of the dice can easily be made negligible, in which case once you've hit that level of skill there's sharply reduced returns for becoming even more skillful, and before you hit that level its almost like 'don't bother trying'.

Yeah. I prefer to frame things as "does this go well, or poorly?" That creates a lot more dynamic potential and gets rid of a lot of those problems. If you're very competent, success at the primary task may be presumed.... things going well or poorly may really be about secondary effects.


The big issues I see are

1. Rolling where there aren't interesting consequences for both/all results. Consequences that move the story along and change the scene. Retrying a check shouldn't really ever be a thing, at least not straight up. If it deserves a roll, the outcome of that roll should matter.

Agreed. A lot of times that's because the system has other failure states built into it with incremental costs, and what you're really doing is collapsing that.

Like, in D&D, searching for a secret door takes time. In a dungeon, that means there's a chance of a random encounter. The real "failure" cost isn't not finding the door - it's getting a random encounter. Collapsing that into one roll just means you make "you're still searching when the monster shows up" the consequence of failure. (Or, more nuanced, "you're still searching when you hear something approach from afar, do you keep at it or do you head out?")


2. Along with that, lumping too big of outcomes on single points of failure. Interesting consequences should be incremental. In a D&D-like, you wouldn't tie the outcome of an entire combat to a single attack roll. Or generally shouldn't. Each small check moves the combat onward; missing has consequences because it lets the other person do bad things longer. But missing once doesn't mean you failed. And it's not an arbitrary count of sucessess/failures. "Skill challenges" should have a similar structure--a sequence of things to interact with, possibly in parallel. Something everyone can interact with, the success or failure of each of which influence the final outcome more than just modulating check difficulty. Embrace the branches.

I'm okay either way, depending on how much you want to focus on it. I'd actually like a one-roll combat option. But, either way, there needs to be a way to say "this is critical, let's spend time on it" or "this isn't so critical, let's not", both of which have a wider range of results than the binary.


3. The multi-headed hydra party. Where everyone has their specialty and is incompetent outside of it, so the DM lets them swap in the specialist for every check but otherwise act like one creature. Everyone faces skill challenges; everyone should participate. He who asked the question deals with the check. In social situations, the NPCs may not always respond to the person with the highest social skills. Yes, that means that dumping those skills has negative consequences and a well-rounded person is generally better than a narrow specialist. Adventurers are generalists, not specialists.

Well, I generally do think that the specialists should do what they specialize in. That makes sense. It may make sense that that doesn't always work - the king may want to talk to the barbarian for some reason.


4. "Me too" checks, where everyone acts like one success is enough for the whole party (a variant of #3). In those cases where there's no reason why they wouldn't talk, either do a group check (50+% have to succeed to succeed) or just give them the information based on the best person's outcome.

Group checks should be that. "They failed, let me try" doesn't work for me. This gets back to having actual stakes for failure. (In that case, a second character might try, but you still have the consequences of the first failure to deal with).

Things like stealth checks, I tend to go with "the slowest and loudest". IOW, base the check on the worst person, and let the higher skilled people assist as appropriate.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Well, I generally do think that the specialists should do what they specialize in. That makes sense. It may make sense that that doesn't always work - the king may want to talk to the barbarian for some reason.


In the absence of other factors, yes. The specialist is the one most likely to try things that will likely cause them to make the kind of rolls they're specialized in. But that doesn't mean that only the arcane specialist ever asks "what do these runes mean" or that the arcane specialist can jump in when the barbarian asks that question and take their place.

If time and circumstance permit, the barbarian may call over the arcane specialist and have them try to figure it out. Or they may not. But if they don't...the barbarian makes any rolls necessary.

[Satinavian]

I’m interested in everyone’s general experience with DC based systems, but rather than clutter that discussion further, I decided a separate thread was in order.


Potential problems :
1) The DC tables might not properly work out when you use the values typical everymen or professionals in that job have and calculate the odds.

2) The DC tables might be to vague or not even exist

3) There might be weird skaling going on.

4) Rndomness for the sake of excitement, no matter whether it makes sense.

[AceOfFools]

The big problems I’ve encountered with DC-skill systems are:

Arbitrary difficulty: There was an official DnD released adventures for 4e that had the solid, reinforced door of the mayor’s office ve easier to knock down than the cracked, door of the run-down, falling apart slum you found 2 levels later. It makes it really hard to invest in a world as a place that exists as anything other than an abstraction.

Excessive rules: on the flip side, there are formulas for the difficulty one needs to know or reference for basically every skill in the d20 system. If you want to have rules to set DC based on the narrative reality of the game, well, someone needs to remember or keep handy a cheat sheet for all of those rules, which no one likes.

Bad balance: I ran a few d20 modern games in a very DnD style: X-combat encounters per day, clever encounter spaced that monsters—yes, monsters—could interact with. It quickly became clear that this was not how the developers intended the game to be run, because the Smart Hero class was devoted entirely to “get high numbers on specific skill checks,” and they were a liability in any environment where rolling those skills wasn’t the main way to interact with the world. Which then reached a problem with:

Serial play: If you need to hit high numbers to do a thing: hackers to clear security cameras, faces to negiotate truces, etc, AND you need to specialize build resources such that only highly specialized characters can hit those numbers, it’s very easy to find your players waiting, doing nothing while the character who can do the thing does the thing, and thus only doing things serially. This is hardly unique to DC skill systems, but it is a possible consequence of them.

Conceptual lock out: One complaint I have with 5e’s bounded accuracy is that it’s really hard to get more than 3~5 points better at a skill than someone who doesn’t have this skill as core to their character, but does need the base stat for build reasons (e.g. a fighter whose not a terrible fighter cannot be that much better a lawyer than a wizard, assuming you use an int based skill for law). This is not a hypothetical example, it annoyed me in actual play.

You might notice that not ever DC-based game has all of these issues in equal amounts. There are ways to mitigate them, but these generally introduce other trade offs, because game design is like that. Nothing works for everyone.

[Tanarii]

1) generating some kind of success or failure state when the attempted activity should be automatic (success or failure).

2) something you should be able to attempt is denied because there is a skill for it and you don't have it / aren't trained to a sufficient level in it.

These were particularly visible in the old days when Thieves skills were a (incredibly low) fixed percentage.
DMs regularly called for the checks for any activity that sounded like it involved them, regardless of the details of the attempted action reasonably mandating success.
DMs saying that non-thieves couldn't attempt actions at all such as sneaking or hiding, because Move Silently and Hide in Shadows existed.

Various systems attempt to solve this in various ways, usually by some variant of complex rules to only rolling "when it matters".

(Minor 3) when the probability of success/failure is a weird range once you determine a roll should happen. This is especially common in % or d20 systems.

[Zuras]

1) generating some kind of success or failure state when the attempted activity should be automatic (success or failure).

2) something you should be able to attempt is denied because there is a skill for it and you don't have it / aren't trained to a sufficient level in it.

These were particularly visible in the old days when Thieves skills were a (incredibly low) fixed percentage.
DMs regularly called for the checks for any activity that sounded like it involved them, regardless of the details of the attempted action reasonably mandating success.
DMs saying that non-thieves couldn't attempt actions at all such as sneaking or hiding, because Move Silently and Hide in Shadows existed.

Various systems attempt to solve this in various ways, usually by some variant of complex rules to only rolling "when it matters".

(Minor 3) when the probability of success/failure is a weird range once you determine a roll should happen. This is especially common in % or d20 systems.


The awfulness of the Thief skills table is one of the reasons I’ve never been able to stomach any of the faithful AD&D retroclones.

[kyoryu]

If time and circumstance permit, the barbarian may call over the arcane specialist and have them try to figure it out. Or they may not. But if they don't...the barbarian makes any rolls necessary.

I think a lot of rolls are made very abstractly. I think that's a mistake - they should be tied directly to the situation and what is actually happening in the game world.

Usually that will let the specialist specialize. Sometimes it won't.



Conceptual lock out: One complaint I have with 5e’s bounded accuracy is that it’s really hard to get more than 3~5 points better at a skill than someone who doesn’t have this skill as core to their character, but does need the base stat for build reasons (e.g. a fighter whose not a terrible fighter cannot be that much better a lawyer than a wizard, assuming you use an int based skill for law). This is not a hypothetical example, it annoyed me in actual play.


This is really mostly a skill+stat thing, which is the default in a lot of systems. If you don't presume that, it creates a lot less lockout.


1) generating some kind of success or failure state when the attempted activity should be automatic (success or failure).

2) something you should be able to attempt is denied because there is a skill for it and you don't have it / aren't trained to a sufficient level in it.

(Minor 3) when the probability of success/failure is a weird range once you determine a roll should happen. This is especially common in % or d20 systems.

That's a lot of why I like to treat "can I do something?" as a separate mechanic from "how hard is it?", as compared to the "it's only too hard if your roll can't succeed". While that's conceptually tidy, I find it leads to a lot of issues.

Also, skill layout, levels of skill acquisition, default rules, etc. all factor into that.

[False God]

This is really mostly a skill+stat thing, which is the default in a lot of systems. If you don't presume that, it creates a lot less lockout.

This was a change I made to any of my d20-based home games after playing WoD. When I call for a roll, I'll tell you which skill and which stat (if any, maybe multiple choice) is applicable. It also dramatically reduces the need for high DCs.

[kyoryu]

This was a change I made to any of my d20-based home games after playing WoD. When I call for a roll, I'll tell you which skill and which stat (if any, maybe multiple choice) is applicable. It also dramatically reduces the need for high DCs.

I play a lot of Fate, and Fate just has skills. A lot of people want to use so-called "two column" Fate (which would combine skill + approach or stat), and I think that is a net negative, for a lot of the reasons that were pointed out.

[SimonMoon6]

c) Relatedly, accidentally gating all non-specialist characters out of participating by setting the DCs to be a reasonable challenge for the party expert (especially in games with constant scaling/no bounded accuracy). This is fine for tasks like developing a cure for the plague virus, but terrible for many social and exploration tasks where other PCs should reasonably be able to participate.

I think that's a feature not a bug.

If I'm playing a specialist at trap-finding, someone who has put a ton of skill points into trap-finding, someone who has taken a Skill Focus feat (or something similar) to be better at trap-finding, someone who has entered a prestige class to be even better at trap-finding, someone who has bought magic items to supplement their ability to find traps... and then Dumdum the Barbarian finds a trap before I do, then I think something is seriously wrong with the universe.

Granted, D&D 3.x fixes that problem by saying, "Oh, well, only rogues (and maybe other specialists) can find *magic* traps". But that's just another form of gate-keeping.

Why should I specialize at something if *everybody* has a 25% chance of success? With enough PCs, that's a virtual guarantee of success without any specialization.

Ideally, what should happen is that there will be some skill challenges with low DCs and some skill challenges with high DCs all in the same adventure together. So, sure Dumdum the Barbarian might have a chance to sneak past the drunken patrons of a bar to exit out the backdoor unseen (DC: 5), but only Sneaky McSneaksALot will be able to sneak past the watchful eyes of the half-Shadow Dragon Beholder to get to the Ultimate Treasure (DC: 75).

Or, Dumdum the Barbarian can climb over a decaying wooden fence (DC: 5), but only Climby McClimbsALot can climb up the sheer glass cliff covered in slippery oil (DC: 100).

So, yeah, *everyone* can sneak, but only one person can sneak when it's really important. Everyone can climb, but only one person can climb when it's important.

[KaussH]

1) generating some kind of success or failure state when the attempted activity should be automatic (success or failure).

2) something you should be able to attempt is denied because there is a skill for it and you don't have it / aren't trained to a sufficient level in it.

These were particularly visible in the old days when Thieves skills were a (incredibly low) fixed percentage.
DMs regularly called for the checks for any activity that sounded like it involved them, regardless of the details of the attempted action reasonably mandating success.
DMs saying that non-thieves couldn't attempt actions at all such as sneaking or hiding, because Move Silently and Hide in Shadows existed.

Various systems attempt to solve this in various ways, usually by some variant of complex rules to only rolling "when it matters".

(Minor 3) when the probability of success/failure is a weird range once you determine a roll should happen. This is especially common in % or d20 systems.

The Thieves skills were an easy fix. I always treated them like powers in the old days. So anyone could Hide, but be detected. but if you made your Hide in shadows then you couldnt just be detected, abilities needed to be used. If you had climb walls, you didnt roll for ropes and roof running, ect. It did not fix the detect traps and that, but thats a whole diff matter.
Now if you failed your Super power, then you were just as well hidden as any normal person, normal rules applied.

Now keep in mind this was for 1/2nd ed.

[PhoenixPhyre]

So, yeah, *everyone* can sneak, but only one person can sneak when it's really important. Everyone can climb, but only one person can climb when it's important.

Yeah, I don't like this. Because it means that only one person can participate at a time. It'd be like saying "everyone can fight, but in an important fight only the fighter can hit the enemy."

Everyone should be able to participate in everything. The "specialist" should be able to make the most progress and may be able to carry things alone for easy stuff, but any significant task should require multiple people working together. In that instance, the specialist's advantage is that he can cover some of the load for people who fail, meaning you might only need a couple of successful people instead of the whole team.

Of course, this means that conceptualizing "ability checks" as just one success to rule them all, with failures ignored needs to go away. Good. The way you keep from piling on is you...don't let people pile on. The person who takes the action does the thing. And then the situation changes before you ask the next person what they do. Every success, every "failure" has consequences. So succeeding 75% of the time instead of 25% of the time means you get the good consequences 75% of the time, not 25% of the time.

It also helps to drop the "one and done" approach. A situation that calls for ability checks and actually matters should require multiple checks, each of which moves the situation towards one of many end states. But none of which are individually decisive.

[stoutstien]

Yeah, I don't like this. Because it means that only one person can participate at a time. It'd be like saying "everyone can fight, but in an important fight only the fighter can hit the enemy."

Everyone should be able to participate in everything. The "specialist" should be able to make the most progress and may be able to carry things alone for easy stuff, but any significant task should require multiple people working together. In that instance, the specialist's advantage is that he can cover some of the load for people who fail, meaning you might only need a couple of successful people instead of the whole team.

Of course, this means that conceptualizing "ability checks" as just one success to rule them all, with failures ignored needs to go away. Good. The way you keep from piling on is you...don't let people pile on. The person who takes the action does the thing. And then the situation changes before you ask the next person what they do. Every success, every "failure" has consequences. So succeeding 75% of the time instead of 25% of the time means you get the good consequences 75% of the time, not 25% of the time.

It also helps to drop the "one and done" approach. A situation that calls for ability checks and actually matters should require multiple checks, each of which moves the situation towards one of many end states. But none of which are individually decisive.

Yea. The idea of the "skill guy" became so ingrained doesn't help either.

You either need to bring the range of results into a smaller range or ditch DCs/thresholds all together.

[Quertus]

I mean, there's a lot of bad implementations of DC-based skill systems, I'll definitely agree with that. And I guess it's good for a potential developer to look at the pitfalls, to see what "doing it wrong" looks like. But I've not really seen any problems inherent to the concept, with the possible exception of the difficulty in... hmmm... writing good "yes, but" content for such systems. The variable results based on DC hit for Gather Information checks in some modules are an example of trying and partially succeeding - partially succeeding because a) everyone who hits the same DC gets the same results; b) there's no clear in-character communication of "can I retry? should I retry?"; c) there's much more clear metagame ability to know to retry these rolls.

So, it's a baby-step in the right direction, but still pretty bad compared to what it should look like. And limited to very few rolls.


4. "Me too" checks, where everyone acts like one success is enough for the whole party (a variant of #3). In those cases where there's no reason why they wouldn't talk, either do a group check (50+% have to succeed to succeed) or just give them the information based on the best person's outcome.

Um... what answer other than the bolded bit are you suggesting some people would do? I'm not seeing what people would do wrong here. :smallconfused:


So, sure Dumdum the Barbarian might have a chance to sneak past the drunken patrons of a bar to exit out the backdoor unseen (DC: 5), but only Sneaky McSneaksALot will be able to sneak past the watchful eyes of the half-Shadow Dragon Beholder to get to the Ultimate Treasure (DC: 75).

Or, Dumdum the Barbarian can climb over a decaying wooden fence (DC: 5), but only Climby McClimbsALot can climb up the sheer glass cliff covered in slippery oil (DC: 100).

So, yeah, *everyone* can sneak, but only one person can sneak when it's really important. Everyone can climb, but only one person can climb when it's important.

So, first, I don't like the correlation of "difficult" with "important". I very much think that we should divorce those two, and admit that we're discussing when rolls are difficult, not necessarily when they are important.

That said, when rolls are important, that's when you want your skilled guy making the rolls. Sure, let Dumdum the Barbarian attempt to draw the patient's blood, but when they go in for surgery, leave not just the heart transplant, but also the selection of which blood type blood to administer to Dr. McHealsALot.


Yeah, I don't like this. Because it means that only one person can participate at a time. It'd be like saying "everyone can fight, but in an important fight only the fighter can hit the enemy."

Everyone should be able to participate in everything.

Sorry, but no. Or, rather, not everyone should participate in everything in the same way. If your relative goes in for brain surgery, are you going to be making Medicine rolls to assist the surgery? I certainly hope not (unless you secretly have qualifications I'm not aware of). If somebody is building a rocket for NASA, I could write the code, but should I be working on the physical product, making Craft:Rocket rolls? Absolutely not!

IME, letting morons touch the important parts of the code just slows me down. And letting me touch, well, most anything that is someone else's high-skill specialty other than programming, probably isn't going to move their project forward in a productive direction, either. Not that I haven't helped plenty of projects without having the core skills, simply by dent of taking the stress off other low-skill tasks.

I guess the question is, how much to you want your game to be Simulationist, mapping out value of rolls and Gant charts, vs how much you want your game to be Gamist, and allow efforts of various participants to matter in a more simplified, abstract way.

[King of Nowhere]

what's the alternative to dc based systems? I can't even imagine on that wouldn't have the same issues.
I mean, a dc may become a dm-may-I as he sets the difficulty check, but if you do not have to roll some dice and add some modifier depending on your skill, then it really is a dm-may-I. And if you go for a full narrative approach, well, you can do that with a dc system too. many times I had envisioned a task with a high dc only for the players to find some roundabout easier way to go at it that didn't require any rolling.




The problems I *have* encountered, and have to periodically guard myself against as a GM have actually been:

a) forgetting that requiring a series of multiple successes dramatically worsens the odds for any task, and

b) Instinctively scaling up challenges so there is still some chance of failure, without any in-universe logic. I have to guard myself against making every lock in town suddenly masterwork difficulty after the rogue gets Reliable Talent.

c) Relatedly, accidentally gating all non-specialist characters out of participating by setting the DCs to be a reasonable challenge for the party expert (especially in games with constant scaling/no bounded accuracy). This is fine for tasks like developing a cure for the plague virus, but terrible for many social and exploration tasks where other PCs should reasonably be able to participate.
Those are not much problems as mistakes made by a dm. just like railroading too much, or inserting a powerful dmpc to overshadow the players, those are dark temptations that would push a dm to abuse his power - made all the more insidious by the fact that those things are ok when done sensibly and in small amounts.
Basically, they are not a problem with the system, they are mistakes that can be made.
As for a), it can make sense in context. staying hidden for a long time increases your likelyhood of getting spotted, so it's sensible to ask for periodic checking. and the main point of using multiple guards is the increased chance that one of them will get lucky and watch the right place at the right time.
As for b), a good question to ask is "how difficult should this be for those characters?" at high level, it will generally mean there's no need to roll anything.
as for c), regarding specifically the social tasks, one has to remember that the npcs are not out there to be obstacles. if the players offer a good deal, there's no need to roll anything.

[NichG]

what's the alternative to dc based systems? I can't even imagine on that wouldn't have the same issues.
I mean, a dc may become a dm-may-I as he sets the difficulty check, but if you do not have to roll some dice and add some modifier depending on your skill, then it really is a dm-may-I. And if you go for a full narrative approach, well, you can do that with a dc system too. many times I had envisioned a task with a high dc only for the players to find some roundabout easier way to go at it that didn't require any rolling.


The next time I make a fantasy heartbreaker system I'll probably do something like this:

- Skills take base values 0 to 7. Certain activities have a minimal skill rank to even attempt them. There are no direct opposed rolls.
- Total dice pool combines an Attribute with Skill
- When you want to roll to activate a use of your skill, pay 3 Stamina and roll your total pool of d10s looking for 8+
- You can spend a success to succeed at a thing within your capabilities.
- If your action is opposed you must spend an extra success per source of opposition.
- If you are rushing, otherwise interfered with, you must spend an extra success.
- You can spend a success to avoid a side effect of your course of action, increase a numerical consequence by 1 increment (20% of baseline ability), reduce the Stamina (or other) cost of the action by 1, or reduce the time needed by half (multiplicative)
- Characters can buy one extra success for 3 Stamina per 2 points of base skill rank they have.

[Hrugner]

A good, non arbitrary replacement skill system could be a static value with no dice and each point below the difficulty requires some additional assistance or equipment to achieve. So you'd have the inexperienced climber require a guide and full climbing kit plus magical assistance taking about an hour to setup and execute the climb, and the climbing specialist skates up the wall in 2 minutes. Social skills would require you to work the room to build support, and a letter of introduction, before tackling the hard target, picking a lock could require absolute silence, enough tools to disassemble the door completely, and make a bunch of noise, that sort of thing. Then skill growth consists of buying off tools or assistants, and DC is represented by a tool list rather than a number. It would also give you a good chance to add utility to spells and items by saying what tools they replace.

Doing it this way would also make skill solutions more reliable, putting them on more even footing with destructive solutions.

[Zuras]

Those are not much problems as mistakes made by a dm. just like railroading too much, or inserting a powerful dmpc to overshadow the players, those are dark temptations that would push a dm to abuse his power - made all the more insidious by the fact that those things are ok when done sensibly and in small amounts.
Basically, they are not a problem with the system, they are mistakes that can be made.
As for a), it can make sense in context. staying hidden for a long time increases your likelyhood of getting spotted, so it's sensible to ask for periodic checking. and the main point of using multiple guards is the increased chance that one of them will get lucky and watch the right place at the right time.
As for b), a good question to ask is "how difficult should this be for those characters?" at high level, it will generally mean there's no need to roll anything.
as for c), regarding specifically the social tasks, one has to remember that the npcs are not out there to be obstacles. if the players offer a good deal, there's no need to roll anything.

They’re problems with the system in the sense that some systems make it harder to make mistakes. Compare D&D 5e to something like Neoclassical Geek Revival, which forces the automatic success issue quite a bit by effectively making taking 10 the default resolution for all checks and providing options for both bell curve and flat roll resolution. Many systems also have concrete systems for repeated checks, like tracking effort in Dungeon World or Suspicion in NGR.

D&D 5e’s skill system is perfectly usable, it would just be nice to have some additional features, kind of like the rear-view backing camera on a car. You don’t have to have it but it’s quite handy.

[SimonMoon6]

Everyone should be able to participate in everything.

How does the fighter participate in casting spells?

Everyone can participate in the adventure, but everyone should be contributing different things. The fighter doesn't have to have a magical ability to heal his friends; the cleric can do that. Likewise, the fighter doesn't have to be able to climb a wall or open a chest; the rogue can do that. The fighter doesn't have to have a way to teleport the party into the dungeon; the wizard can do that.

Everyone should have different things they're good at or else you're back to 4th edition where everyone can do the same exact things but given different names.

And nobody wants that.

[JNAProductions]

How does the fighter participate in casting spells?

Everyone can participate in the adventure, but everyone should be contributing different things. The fighter doesn't have to have a magical ability to heal his friends; the cleric can do that. Likewise, the fighter doesn't have to be able to climb a wall or open a chest; the rogue can do that. The fighter doesn't have to have a way to teleport the party into the dungeon; the wizard can do that.

Everyone should have different things they're good at or else you're back to 4th edition where everyone can do the same exact things but given different names.

And nobody wants that.

Why is “casting spells” an activity in and of itself, rather than a method via which some PCs do their thing?

[Telok]

The biggest issue with the systems is generally they're either under explained, without sufficient examples and guidelines, or they're... I call it 'monotone', where they have no flexibility built in but the same dice setup is used for absolutely everything. Or both, they cam be both at the same time too.

You can adapt of course. If you're good you can use pliers as a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver. But it's not good at it and you have to work a lot harder. Likewise a dicing system designed for a combat engine which teaches people to roll straight success/fail for every discrete action turns out to be bad for a "schmoozing at a party" challenge. Like you can use the pliers as a screwdriver it'll mostly function, but it more effort and work and clunky mistakes.

Personally I like "30 over 13" type stuff if I'm forced to use a single die like the d20 games. You need 30 points over target number 13 to get to the "solution". The invested character that can throw a 45 result is flat out better than the no-skill rolling d20+2. Although really, the only question you ever ask the die is if a character can accomplish something within the time allowed.

[Pex]

A lack of guidelines on the difficulty of a task leads to inconsistent play. It's not enough to say give DC X if it's Easy DC Y if it's Hard because one DM can say a task is Easy DC X while another says it's Hard DC Y. It is the game designers' job to provide examples of difficulty. Of course they can't account for everything possible everywhere. They aren't supposed to. Examples are enough for a comparison. More robust systems provide aid for adjusting for circumstances whether to add or subtract from the DC, provide a + or - to a roll, or in 5E's case Advantage/Disadvantage. This is a matter of implementation, not the concept itself of having defined examples.

Another issue I have is changing the difficulty based on who is doing it. A task should have its own difficulty based on itself. One character having a better chance to succeed should be based on character build choice. If a wall is DC X to climb then it is DC X to climb for everyone everywhere. It is DC X for Alex. It does not become DC Y (Y > X) because suddenly Bob is there and is higher level. If you need a DC Y for whatever reason then it should be a different type of wall worthy of being DC Y, and by math Alex will have a harder time climbing it as is proper. Training in a skill (skill points, proficiency, whatever skill build system used) should make things easier for you by giving you a higher modifier to your roll than someone who is not so trained, i.e. did not dedicate the skill build method into it. The task is still Dc X. The one trained will already have an easier time of it. You don't need to change the DC to Y just because a lesser trained character tries to do it. It is a matter of rules implementation to say only characters trained can do a certain skill use. If Alex is not trained while Bob is, then only Bob may roll for it. The rules should explicitly say this if that's what is desired. Without that explicit mention Alex gets to roll at the same DC as Bob. Bob just has a better chance of succeeding because of his higher modifier. If the DM wants to house rule that mention into a game that doesn't have it, he should say so in Session 0 before character creation.

[King of Nowhere]

A good, non arbitrary replacement skill system could be a static value with no dice and each point below the difficulty requires some additional assistance or equipment to achieve. So you'd have the inexperienced climber require a guide and full climbing kit plus magical assistance taking about an hour to setup and execute the climb, and the climbing specialist skates up the wall in 2 minutes. Social skills would require you to work the room to build support, and a letter of introduction, before tackling the hard target, picking a lock could require absolute silence, enough tools to disassemble the door completely, and make a bunch of noise, that sort of thing. Then skill growth consists of buying off tools or assistants, and DC is represented by a tool list rather than a number. It would also give you a good chance to add utility to spells and items by saying what tools they replace.

Doing it this way would also make skill solutions more reliable, putting them on more even footing with destructive solutions.
this is already covered by a dc-based system. become good enough at a certain skill, and you have automatic success. apply measures to make the task easier (like the climbing equipment example), and you can make it an automatic success for anyone. if the task is hard enough, it can't be done.
a dc-based system includes a chance to succeed or fail when a task is just hard enough that you could maybe succeed.
it also includes a way to handle opposite use of skills (like stealth against perception) which your proposal would lack.

The next time I make a fantasy heartbreaker system I'll probably do something like this:

- Skills take base values 0 to 7. Certain activities have a minimal skill rank to even attempt them. There are no direct opposed rolls.
- Total dice pool combines an Attribute with Skill
- When you want to roll to activate a use of your skill, pay 3 Stamina and roll your total pool of d10s looking for 8+
- You can spend a success to succeed at a thing within your capabilities.
- If your action is opposed you must spend an extra success per source of opposition.
- If you are rushing, otherwise interfered with, you must spend an extra success.
- You can spend a success to avoid a side effect of your course of action, increase a numerical consequence by 1 increment (20% of baseline ability), reduce the Stamina (or other) cost of the action by 1, or reduce the time needed by half (multiplicative)
- Characters can buy one extra success for 3 Stamina per 2 points of base skill rank they have.
i have no idea what exactly stamina would be in your system, but while it makes sense for a jump or tumble, why would a knowledge or spot check require stamina? and by "spending a success to succeed at a thing" you basically remove the different difficultes: sure, you need 5 ranks to even try this difficult task, but once you do have those 5 ranks you only need one success, so it's almost trivial. also, there's no good mechanic for an opposed check.

But finally, let's just accept that your skill level gives you a number of dice to roll, and you need a certain number of success on each one; that's a more convoluted system, but it's virtually identical to setting a dc. being more skilled increases your odds by giving you more dice to roll instead of giving a bonus to your single roll.
i would say it does increase variety - if you have a +10 to a skill, you are never going to roll below 11, while if you have 10 skill dice you can still roll 0 success - which increases the odds of the super expert failing spectacularly at something very easy. can be good for laughs, but not desirable.

I'm not picking on you two specifically, it's just that the DC system - used correctly - is simple and effective, and I've never seen a system or a proposal that would not have worse problems.

tl;dr the DC based skill system is the worst possible skill system, with the exception of all others.



D&D 5e’s skill system is perfectly usable, it would just be nice to have some additional features, kind of like the rear-view backing camera on a car. You don’t have to have it but it’s quite handy.
d&d 5e is a particularly poor application of the skill system. at least based on my experience with baldurs gate 3, which is my main source of knowledge on how 5e works.
you don't gain skill ranks. you can never be a specialist. I can be a senior professor, but ultimately I have nothing more than skill proficiency, and a college freshman is going to have my same modifier. which in turn makes the handling of how difficult a task should be a complete mess-up.

[JNAProductions]

Something to note is that 5E and other D&D systems’ skill systems are for ADVENTURING.
They are NOT meant to simulate teaching a college course, or activities like that.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Something to note is that 5E and other D&D systems’ skill systems are for ADVENTURING.
They are NOT meant to simulate teaching a college course, or activities like that.

Yeah. The model is that adventurers are generalists with mild area of focus. And all the ability check proficiency areas are adventure focused. NPCs, in the course of their regular lives (and PCs as well, outside of adventuring) don't use ability checks. Commoners don't need farming proficiency to farm, they know about their daily tasks and environment without any checks. A cleric knows his faith without needing proficiency or even a roll. Etc.

[Zuras]

d&d 5e is a particularly poor application of the skill system. at least based on my experience with baldurs gate 3, which is my main source of knowledge on how 5e works.
you don't gain skill ranks. you can never be a specialist. I can be a senior professor, but ultimately I have nothing more than skill proficiency, and a college freshman is going to have my same modifier. which in turn makes the handling of how difficult a task should be a complete mess-up.

That’s not a flaw of the system so much as a consequence of not making the skill system entirely separate from the class & level system. The system isn’t equipped to distinguish between a professor and a freshmen who don’t have class levels.

[Hrugner]

this is already covered by a dc-based system. become good enough at a certain skill, and you have automatic success. apply measures to make the task easier (like the climbing equipment example), and you can make it an automatic success for anyone. if the task is hard enough, it can't be done.
a dc-based system includes a chance to succeed or fail when a task is just hard enough that you could maybe succeed.
it also includes a way to handle opposite use of skills (like stealth against perception) which your proposal would lack.


The roll based portions of the system are useless, so we're cutting them out. The abstraction to a number is also useless, so we're cutting that out too. This makes skills reliable enough to be planned around, and removes the ability to overwhelm difficulty with raw numbers. If that's basically the same thing to you, we'll just have to agree to disagree I guess.

It works just as well with contested rolls. What you want to know with stealth vs. perception is at what range a person is perceived. You give people a "plain sight with no distractions" detection radius, and decrease the size of that radius based on various advantages like cover, darkness, camouflage, weather, noise, or what have you. The skilled sneaker reduces the radius without the purchased advantages, and the skilled perceiver buys off the benefit of those advantages. This cuts out the slow crawl of multiple checks on approach as you know the encounter distance, and lets you include less stealthy members in your team if a very advantageous approach is available.

[King of Nowhere]

The roll based portions of the system are useless, so we're cutting them out. The abstraction to a number is also useless, so we're cutting that out too. This makes skills reliable enough to be planned around, and removes the ability to overwhelm difficulty with raw numbers. If that's basically the same thing to you, we'll just have to agree to disagree I guess.


I agree to disagree all right, but you got me curious: why would you think rolling is useless?
and why would you remove the random factor when it's sensible? As I mentioned, I rarely call for a skill check, especially at high level; however, there are situations where a skill check may go either way, even for someone super skilled. performing particularly tricky acrobatics, improving a magic ritual that you've never seen before, opening an incredibly complex lock in less than 5 minutes, remembering details on an unimportant wizard who took a minor part in a conflic a century ago... I label those tasks as "stuff that a regular skilled human could not achieve, and someone supernaturally skilled just might", and slap on them a DC between 40 and 50 - the party specialist can try those, and success is not guaranteed. unless I misunderstood, you would basically remove the randomness from such events, turning them into either sure successes, or outright impossible tasks.


This cuts out the slow crawl of multiple checks on approach as you know the encounter distance, and lets you include less stealthy members in your team if a very advantageous approach is available.
You can do that with the dc system too. just decide that the approach is advantageous enough that there's no need to roll - or that the stealthy scout is leading the group and avoiding the guards, covering for the less stealthy members.
maybe you played with some peculiar gm that asked for 10 consecutive rolls as you gradually progress closer to the guard on the minimap, and that's why you dislike the dc system and want to change it; but our little exchange got me thinking, it's not really the system that makes the difference, but how the players and gm choose to interpret it.


Something to note is that 5E and other D&D systems’ skill systems are for ADVENTURING.
They are NOT meant to simulate teaching a college course, or activities like that.
pretty much any party wizard with whom I played was basically a college professors. often enough, other party members also had a background in research and academy. in my last campaign, we rolled knowledge and spellcraft more often than we rolled stealth or detect traps. tampering with magic rituals or finding weaknesses in magic defences were very common activities.
Still, just because the system is not meant to simulate something, it doesn't mean you can't do it.

[JNAProductions]

Sure-but it’s a round peg into a chicken dinner.
You CAN do it, but it’s not designed for it-so expect some issues, if you use it without adjustments.

[TaiLiu]

I think Powered by the Apocalypse games (e.g. Monster of the Week) have basically solved problems a to c. At the very least, they're usually better than d20 systems (e.g. D&D 5e).


Forgetting that requiring a series of multiple successes dramatically worsens the odds for any task.

The 2d6 system is a bell curve just from the start, and the odds of an average result increases the more you roll. Technically, the latter is also true for d20 systems, but the curve is much wider and slower to form.


Instinctively scaling up challenges so there is still some chance of failure, without any in-universe logic.

The DC is always the same in PBTA games. You roll a 2d6 plus your modifiers. A 10+ is a success, a 7-9 is a partial success, and 6 under is a failure. You never have to worry about setting the DC too high or low—the system takes care of that for you.


Relatedly, accidentally gating all non-specialist characters out of participating by setting the DCs to be a reasonable challenge for the party expert.

The 2d6 system is brilliant. The most likely result, without modifiers, is a 7—a partial success. In contrast, take a d20 system like 5e. Let's say you need to roll for an easy task (DC 10). Without modifiers, your odds of success and failure are the same. On a d20, the odds are both frightening wide and flat. There's no bell curve of competence to save you.

[NichG]

i have no idea what exactly stamina would be in your system, but while it makes sense for a jump or tumble, why would a knowledge or spot check require stamina? and by "spending a success to succeed at a thing" you basically remove the different difficultes: sure, you need 5 ranks to even try this difficult task, but once you do have those 5 ranks you only need one success, so it's almost trivial. also, there's no good mechanic for an opposed check.


This is intentional. The roll is to determine what things cost and what side-effects you can introduce or avoid, not 'do you succeed?'. In general the question of whether you could or couldn't succeed is answered by your static skill level, not by the roll.

So something like a 'Knowledge check' wouldn't happen to answer the question 'do you know something?'. But it could happen for something like 'I want to use my Knowledge to build a bridge'. You roll to find out how much that will cost you, what side-effects will occur and which ones you can buy off, how long it will take, etc. In that sense, the expert will simply never fail unless something is wrong - they're exhausted, they're under time serious pressure, etc. Because even if they roll zero successes, they just spend another 3 Stamina and succeed.

[Hrugner]

I agree to disagree all right, but you got me curious: why would you think rolling is useless?
and why would you remove the random factor when it's sensible? As I mentioned, I rarely call for a skill check, especially at high level; however, there are situations where a skill check may go either way, even for someone super skilled. performing particularly tricky acrobatics, improving a magic ritual that you've never seen before, opening an incredibly complex lock in less than 5 minutes, remembering details on an unimportant wizard who took a minor part in a conflic a century ago... I label those tasks as "stuff that a regular skilled human could not achieve, and someone supernaturally skilled just might", and slap on them a DC between 40 and 50 - the party specialist can try those, and success is not guaranteed. unless I misunderstood, you would basically remove the randomness from such events, turning them into either sure successes, or outright impossible tasks.


You can do that with the dc system too. just decide that the approach is advantageous enough that there's no need to roll - or that the stealthy scout is leading the group and avoiding the guards, covering for the less stealthy members.
maybe you played with some peculiar gm that asked for 10 consecutive rolls as you gradually progress closer to the guard on the minimap, and that's why you dislike the dc system and want to change it; but our little exchange got me thinking, it's not really the system that makes the difference, but how the players and gm choose to interpret it.


The random element on skill checks makes skills something you can't rely on or plan around. It also introduces problems with multiple people making the same check hoping for a high roll, and reduces the viability of making group checks where any one person failing makes the whole roll fail. Similarly, the longer you spend doing something the less likely you are to succeed if you are making checks every turn you take the action, which is the opposite of the typical relationship between time spent and difficulty. We can make the random die roll work by working around the problems introduced by rolling, modifying the pace of rolling or who is permitted to roll for what, or junk rolling and come up with something that isn't random and never introduce those problems in the first place.

Is the random factor ever sensible? Tricky acrobatic feats are accomplished through practice, and the 2000 sydney olympics showed us what a 5cm difference on a vaulting horse can do to that practice. The lock is a similar issue, if you're familiar with the lock, it's no issue, if you aren't you can't luck through it, and in the end, it could be easier to disassemble it. Recalling trivia doesn't feel random, and at a certain point you're recalling something so minor that your own certainty of what you've read is probably stronger than the certainty of the person who recorded the trivia to begin with.

This makes our random chance look less skill based and more literally random. Did you read the book where the wizard's name was recorded, have you practiced an acrobatic routine similar to this one, have you opened a lock like this one. We can use the die to emulate this, even reusing the roll if the player needs to accomplish the same feat again in the future, or we can discard the die and instead record what benefits the character no longer needs to accomplish certain tasks. From my perspective, we're doing a lot of work to keep the dice, and there's no real benefit to the game in doing so.

[Vahnavoi]

What problems do you regularly encounter with DC based skill/resolution systems?

1) too many small modifiers to add on either side, leading to lot of counting for what is often just a pass/fail check.

2) tables of static target numbers that try to be too complete. (As in, try to tell me about very specific things instead of giving general examples.) BONUS: the game is somehow both this and the above (because precalculating your mods into the tables was too much to ask).

3) being flaky about what type of things ought to be added to the target number versus the roll needed to pass it. EXTRA BONUS: the same thing alternates between where it goes (f.ex. a bad tool can either make your roll worse or the target number higher). EXTRA MEGA BONUS: the same thing gets counted twice due to even the game designer forgetting what goes where (f.ex. a bad tool makes your roll worse AND the target number higher!)

4) Calculation loops; players may love unbounded exploding dice, but I don't.

5) Pretending your target numbers don't just work out to a percentile system with 5% increments. (Could've just given me percentiles.)

6) Ripping off target numbers from a system that DID just work out to a percentile system with 5% increments, then using dice that don't work in 5% increments. (2d6 based systems using 5 and 10 as target numbers, I'm looking at YOU.)

7) purposelessly hiding target numbers from players, making it hard for players to count their odds when they're supposed to.

8) purposelessly revealing target numbers to players when they are not supposed to know their odds. EXTRA MEGA LUCK BONUS: does both this and 7) at the time.

9) using target numbers at all yet insisting on using some stupidly complicated random number generator, because you don't want players to "game the system" by counting their odds. (This only means the game master also has difficulty counting the odds, which is a bother for scenario design.)

10) Somewhat related to 6) and 9): using target numbers that are easy to remember (supposedly) but don't signify useful breakpoints in probability given the random number generator of the game. See also: the other thread about success chances.

11) Being ignorant of or actively hostile to any math above first grade of elementary school in setting or manipulating target numbers. (Because probability is cool but multiplication isn't?!?)


I’ve seen many people complain that they can make RPGs devolve into a game of mother-may-I, and while I clearly see how this could happen, it’s not something I’ve ever encountered myself. Even in systems where you’re literally making everything up as you go along, like FATE, the table always reached a consensus that a given task difficulty was fair and the aspects a player applies to it made narrative sense.

That's because people who use "mother-may-I" as a derogatory are wrong. "Mother-may-I" is an actual game with actual rules, not something a game "devolves" into; there's a pretty good chance your experiences with FATE (etc.) are equivalent to Mother-may-I played correctly.


The problems I *have* encountered, and have to periodically guard myself against as a GM have actually been:

a) forgetting that requiring a series of multiple successes dramatically worsens the odds for any task

b) Instinctively scaling up challenges so there is still some chance of failure, without any in-universe logic. I have to guard myself against making every lock in town suddenly masterwork difficulty after the rogue gets Reliable Talent.

These two are real problems but don't have a lot a lot do with target numbers. A) is about using dice at all while neglecting cumulative probability, b) is dynamic difficulty done badly. I see the first in virtually all games with dice, while the latter is often injected into games by a game master in scenario design phase even if nothing in system rules tells you to do it.


c) Relatedly, accidentally gating all non-specialist characters out of participating by setting the DCs to be a reasonable challenge for the party expert (especially in games with constant scaling/no bounded accuracy). This is fine for tasks like developing a cure for the plague virus, but terrible for many social and exploration tasks where other PCs should reasonably be able to participate.

Now this is a calibration issue that does directly have to do with target numbers. The two main offenders I've noticed are:

1) static target number too high for common tasks; what I'd call a simple calibration error. Caused by a game designer thinking something is either more difficult than it'd reasonably be or underestimating how often the roll needs to be made. Fixed in post by knowing better than the game designer and giving a more appropriate target number, and in general, not asking rolls for trivial things.

2) target number derived from unbounded opposed roll. This creates an arms race effect where eventually only people who can compete are those who heavily invested. Caused by the game making it too easy to get a high bonus to a check. Fixed in post by directly bounding target numbers or capping investments.

[Satinavian]

That’s not a flaw of the system so much as a consequence of not making the skill system entirely separate from the class & level system. The system isn’t equipped to distinguish between a professor and a freshmen who don’t have class levels.
It's a barebone bad excuse of a skill system designed by people who believe that combat and possibly magic are the only important parts of he game.

It's a big reason to not play D&D5.

[Telok]

If this thread is going to be nothing but a rehash of how to houserule/interpret the current D&D version of everything noncombat to make it not lol-random then could we mark it as such and move it to the right subforum?

[Zuras]

If this thread is going to be nothing but a rehash of how to houserule/interpret the current D&D version of everything noncombat to make it not lol-random then could we mark it as such and move it to the right subforum?

I actually, started the thread in response to complaints about Pathfinder 2e’s skill system, but I did ask for specific examples, which is going to naturally lead to more D&D 5e examples than anything else.

Also, it’s not like the various procedural ideas (tracking multiple successes, failing forward, success at a cost, the three clue method for mysteries) aren’t reasonably system neutral. I’m not sure how such a discussion is anything other than general. I play 5e without any codified house rules myself, but I use ideas from GURPS, FATE, Dungeon World and half a dozen other games in handling skill-based challenges.

[Tanarii]

That's because people who use "mother-may-I" as a derogatory are wrong. "Mother-may-I" is an actual game with actual rules, not something a game "devolves" into; there's a pretty good chance your experiences with FATE (etc.) are equivalent to Mother-may-I played correctly.
I've been seeing this terminology used on these forums for years without ever realizing Mother-may-I is an actual game. And knowing that an looking up the rules, you're entirely correct. What's being derogatorily called Mother-May-I is nothing like the game. :smallconfused:

I can't see playing Fate or any other RPG like it though. Because as I understand it, playing an RPG like Mother-may-I would be the GM instructing the players on what their characters are to do, and them either asking GM-May-I then executing it, or forgetting to ask and ... I dunno, going back to town?

Edit: What's being disparaged in terms of a skill system would probably be more effectively disparaged by calling it after the game "Twenty questions" instead. Which I have occasionally seen it called as well.

[Zuras]

I've been seeing this terminology used on these forums for years without ever realizing Mother-may-I is an actual game. And knowing that an looking up the rules, you're entirely correct. What's being derogatorily called Mother-May-I is nothing like the game. :smallconfused:

I can't see playing Fate or any other RPG like it though. Because as I understand it, playing an RPG like Mother-may-I would be the GM instructing the players on what their characters are to do, and them either asking GM-May-I then executing it, or forgetting to ask and ... I dunno, going back to town?

Edit: What's being disparaged in terms of a skill system would probably be more effectively disparaged by calling it after the game "Twenty questions" instead. Which I have occasionally seen it called as well.

Fundamentally the game is supposed to be a conversation between the players and GM, with periodic consultations to an RNG when you want to avoid predetermined outcomes. Calling it Mother-May-I is just one way of stating you’re having a bad conversation.

It can be a big problem, but in my experience it’s just a sub-category of problems caused when the players and GM aren’t on the same page.

[Tanarii]

Calling it Mother-May-I is just one way of stating you’re having a bad conversation.
That's not the context I see it used in.

I see it used as "I don't know what value the GM is going to assign to my probability of success before I tell her what the action is."

Meanwhile the game Mother-May-I appears to be "do as you're told, but only if you remember to ask nicely first, otherwise get punished". (Reference: https://www.toyassociation.org//genius/play-ideas-tips/play-ideas/mother-may-i-game.aspx#.ZDOzoy9lAgo)

[Vahnavoi]

I've been seeing this terminology used on these forums for years without ever realizing Mother-may-I is an actual game. And knowing that an looking up the rules, you're entirely correct. What's being derogatorily called Mother-May-I is nothing like the game. :smallconfused:

And now you now better. :smallamused: I'll explain what the spirit of the derogatory is along with more things about the actual Mother-may-I game below.


I can't see playing Fate or any other RPG like it though. Because as I understand it, playing an RPG like Mother-may-I would be the GM instructing the players on what their characters are to do, and them either asking GM-May-I then executing it, or forgetting to ask and ... I dunno, going back to town?

Consider what the people who want to know every target number beforehand actually want. They want a game designer write in a book instructing exactly what their character can do and how, which they then have to ask their game master to execute, and if they fail to follow the instructions or communicate their intent to their game master, either nothing happens or they fail and suffer the consequences.

In short: everybody who is following rules set by someone else is already playing Mother-may-I in the sense you are using it in this paragraph. Those who complain about it just have this weird insistence that a person who usually isn't even present (writer of a gamebook) would or should be a better "mother" than the person actually holding their game (the local game master).

There is, however, slightly more to this, see end of this post.


Edit: What's being disparaged in terms of a skill system would probably be more effectively disparaged by calling it after the game "Twenty questions" instead. Which I have occasionally seen it called as well.

Which is even sillier. I would guess that, along with the complaint, you have seen someone say "I don't want to guess what my game master is thinking". The entire point of "Twenty questions" is that with twenty yes-or-no questions it's possible to logically deduce what's in anyone's mind, regardless of what it is. The game's interesting enough that some roleplaying games already include it as a subgame - see, for example, D&D's divination spells. The corollary being that Twenty questions would make an excellent backbone for information-acquiring skills in a skill system.

Furthermore, since any consistent scenario is open to logical inquiry, a savvy player can use the format of Twenty questions to inquire and deduce information in any game that allows them to ask questions. So, people who try to use name of the game as a disparaging comment usually just mean they think their game master isn't giving them enough information, they hate having to ask questions or they hate having to reason about the answers. The first part can be valid, the latter two usually just means the complainer is a negative nelly. If the problem is that a player isn't allowed to ask questions to deduce information, then the comparison to Twenty questions is invalid to begin with.


That's not the context I see it used in.

I see it used as "I don't know what value the GM is going to assign to my probability of success before I tell her what the action is."

Meanwhile the game Mother-May-I appears to be "do as you're told, but only if you remember to ask nicely first, otherwise get punished". (Reference: https://www.toyassociation.org//genius/play-ideas-tips/play-ideas/mother-may-i-game.aspx#.ZDOzoy9lAgo)

That ruleset is a bit odd because it is different in one important respect to one classic version of the game - this is not unusual, children's games have numerous common variants under the same name. However, that rule difference explains the disconnect. Let me quote Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_May_I%3F) on the same topic and you'll see:

"One player plays the "mother", "father" or "captain". The other players are the "children" or "crewmembers". To begin the game, the mother or father stands at one end of a room and turns around facing away, while all the children line up at the other end. The children take turns asking "Mother/Father, may I ____?" and makes a movement suggestion..."

Underlines for emphasis.

In the other common variant, the players have to negotiate their move with the "mother", not simply do as they're told. Which is, in a nutshell, the FATE paradigm of negotiating your action and fair arbitration to it.

But it doesn't stop there. This negotiation paradigm is something that can be used to play any turn-based game, and is in fact a natural way to play any turn-bases game with a referee when a player is uncertain of or unfamiliar with the rules. (Player: "hey, referee, may I do this?" Referee: *checks rules* "You may / you may not".) This applies regardless of how hardcoded the rules are - to bring us back to main topic, whether target numbers are taken from a preplanned table or decided on the spot makes little difference to a player who doesn't know what the target number is.

People who use "Mother-may-I" as derogatory hates this negotiation step. They want the information to already be there on a cheatsheet so they can spy it on their own leisure. They might want this because skipping the negotiation step makes a game faster. This may or may not be fair; as noted above with "twenty questions", it's possible a game master is genuinely giving too little information. But quite often, these possibly valid criticisms blend together with other pet peeves that have little to do with Mother-may-I. Often, the game is brought up a derogatory simply because it's a children's game, and some people are actively hostile to any notion that their super-serious-game-for-adults-that-is-totally-not-playing-pretend-with-friends is somehow equivalent to a children's game

Meanwhile, the actual Mother-may-I game exist to subtly teach kids, in a fun way, basic things like identifying who is in charge, patiently waiting for your turn, making reasonable suggestions and deciding whether the person in charge is giving reasonable commands. You know, things that are good manners in almost any tabletop game. I would go so far to suggest that, given time, any playgroup seeking to play roleplaying games together ought to play few rounds of Mother-May-I first. People who do badly in it or refuse to do so in principle aren't going to be good company.

[Captain Cap]

In short: everybody who is following rules set by someone else is already playing Mother-may-I in the sense you are using it in this paragraph. Those who complain about it just have this weird insistence that a person who usually isn't even present (writer of a gamebook) would or should be a better "mother" than the person actually holding their game (the local game master).
It's about expectations: if I know beforehand (as it is already laid out in an accessible ruleset) what it takes to be a good climber in the game, what I can expect a good climber to do, how much of a good climber a character can be, then I can create a good climber character whose skill is gonna reflect in the game, that is, I can be sure the role I intend to play is gonna match with how it will actually play out, at the benefit of immersion.
If my super-detective can't be expected to reliably analyze a crime scene, then I'm not playing a super-detective, I'm playing a guy who's pretending to be a super-detective.

Of course, you can always (and should anyway) talk with your DM beforehand to lay out such expectations, but having an already established and agreed upon base for consistency makes everything easier and the expectations more reliable.

[Vahnavoi]

@Captain Cap: there's no point in building expectations on a ruleset without acceptance of a "mother" equivalent; an "already established and agreed upon base" doesn't spawn out of nothing, it requires people to accept authority of some source.

That's why using Mother-may-I as derogatory misses it's mark; if you aren't playing it with your local game master, you are playing it with writer of a game book, a panel of other players, or some other entity that fills the role of the "mother" and confirms "yes, these are the expectations you may use".

This doesn't mean what you said is wrong, it just means we don't ever have to mention Mother-may-I to discuss your actual points, namely, merits of having extensive foreknowledge to build your expectations on.

There, I'd tell you to take a peek at the difficulty thread, where one point under discussion is how much predictive planning is necessary for a functional game to begin with. Personally, I find many aspirations of the sort you refer to as "creating a good climber" to be build on sand; trying to codify (and then stick to!) enough expectations so that the idea in the player's head will be matched in actual play is frequently a harder problem than negotiating such a character at a table. (Which is why I, when I have any truly exotic or esoteric character concept in mind, play freeform to realize those concepts and just tell other people in plain English how they are supposed to work.)

To tie this back to the main topic, when it comes to games that use target numbers, the games where it's easiest to build a character so that it works as a player thinks it would, tend to be those with simplest and clearest system math; the target numbers may be floating (read: decided on the spot by a game master) but they are bounded in a way that makes counting a range of odds easy in one's head or at least with minimal use of a pocket calculator. For the same reason, these games often require the least amount of expectations to play; understanding what you're supposed to do takes 5 minutes of back-and-forth with a game master, even if you've never read the game rules yourself.

[Captain Cap]

@Captain Cap: there's no point in building expectations on a ruleset without acceptance of a "mother" equivalent; an "already established and agreed upon base" doesn't spawn out of nothing, it requires people to accept authority of some source.
But they get to accept or not the authority after already knowing what the answers to "may I" are gonna be, at least relatively to that "mother". I imagine that's the difference prompting the use of the expression.


I find many aspirations of the sort you refer to as "creating a good climber" to be build on sand
It depends on the ground you're building it on, though. In 5e, yes, it would be mostly sand, while other systems with more guidance could provide a firmer ground.
On the other, if instead I want to create a "good fighter", 5e is as as good as concrete.


trying to codify (and then stick to!) enough expectations so that the idea in the player's head will be matched in actual play is frequently a harder problem than negotiating such a character at a table.
That's right, it is harder, that's why such approach would require a stronger leg to stand on than case by case rulings.


To tie this back to the main topic, when it comes to games that use target numbers, the games where it's easiest to build a character so that it works as a player thinks it would, tend to be those with simplest and clearest system math; the target numbers may be floating (read: decided on the spot by a game master) but they are bounded in a way that makes counting a range of odds easy in one's head or at least with minimal use of a pocket calculator.
That makes sense. The less the moving parts, the less a GM has to adjudicate each time.

[kyoryu]

I feel like there's three aspects of "Mother May I" that are useful to tease apart.

1. When difficulties are given
2. How difficulties are given
3. What difficulties are given

The first two, to me, are mostly a matter of perception. The info is coming from the GM. Whether the GM says "DC 15" when you ask the difficulty, or whether they mark down "solid stone wall" doesn't change that. So there's every bit as much of permission either way. Of course, the first one is rather exhausting for the GM, as they must write down, in some way, the difficulty (or the factors leading to the difficulty) for every single object in ever single scene.

The third one is, perhaps, the interesting one. I can see two possible negative GM behaviors that could lead to it being an issue.

The first one is just the GM increasing difficulties for things they don't want the players to do. This is just bad GMing. Note that for the most part, it can still be accomplished even if the information is given up front.

And, honestly, it's just bad GMing, and so the "don't play with bad people" advice comes to mind.

The second is more interesting, I think. And perhaps relevant in a 3.x-focused forum. This is the idea that there's no standard, and so the GM sets up "fair" difficulties based on what they think the difficulty should be. But, those are also based on the skills that they see. So if the best climber has a climb of 5, they'd make the difficulty 15 to get a 50/50 chance. But if the best climber had a 10 skill, the difficulty would be 20.

This completely negates any skill investment. And it's a problem in any game that really allows you to spend arbitrary points to increase some skills.

I don't see this in Fate, because Fate doesn't allow for arbitrary skill buys. You get your "pyramid" and that's it, so as a GM I know what skill calibration is.

The other solution is to make sure there are well communicated standards for what ratings should be used - this can be by the actual in-world description of the thing (the infamous oak tree). I think "target challenges by level" is also reasonable in this case, provided the GM also understands that this should be when tackling level-appropriate challenges.

I find that second case more interesting because it can be a bad result when everybody is actually operating in good faith. But I think that a reasonable calibration of expected difficulties is, generally, enough to preserve the value of skill investment.


It's about expectations: if I know beforehand (as it is already laid out in an accessible ruleset) what it takes to be a good climber in the game, what I can expect a good climber to do, how much of a good climber a character can be, then I can create a good climber character whose skill is gonna reflect in the game, that is, I can be sure the role I intend to play is gonna match with how it will actually play out, at the benefit of immersion.
If my super-detective can't be expected to reliably analyze a crime scene, then I'm not playing a super-detective, I'm playing a guy who's pretending to be a super-detective.

This gets into the calibration issue I mentioned. In Fate, the climber is going to be "take a high Athletics and an appropriate stunt, maybe toss in an aspect" and you're done. If there's any lack of clarity, talk about your expectations in Session Zero so everyone is on the same page.

Yes, there's a conversation there, but in my experience (again, with the right game support), I find that to be more useful than trying to encode every possible specialty or skill in a set of game rules.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It depends on the ground you're building it on, though. In 5e, yes, it would be mostly sand, while other systems with more guidance could provide a firmer ground.
On the other, if instead I want to create a "good fighter", 5e is as as good as concrete.



Except...yeah. Either I'm fundamentally misunderstanding what people mean by "building a good climber", or people are expecting way more than the system promises. 5e is built around the idea that you can't, generally, go "off the d20" and assure success. On anything. So if you want to build someone who can always climb anything...well...you can't do it via the ability check system[1]. Because the system says "no, that's not something playable (at least not that way)." That's asking why your pitchfork doesn't work well as a soup spoon. So asking for absolute skill (being able to hit some arbitrary benchmark for "can make climbing checks X% of the time), that's not something the system even allows for[2].

But if what you want is to be good at climbing, relative to other ability checks, the way forward is trivial. High Strength and/or expertise in Athletics. Take thief rogue to level 3 or 10+ for extra bonuses (being able to climb at normal speed, not half speed at level 3, getting to always take a minimum of 10 on every proficient check at level 10+). Or...learn spiderclimb.

So if you truly want to build a guy who is the best at climbing, two possible builds are:
* Human Barbarian X, max STR, take Skill Expert: Athletics at level 1. Now while raging you have (at level 1): +7 and advantage on checks made to climb. At level 20, you have +19 and advantage on checks made to climb. So if the DC is below 21, you succeed. And can routinely (50% of the time, not even counting rage's advantage) succeed on DC 30 checks, the hardest ones the game allows for (and which are supposed to be extremely rare).
* Any race thief rogue X, don't dump STR (say start at +2), take expertise in Athletics early on. Numbers are slightly lower, but you're faster at climbing past level 3 AND post level 10 your floor is tons higher. At level 20, assuming you don't actually increase your strength at all, you're looking at a floor of a 24 on the check. And you're above 20 minimum from level 10 on. And that's true even if your STR is +0.

So yeah. Even without magic, it's fairly trivial to make a character that can effortlessly succeed on any reasonable climb check at higher levels. In fact, all you have to do is take the obvious options. No splat diving, no obscure items, no obscure races. Choose things that obviously make you better at climbing and go.

[1] spells can give some options here. And you can push beyond DC 20 fairly easily (as shown in the examples).
[2] not to mention that climbing is a horrible example, because the rules for that are actually very clear. Climbing checks are the exception, not the rule. Anyone can climb most surfaces, no check needed, just half speed. Checks are only for exceptionally smooth/hard to climb surfaces. Compare that to 3e where your average fighter couldn't climb the easy wall at the climbing gym most of the time and only specialists could climb the hard wall. In 5e, since there are handholds, the stated default in the PHB is "yeah, you move at half speed. Climb away."

[GloatingSwine]

I've been seeing this terminology used on these forums for years without ever realizing Mother-may-I is an actual game. And knowing that an looking up the rules, you're entirely correct. What's being derogatorily called Mother-May-I is nothing like the game. :smallconfused:


What, language shifts and subcultures develop their own meanings for phrases? Say it ain't so!

When people on this forum uses the phrase "mother-may-I" what they're generally referring to is nothing to do with the game of the same name but a lack of alignment in expectations of what will be possible outside the bounds of the printed rules of an RPG system, leading the players to have to guess at what the GM is and is not going to allow them to attempt.

To take the "being a good climber" example, the system can tell you what a good climber is, it can't tell you what you're allowed to try and climb. If you and the GM have sufficiently different expectations for that you may find yourself playing mother-may-I.

[Tanarii]

That ruleset is a bit odd because it is different in one important respect to one classic version of the game - this is not unusual, children's games have numerous common variants under the same name. However, that rule difference explains the disconnect. Let me quote Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_May_I%3F) on the same topic and you'll see:

"One player plays the "mother", "father" or "captain". The other players are the "children" or "crewmembers". To begin the game, the mother or father stands at one end of a room and turns around facing away, while all the children line up at the other end. The children take turns asking "Mother/Father, may I ____?" and makes a movement suggestion..."

Underlines for emphasis.
Okay, that makes the use of the phrase far more understandable.

As in the player states they want to undertake activity X, and then depend on the DM saying any of:
Yes
Yes if you can roll DC N
No, but ...

I agree with your later statement that this doesn't really address the real question of knowing the answer before determining if you will actually undertake the activity.

There are a ton of modern systems that have a rule like PbtA or MYZ engines:you do the thing you roll and if you roll you do the thing.

In the case of committing to the action and rolling being the same thing, knowing your rough probabilities of results in advance (which I'd say you usually do with both PbtA and MYZ) it makes decision making less scary. So to speak.

[Quertus]

@Captain Cap: there's no point in building expectations on a ruleset without acceptance of a "mother" equivalent; an "already established and agreed upon base" doesn't spawn out of nothing, it requires people to accept authority of some source.

That's why using Mother-may-I as derogatory misses it's mark; if you aren't playing it with your local game master, you are playing it with writer of a game book, a panel of other players, or some other entity that fills the role of the "mother" and confirms "yes, these are the expectations you may use".

This doesn't mean what you said is wrong, it just means we don't ever have to mention Mother-may-I to discuss your actual points, namely, merits of having extensive foreknowledge to build your expectations on.

There, I'd tell you to take a peek at the difficulty thread, where one point under discussion is how much predictive planning is necessary for a functional game to begin with. Personally, I find many aspirations of the sort you refer to as "creating a good climber" to be build on sand; trying to codify (and then stick to!) enough expectations so that the idea in the player's head will be matched in actual play is frequently a harder problem than negotiating such a character at a table. (Which is why I, when I have any truly exotic or esoteric character concept in mind, play freeform to realize those concepts and just tell other people in plain English how they are supposed to work.)

I mean, in chess, you sit down to the game knowing the rules, and can take your actions knowing that they will work; in Mother May I, the GM makes up the rules when you ask if you can do something. That’s not sounding like misusing the concept to me to use it to contrast a game where you don’t know the outcome of an action until you ask the GM to one where you do. Football would be a very different game if each umpire could make up how many points each touchdown / field goal / touchback / etc were worth - or even what ways there were to score points in the first place, how many downs to make what yardage, etc. Arguably, “Mother May I” has too many rules, and it’s not actually strong enough to describe the problem at hand.

It’s also related to the concept of public vs hidden information. I mean, I like Discovery, I like exploring the unknown. But, when dealing with the known, I expect to be able to make reasonable predictions about what the character can do, rather than be surprised when the overweight programmer GM declares that climbing a tree or standing on one foot are “hard”, while hacking someone’s phone is “easy”.

Put another way, there’s things that should be left to the passion and vision of an individual, and things that should be resolved in committee, tested and revised over time. “Physics”, how reality works, is in the latter category, at least where humans are concerned.

So, to the topic, common issues with DC-based skill systems, here’s the problems I remember seeing:

1) insufficient defined content / DCs / modifiers to be able to play through common “known” content without asking the GM “Mother May I” to determine DC.

2) insufficient range of DC / modifier to accurately model differences between characters. If the system has both “brain surgeon” and “middle school dropout” or “illiterate Barbarian” and “trained her mind to alter the fabric of reality” as viable characters, then there should be no comparison, and auto-success vs auto-failure should happen, not just in contrasts between them, but between any of them and Average Joe.

3) limited to producing pass/fail results.

3b) or other options poorly or inconsistently implemented

3c) often by designers who fail to realize that this is a good place to allow players to define their characters (by the costs they’re willing to pay, by the costs they pay up front vs gamble, etc).

4) emphasis on rolling / chance.

5) incoherent gatekeeping (“you’ve trained your mind to alter the fabric of reality, but can’t have more than a basic grasp of mathematics” or “in the same amount of time it took to learn to bend reality, your brother can’t have learned to balance on one foot”).

6) lack of realism / verisimilitude // produces an incoherent reality if taken to its logical conclusion.

7) no ability to handle alternate resolutions. For example, the best skill checks in 3e modules IME are the multi-DC Gather Information checks… yet they make no mention of what a Historian with Knowledge: History, or a rumor monger with Knowledge: Local might already know (not that I’m a fan of Knowledge skills).

8) bad pricing on skills.

9) fail at Character Creation.

10) poor choice of skills for skill list - skills that are too general (“magic”, “roll combat”), or too specific and incomplete (“none of these 200 skills cover what my character concept can do”), or even both in the same system.

[Telok]

8) bad pricing on skills.

9) fail at Character Creation.

Yeah, that's an amusing set. Like I've got a D&D 5e character who I chose skills/profs for at first level based on background and character stuff. Because the difference in play of +0 vs +2 or +3 vs +5 is super minor. Turns out at 15th level I now consider having to roll any skill/prof a failure. Character has +11 deceive, which las literally never come up in game, and -1 to +6 otherwise. Since all checks rolled are vs 15+ (GM is fairly good at not requiring rolls for silly trivial stuff but things like "know your own religion basics" but all "know/decipher magic" and "find info" type stuff is a check unless your character has cast the spell) any action calling for a roll is assumed to fail unless magic gets added or replaces it. The GM has ended up encouraging us to dogpile checks and get magic items/spells to skip checks just to compensate for our tendency to fail anything outside of hurting/murdering stuff no matter what our +number on the character sheets are.

Compare with several dice pool systems or Classic Traveller where high (not even max) ability stat or basic training put you over the default median targets. Even in games where the reasoning behind what to roll for is identical to D&D 5e having both max ability plus maximum skill means characters do 100% expect to out score a no bonus & no training character in challenging and difficult circumstances.

Then the whole pricing thing, yeah. Traveller is harsh, four years to learn the basics of, say, xenobiology. But that gets you from no roll or 2d6-2 vs 8+ to 2d6+1 vs 8+ and a possible bonus for high int/edu. So from a 17% chance to a 58%+ chance on the average "DC" 8 check. Although to be fair Traveller does give you 3 to 4 weeks of downtime for every hyperspace jump and you can do this concurrent with adventuring. Most other games make it easier to pick up new skills at the basic "and now I can do X" level. D&D has had it pretty weird over the years but we're at a level now of recommendations to take the "happy go lucky magic lute player" or "nimble stabby law breaker" classes for a warrior to get significantly better at swimming & climbing or for the religious clasess to get better at knowing religious stuff. Granted, those will get the character from (usually about & assuming dediacring character advancement to it at 12th-16th level) +5 to +10 or +10 to +15, which is significant but hella costly given the game's character advancement structure.

[Vahnavoi]

It depends on the ground you're building it on, though. In 5e, yes, it would be mostly sand, while other systems with more guidance could provide a firmer ground.

I don't play 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons and wasn't thinking of it when I made my statement. If I was thinking of an edition of D&D at all, it would've instead been the 3rd, and other games more complex than 5th edition.

At this point, you're likely confused, because such complex games are often what people who complain about 5th say they want to play. To clear this confusion, I suggest you look at my earlier multi-point list of flaws I've encountered in target numbers.

Have you done that? Good. Simply put, systems that try to be really comprehensive often have more of these flaws than simpler systems. The extra rules serve to obfuscate what would be a good idea, they are better at building false expectations than actually being predictive. Which, in practice, means that a character build around expectation of, say, being a "good climber", might be anything but.

In such games, conceptualizing a character as a "good climber" before play starts is a fool's game. They are, instead, just a "climber" and how good they are is best answered empirically.


That's right, it is harder, that's why such approach would require a stronger leg to stand on than case by case rulings.

What I wished to communicate is that making your "stronger leg" is a harder problem than making case by case rulings. See also: the "sweet spot for success" thread, especially Telok's posts.

---


I mean, in chess, you sit down to the game knowing the rules, and can take your actions knowing that they will work. In Mother May I, the GM makes up the rules when you ask if you can do something.

Chess is a complete deterministic rules game made to work without a referee, while Mother-may-I and most tabletop roleplaying games are incomplete indeterminist rules games reliant on a referee. In other words, the gap between Chess and most tabletop roleplaying games is already bigger than the gap between most tabletop roleplaying games and Mother-may-I.

It's possible to make a roleplaying game closer to Chess, but you might want to take a minute to consider why most tabletop roleplaying games aren't like that.


That’s not sounding like misusing the concept to me to use it to contrast a game where you don’t know the outcome of an action until you ask the GM to one where you do. Football would be a very different game if each umpire could make up how many points each touchdown / field goal / touchback / etc were worth - or even what ways there were to score points in the first place, how many downs to make what yardage, etc.

Every game of D&D is different because a game master has to select or make a scenario - equivalent to an umpire choosing how many goals there are on the field, where they are and how big the playing field is. Same applies to most other tabletop roleplaying games.

Point being, these comparisons don't really get to the point why target numbers are the place where a player ought to put their foot down. Quite often, they give the appearance of sifting a fly out of your soup but swallowing a camel.


Arguably, “Mother May I” has too many rules, and it’s not actually strong enough to describe the problem at hand.

As noted, the game doesn't ever need to be mentioned to discuss the actual points. It was used in an internet essay once and people latched on to it. It's up there with TV Tropes using mangled proverbs and puns as name for tropes that don't have a thing to do with the proverbs (they have a list, but you can't find it under Non-Indicative Names).

If the issue is that you don't want to petition a game master for common information, it's possible to say just that.

(Yes, GloatingSwine, language shifts and hobbyists come up with special meanings for old words. Sometimes, language shifts for stupid reasons such as hobbyists pointlessly coming up with special meanings for old words. It's normal, but only in the same sense as it's normal for food to spoil if you leave it in your fridge for too long. No-one has to be happy about it nor pretent nothing can be done about it. :smalltongue:)

[LibraryOgre]

a) forgetting that requiring a series of multiple successes dramatically worsens the odds for any task, and

Related to this, something I did last night with my Eldest was to have a roll that helped the actual roll, instead of was necessary. His character was telling a story (about how the local powerful family had ritually murdered her dad), and so I gave him two rolls: If she succeeded at her Performance test, she got advantage on her Persuasion test. Failure on her Performance meant a regular roll on Persuasion; a natural 1 on Performance meant disadvantage on Persuasion. He rolled a 1 on Performance... then a 16 and an 18 on Persuasion.



c) Relatedly, accidentally gating all non-specialist characters out of participating by setting the DCs to be a reasonable challenge for the party expert (especially in games with constant scaling/no bounded accuracy). This is fine for tasks like developing a cure for the plague virus, but terrible for many social and exploration tasks where other PCs should reasonably be able to participate.

This is a big problem, though, as you mention, it's more of a problem when you don't have some form of limitation on skill gaps. 5e does bounded accuracy, which does well. Savage Worlds has skill caps... it's rare to have above a d12 in a skill, and some skills have a floor of d4. It keeps expectations of skill levels more in line than 3.x games, where DCs might scale with the player levels, soon outstripping anyone who didn't specialize.

[King of Nowhere]

Relatedly, accidentally gating all non-specialist characters out of participating by setting the DCs to be a reasonable challenge for the party expert (especially in games with constant scaling/no bounded accuracy). This is fine for tasks like developing a cure for the plague virus[emphasis mine], but terrible for many social and exploration tasks where other PCs should reasonably be able to participate.
This is a big problem, though, as you mention, it's more of a problem when you don't have some form of limitation on skill gaps. 5e does bounded accuracy, which does well. Savage Worlds has skill caps... it's rare to have above a d12 in a skill, and some skills have a floor of d4. It keeps expectations of skill levels more in line than 3.x games, where DCs might scale with the player levels, soon outstripping anyone who didn't specialize.

I see a greater problem with games that don't have this skill gap. It is only sensible that developing a cure for the plague can only be attempted by the specialist. A system that caps skill check basically has no task that's reserved for specialists. basically, the party barbarian can walk into a lab, sneeze into a test tube, and develop the plague cure that the scientist has been seeking for months. I hate 5e for that.
Yes, high dc checks could be abused by poor dming, setting every dc at 30+ for anything that the characters ever try to do, but that's not a good reason to remove a feature just because some people misuse them. it would be like forbidding kitchen knives because they can be used to stab people. sky-high skill bonuses and skill dc have their purposes, removing them entirely is bad.
and this kind of premise - remove a mechanic because you don't trust the dm to handle it correctly - is a terrible premise for rpgs. the dm has the power to screw up your character regardless, intentiojally, or by accident. you have to trust your gm in order to play. else, you may as well avoid any combat encounter entirely.

[Pex]

I see a greater problem with games that don't have this skill gap. It is only sensible that developing a cure for the plague can only be attempted by the specialist. A system that caps skill check basically has no task that's reserved for specialists. basically, the party barbarian can walk into a lab, sneeze into a test tube, and develop the plague cure that the scientist has been seeking for months. I hate 5e for that.
Yes, high dc checks could be abused by poor dming, setting every dc at 30+ for anything that the characters ever try to do, but that's not a good reason to remove a feature just because some people misuse them. it would be like forbidding kitchen knives because they can be used to stab people. sky-high skill bonuses and skill dc have their purposes, removing them entirely is bad.
and this kind of premise - remove a mechanic because you don't trust the dm to handle it correctly - is a terrible premise for rpgs. the dm has the power to screw up your character regardless, intentiojally, or by accident. you have to trust your gm in order to play. else, you may as well avoid any combat encounter entirely.

An alternative to high DC numbers is to have a separate set of DCs that only characters trained or the appropriate specialized level can do. For example, your barbarian can make a DC 15 Medicine check to do CPR and bring an unconscious 0 hit point character to conscious at 1d4 hit points, but only the Specialist Healer who invested a character building resource cost into Doctor of Medicine on the character sheet can make a DC 15 Medicine check to cure a disease.

This should be words on paper part of the rules of the game system skill use not DM fiat so that players can make an informed decision on where to allocate their Specialized Skill Use resource expenditures.

[Tanarii]

Off the top of my head I'd rather see the advanced skill be a different scaling check than just an additional use of the same check.

Otherwise you still need to worry about bonuses that push the check off the die vs small bonuses for untrained for normal stuff.

Of course, another approach is to ditch the paradigm of one die roll + bonus compared to TN entirely. Each comes with its benefits and drawbacks of course. Percentage (so the range of PC skill is 0-100%) is one method that's been used extensively. Or bell curves (2d6 or 3d6) with very limited bonuses are another. Dice Pools (/ugh :smallamused:).

[Quertus]

An alternative to high DC numbers is to have a separate set of DCs that only characters trained or the appropriate specialized level can do. For example, your barbarian can make a DC 15 Medicine check to do CPR and bring an unconscious 0 hit point character to conscious at 1d4 hit points, but only the Specialist Healer who invested a character building resource cost into Doctor of Medicine on the character sheet can make a DC 15 Medicine check to cure a disease.

This should be words on paper part of the rules of the game system skill use not DM fiat so that players can make an informed decision on where to allocate their Specialized Skill Use resource expenditures.

Huh. I like skills and DCs that far exceed the die range, but, from a Simulationist perspective, I can see how what you said makes sense. To put it in 3e parlance, I took the feat that lets me use the Computer skill to easily write code others can't; some people took the Layout feat to let them use the Computer skill to easily create good interfaces that others can't; yet other people the Hardware feat to let them use the Computer skill to easily fix physical problems others can't.

I guess there's more than one way to gatekeep, and to identify your specialists.

[Zuras]

Huh. I like skills and DCs that far exceed the die range, but, from a Simulationist perspective, I can see how what you said makes sense. To put it in 3e parlance, I took the feat that lets me use the Computer skill to easily write code others can't; some people took the Layout feat to let them use the Computer skill to easily create good interfaces that others can't; yet other people the Hardware feat to let them use the Computer skill to easily fix physical problems others can't.

I guess there's more than one way to gatekeep, and to identify your specialists.

For things like the cure the space virus example, you can also turn it into multiple rolls, either requiring multiple successes or letting successes accomplish “damage” against the challenge.

If it’s going to take a bunch of play time, you can also split it up into a multi-part problem. Everyone at the table knows only Doctor Impossible can synthesize a cure, but the Doctor still needs the rest of the team out in the field gathering data to properly diagnose the cause making a bunch of perception and investigation checks.

[King of Nowhere]

If it’s going to take a bunch of play time, you can also split it up into a multi-part problem. Everyone at the table knows only Doctor Impossible can synthesize a cure, but the Doctor still needs the rest of the team out in the field gathering data to properly diagnose the cause making a bunch of perception and investigation checks.
Yes, this is how i try to handle things to give non-specialists some way to contribute. Find something that's within their field of expertise that they can do to help

[Quertus]

“I wipe the brow of Doctor Impossible.”
— ancient gamer saying, meaning “I have nothing to contribute to this scenario.”

[Vahnavoi]

Most discussion on skill gaps is overly focused on rare events.

If you have simple bounded system where upper limit on a single check is 90% and the lower bound is 10%, you get a situation where the expert fails and the non-expert 1% of the time. Add in a hitpoint-like mechanic that allows the expert to fail more often than the non-expert, and the non-experts chance to succeed will asymptotically approach zero in comparison.

[Zuras]

“I wipe the brow of Doctor Impossible.”
— ancient gamer saying, meaning “I have nothing to contribute to this scenario.”


In actual play, Doctor Impossible mostly used his amazing science powers to enhance the psychic abilities of Captain Improbable so he could reverse the polarity of negative space wedgies. Granted that was because we were playing FATE, which makes it simple and natural to help each other out using the “create an advantage” action, rather than a d20 DC based system.

[King of Nowhere]

every time someone mentions a way their table cleverly interpreted/twisted a game mechanic to adapt it better to the circumstance, it reinforces my argument that it doesn't really matter which mechanic you use; it's how you use it that makes a difference

[Zuras]

every time someone mentions a way their table cleverly interpreted/twisted a game mechanic to adapt it better to the circumstance, it reinforces my argument that it doesn't really matter which mechanic you use; it's how you use it that makes a difference

That’s true for the core mechanics—you can get reasonable results from d20 roll-over, d20 roll-under, d100, 2d6, 3d6, and so on. The system itself does need to have a solid baseline of examples and techniques set out for determining consequences and resolving situations where a single pass-fail check is inappropriate.

The key is the GM needs to be experienced with multiple systems to have the needed tools. D&D 5e gives you a lot more latitude to resolve skill checks than it gives you tools to exercise that latitude with. Granted, lots of 5e-only DMs have actually been exposed to many different techniques, because tons of adventures use tracked successes/failures, effort accumulation, explicit permissions for who can attempt checks, and many other ideas from other games, since the typical adventure writer has played multiple other systems.

Most systems do a good-enough job if you play them as intended, but most simply don’t have rules, even modular ones, to support specific genres of play. If you really want to track encumbrance in 5e, for example, you’re better off importing rules from an OSR system that cares about it. Similarly, if you’re running an Intrigue campaign, you’ll need to find a third party supplement or steal rules from an espionage game for detailed rules on detecting characters’ accents and making good forgeries of official documents.

[King of Nowhere]

you’ll need to find a third party supplement or steal rules from an espionage game...

...or even homebrew them yourself.
yeah, the key thing is, when the system you are using does not handle well the thing you are trying to do, apply creativity

[Quertus]

In actual play, Doctor Impossible mostly used his amazing science powers to enhance the psychic abilities of Captain Improbable so he could reverse the polarity of negative space wedgies. Granted that was because we were playing FATE, which makes it simple and natural to help each other out using the “create an advantage” action, rather than a d20 DC based system.

I kinda figured wiping Doctor Impossible’s brow was an aid another / Create an advantage Action…

[Zuras]

I kinda figured wiping Doctor Impossible’s brow was an aid another / Create an advantage Action…

True, but brow-wiping is far more important in sympathetic magic systems than sci-fi, generally. An unintended drop of sweat in a potion you’re making or on the chalk circle you drew to keep a summoned spirit contained is far more likely to kill you. Still, it’s not nothing to say you wiped the brow of Doctor Impossible during the battle of the Tannhäuser Gate.

[King of Nowhere]

An unintended drop of sweat in a potion you’re making or on the chalk circle you drew to keep a summoned spirit contained is far more likely to kill you.

A drop of sweat into a cellular colture can ruin the production of a whole batch of life-saving drugs, potentially killing more people than the summoned spirit - if we didn't have precautions for that.
The escaping spirit makes for a better story, though.
I now wonder if wizards should operate in a clean room, wearing full environmental suits

[OldTrees1]

I now wonder if wizards should operate in a clean room, wearing full environmental suits

Naw. Full environmental suits contain too many strange materials. Any one of them might have a strange interaction with the magical experiment. It is better to stick to the traditional robes that have known interactions.
- Wizard that doesn't like how hot the env suits would get.

[Zuras]

A drop of sweat into a cellular colture can ruin the production of a whole batch of life-saving drugs, potentially killing more people than the summoned spirit - if we didn't have precautions for that.
The escaping spirit makes for a better story, though.
I now wonder if wizards should operate in a clean room, wearing full environmental suits

In Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, which feature magic operating entirely on scientific principles, a wizard kills himself when trying to kill all the cockroaches in his lab building because his sweat drips in the mixture he’s using.

Basically if you want to make a voodoo doll to curse somebody you better use very clean lab technique, otherwise you’re gonna get dandruff on it or accidentally kill your cat. We know magic doesn’t work that way in D&D though, or wizards would be going beardless and using hairless cats as familiars. Alternately, Magic could work that way, but everyone constantly uses prestidigitation to keep things clean.

[Beleriphon]

On DC systems I like the was Mophidious' 2d20 does things. You're rolling for successes, where what counts as a success is a target number determined by by the character's attributes, while the number of successes is a GM Thing.

[Quertus]

In Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, which feature magic operating entirely on scientific principles, a wizard kills himself when trying to kill all the cockroaches in his lab building because his sweat drips in the mixture he’s using.

Basically if you want to make a voodoo doll to curse somebody you better use very clean lab technique, otherwise you’re gonna get dandruff on it or accidentally kill your cat. We know magic doesn’t work that way in D&D though, or wizards would be going beardless and using hairless cats as familiars. Alternately, Magic could work that way, but everyone constantly uses prestidigitation to keep things clean.

Or just not cast Genocide spells? That might be the easier answer.

[Hrugner]

In Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, which feature magic operating entirely on scientific principles, a wizard kills himself when trying to kill all the cockroaches in his lab building because his sweat drips in the mixture he’s using.

Basically if you want to make a voodoo doll to curse somebody you better use very clean lab technique, otherwise you’re gonna get dandruff on it or accidentally kill your cat. We know magic doesn’t work that way in D&D though, or wizards would be going beardless and using hairless cats as familiars. Alternately, Magic could work that way, but everyone constantly uses prestidigitation to keep things clean.

I do like the idea of playing a wizard who is really bad at whatever standard protections are used to prevent these accidents, so he only casts in a "clean room", or uses a magically sealed environmental suit.

[Cluedrew]

Has anyone pinned down what a DC based skill system (or resolution mechanic generally) is? Honestly, the most central thing is actually the one I have the most to say about, which in my mind is the fact you get some score (say from rolling a d20 and adding a modifier to it) and then you compare it to a target number - the DC - for success or failure. The DC is also adjusted to show how hard the task is. But it is that succeed of fail bit that gets me.

The success outcome isn't bad. There are some "jump to the moon" situations which are usually pretty easy to get around with only rolling for possible things. Mostly though "you do the thing you set out to do" works just fine.

The failure outcome is where things get weird. Because "you don't do the thing you tried" is oddly open ended. On one end there is the "nothing happens" outcome where things can stall, set you back to where you were before and why not just go at it again? On the other end there is the "campaigns over" outcome, where the cost of failure is far more than what should be riding on a single roll. This one is a lack of guard rails really, if you are careful it should never come up, but its something you have to watch for.

Finally, there are not in between results. So if you want anything between complete success and complete failure requires multiple checks. It works, and sometimes works quite well, but now you are pretty much putting another resolution system around your existing resolution system and sometimes it is kind of awkward.

[Telok]

I'd have to check through a couple adventures to find the exact reference but there was a Classic Traveller adventure with something like a "roll Computers 9+, +1 for education 10+ and +1 for Bureaucracy skill, for every point you exceed the target number <bonus stuff>, if you fail by 2 or more points <complication>, if you fail by 4 or more <bad thing>". So its not like degrees of success/failure have been unknown for the last 40 years and open ended binary rolls are aren't a solved issue.

[Zuras]

Has anyone pinned down what a DC based skill system (or resolution mechanic generally) is? Honestly, the most central thing is actually the one I have the most to say about, which in my mind is the fact you get some score (say from rolling a d20 and adding a modifier to it) and then you compare it to a target number - the DC - for success or failure. The DC is also adjusted to show how hard the task is. But it is that succeed of fail bit that gets me.

The success outcome isn't bad. There are some "jump to the moon" situations which are usually pretty easy to get around with only rolling for possible things. Mostly though "you do the thing you set out to do" works just fine.

The failure outcome is where things get weird. Because "you don't do the thing you tried" is oddly open ended. On one end there is the "nothing happens" outcome where things can stall, set you back to where you were before and why not just go at it again? On the other end there is the "campaigns over" outcome, where the cost of failure is far more than what should be riding on a single roll. This one is a lack of guard rails really, if you are careful it should never come up, but its something you have to watch for.

Finally, there are not in between results. So if you want anything between complete success and complete failure requires multiple checks. It works, and sometimes works quite well, but now you are pretty much putting another resolution system around your existing resolution system and sometimes it is kind of awkward.

There are a bunch of situations that a simple d20 meet or exceed DC system doesn’t handle. 5e doesn’t give much guidance on basic stuff, other than telling you that you have options. Whether repeated attempts are allowed, consequences for failure (and heightened consequences for failing by 5 or more) are all mentioned, as is success at a cost, failing forward and time considerations in general.

One of the big failings of the 5e DMG is that it basically gives you permission to use whatever cobbled-together hack you think makes sense in a given situation, but doesn’t give any examples. The official published adventures are full of examples, but that’s not helpful to a new DM who’s not running a published adventure.

[Zombimode]

I don't really understand the question and have to echo Cluedrew's question:

Has anyone pinned down what a DC based skill system (or resolution mechanic generally) is?

For "DC based" to be a useful qualifier there needs to be a non-empty complementary set. In other words: what is a non-DC based skill system? Is that even a thing?

To elaborate:
To my knowledge the abbreviation "DC" stands for "Difficulty Class" and was coined by D&D 3e. In that game it marks the target number for a given check. Thus, by setting the DC it is possible to modulate how hard or how easy the task is.

The corollary that I would draw from this is: any skill system in that the task resolution (the "skill check") can be modulated in a way to influence the probability or even possibility of the check to succeed is a DC based skill system. Everything else is just an implementation detail. And thus there are a lot of properties of a skill system that are not the defining line of a DC-based system.

Including:

If there is a "roll" in the first place or not: even in "you need to be THIS tall to ride" systems the DC can be modulated by lowering or raising the bar
Whether it is a flat or bell-curve etc. distribution: in 3.5 (flat distribution) a routine task is DC 10, in GURPS (bell curve) a routine task get +4 on effective skill
Whether there are degrees of success and failure: still failure ends somewhere and success starts somewhere, if that can be modulated it is DC based
The range of competency (the differences in success rates for amateurs and masters): 5e (small range) vs. 3.5 (big range)
How the mechanics for retries look like or even exist
If there is a "mechanic" in the first place: even in purely verbal games tasks can be of different difficulty levels; for an easy task the player has an easy time to convince the GM that the PC succeeds at that task, but has to get much more creative for a hard task


Under that light a "non DC based" skill system is one that uses the exact same check with the exact same range of possible outcomes for every task, equally for everyone.
Like: "whatever you do, flip a coin. If you win the flip, you succeed at what you're trying to do. If you loose, you fail."
I have the feeling that the vast overwhelming majority of game systems do not look like this and have some kind of "DC based" skill system instead.

So, to the OP: assuming that with "DC based skill system" you means something much more specific that what I have detailed above, can you clarify what exactly do you mean?

[King of Nowhere]

clearly the difference between those options is because a skill system can resolve a wide array of wildly different things, ranging from whether you can climb a tree fast enough to escape pursuit, to whether you can get the duke to increase your reward, to whether you can develop a new spell.
and you can't introduce a dozen different subsystems to deal with each of those things separately.
so you get a general system and you adapt it to each specific situation.

[Quertus]

There are some "jump to the moon" situations which are usually pretty easy to get around with only rolling for possible things.

Fortunately, the d20 system in 3e D&D handles jumping to the moon correctly, requiring something like a +1,000,0000,000 modifier or something to succeed - at which point, yeah, sure, why not? Sounds easier than balancing on a cloud, which I feel confident the system lets you accomplish with just a 3-digit DC.

“Always roll, or at least always look at the modifier vs DC, and let the system thereby tell you what is possible”.

And fix any DCs that are problematic (do you really want jumping to the moon to be that much harder than balancing on a cloud, or than using escape Artist to walk through a Wall of Force?)


Has anyone pinned down what a DC based skill system (or resolution mechanic generally) is? Honestly, the most central thing is actually the one I have the most to say about, which in my mind is the fact you get some score (say from rolling a d20 and adding a modifier to it) and then you compare it to a target number - the DC - for success or failure. The DC is also adjusted to show how hard the task is. But it is that succeed of fail bit that gets me.

I don’t think “only success or fail” is actually a property of a DC-based system. For example, multiple modules have multi-outcome Gather Information checks.

And I usually house rule a “made it by X / Failed by X” state into any DC based system. Which I still consider to be DC-based systems, even after my mods.


The success outcome isn't bad. There are some "jump to the moon" situations which are usually pretty easy to get around with only rolling for possible things. Mostly though "you do the thing you set out to do" works just fine.

The failure outcome is where things get weird. Because "you don't do the thing you tried" is oddly open ended. On one end there is the "nothing happens" outcome where things can stall, set you back to where you were before and why not just go at it again? On the other end there is the "campaigns over" outcome, where the cost of failure is far more than what should be riding on a single roll. This one is a lack of guard rails really, if you are careful it should never come up, but its something you have to watch for.

Finally, there are not in between results. So if you want anything between complete success and complete failure requires multiple checks. It works, and sometimes works quite well, but now you are pretty much putting another resolution system around your existing resolution system and sometimes it is kind of awkward.

Huh. Ok, tying everything together, I guess your question is, “is it still a DC system if you have multiple DCs or a gradient of success”; ie, if a knowledge check isn’t “do you know…” but “how much do you know”, like those multi-DC Gather Information checks.

And while my impulse has been to say, “yes”, then it makes the category rather large.

And I’m cool with that.


its not like degrees of success/failure have been unknown for the last 40 years and open ended binary rolls are aren't a solved issue.

Yeah, it’s funny how easy it is to get trapped into just a single way of looking at things.

And this thread, talking about common issues, simply exacerbates that mindset. There’s nothing intent to a DC system that it should have these problems, regardless of how common they are.


If there is a "roll" in the first place or not: even in "you need to be THIS tall to ride" systems the DC can be modulated by lowering or raising the bar

Huh. I hadn’t considered that. I guess such systems could be DC, but, depending on implementation, they could also be Gatekeeping.


For "DC based" to be a useful qualifier there needs to be a non-empty complementary set. In other words: what is a non-DC based skill system? Is that even a thing?


For a few example of things that aren’t DC systems….

WoD uses “DC and successes” dice pools, as well as just “successes” dice pools. As does Shadowrun.

Star Trek has a couple of Systems which just have “roll under”. In Call of Cthulhu, I’ve only experienced “roll under skill” and “roll under half/double skill”.

D&D 3e has Gatekeeping, where only trained Rogues can use Search to find magical traps, or some skills can only be used when Trained.

And of course there’s always “player skill” challenges.

[Cluedrew]

The corollary that I would draw from this is: any skill system in that the task resolution (the "skill check") can be modulated in a way to influence the probability or even possibility of the check to succeed is a DC based skill system.I think this one is a little too broad. Scratch that, this is way too broad. It covers every single resolution system in a role-playing game I've ever heard of except Toon's "what do we do if we don't know what a rule means" decider. Which is not to say others don't exist but its pretty rare. I would argue some of those details are important.

Some things that I would say makes it not a DC based system:
Your score is not determined by the some of dice/a die and a modifier. This is probably is one of the less important ones but someone pulled out a dice pool system as an example of a DC system I would be surprised.
The target number does not represent difficulty; either being fixed or adjusted for some other factor. For example, if the dice are set by the difficulty of a task and then you have to roll equal to or under your skill level, that would not be a DC.
There are multiple target numbers. If you grade success by which thresholds are passed that is something else. Here you could argue there is a difference between not-a-DC and DC-with-add-on, but if an add on is core to the system and used all the time, I'd say it is a different system.

To Quertus: My argument is that a multi-check system is not a DC system, but a larger system that uses a DC check as a component. Which is not an inherent problem if done correctly, but it does add more points of failure because even if you get the DC system right you could mess up the system for combining the results or deciding which one to use.

[Zuras]

I don't really understand the question and have to echo Cluedrew's question:


For "DC based" to be a useful qualifier there needs to be a non-empty complementary set. In other words: what is a non-DC based skill system? Is that even a thing?


There are lots of skill systems not based on DCs. Many systems have a target number set by the character’s skill, or even a system set number for success. Savage Worlds always registers a success on a 4 or higher, but hitting a 4 is much more likely on a d10 than a d4, for example. There are also lots of roll-under your stat/skill systems, particularly in the OSR.

Now, in theory the math can be equivalent if you apply penalties to the skill roll based on task difficulty, but psychologically it feels different, and GMs tend to stick to a smaller range and are less likely to throw a DC 20 ladder at you.

Also, the discussion began in response to people slagging the Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5e skill systems. My question in response was basically “what problems do you see with the d20 DC skill system (as seen in D&D 3.0 and greater, Pathfinder, and other places) that are inherent to the system and not just bad/inexperienced GMs making trees switch between impossible to climb and basically ladders on alternating Thursdays.

Some of the issues may be universal to all skill system, like “I don’t have a satisfying heuristic for deciding when to roll group checks versus individual checks, and I worry I’m not being consistent”. Others may be system-specific, but not actually related to DC based systems, like the lack of a bell curve in any skill check resolved by a single d20, which every 2d6, 3d6, 4dF, and Nd6 system avoids.

Phrased another way, “as a GM, what problematic habits do you keep on falling into when resolving skill contests in D&D and Pathfinder, and/or what types of more complex contests do you wish you had additional rules guidance to resolve rather than having to steal a mechanic from another game (or a previous module you played)?”

[Quertus]

I think this one is a little too broad. Scratch that, this is way too broad. It covers every single resolution system in a role-playing game I've ever heard of except Toon's "what do we do if we don't know what a rule means" decider. Which is not to say others don't exist but its pretty rare. I would argue some of those details are important.

Some things that I would say makes it not a DC based system:
Your score is not determined by the some of dice/a die and a modifier. This is probably is one of the less important ones but someone pulled out a dice pool system as an example of a DC system I would be surprised.
The target number does not represent difficulty; either being fixed or adjusted for some other factor. For example, if the dice are set by the difficulty of a task and then you have to roll equal to or under your skill level, that would not be a DC.
There are multiple target numbers. If you grade success by which thresholds are passed that is something else. Here you could argue there is a difference between not-a-DC and DC-with-add-on, but if an add on is core to the system and used all the time, I'd say it is a different system.

To Quertus: My argument is that a multi-check system is not a DC system, but a larger system that uses a DC check as a component. Which is not an inherent problem if done correctly, but it does add more points of failure because even if you get the DC system right you could mess up the system for combining the results or deciding which one to use.

You’re drawing the line at multiple rolls? I mean, as much as it’s in character for me to poke fun at 4e for what it isn’t, I’d still argue that 4e skill challenges are DC based. Well, a really odd “DC and successes” wuzzle, with an emphasis on DC, whereas (some rolls in some editions of) WoD involved a simple hybrid “DC and successes”, with an emphasis on successes.

Which leads us to your other criteria.

Dice pool systems absolutely can use a variant DC; they just usually are primarily about things like “successes”. Still, if you sum your die pool, it becomes a little more obvious how “die pool” and “DC” can interact, no?

Similarly, I think… I think humans are mammals. As are horses. We need those three words to describe those two things, because one is a container for the other two.

In that vein, I can see the desire for the capacity for distinguishing “pure DC” systems from hybrid ones, sure. But they’re all still in the larger umbrella of “uses DC”.

Now, 3e is the origin of popular usage of DC, no? Which provides us with our two strong, competing interests. On the one hand, we’d want 3e to fall inside the DC label on a Venn diagram; otoh, it’s got numerous resolution tricks, that one would want to be able to have individual names for.

And it’s not just Gather Information in a few modules - craft checks have variable DCs producing variable speed crafting; I think Climb and Spellcraft have similar speed boosting variable DCs; Hide is opposed by Spot; Sleight of Hand has variable DCs for success and whether the attempt was spotted (successful or no); Knowledge checks aren’t binary “know nothing / know everything” checks; etc.

So, since 3e is rife with so many resolution tricks in its skill system, I’d propose to put everything in 3e skill checks into the huge DC umbrella by default, and individually label the various subsystems, removing those (like “opposed rolls”) that explicitly don’t fit under this umbrella.

[Tanarii]

The corollary that I would draw from this is: any skill system in that the task resolution (the "skill check") can be modulated in a way to influence the probability or even possibility of the check to succeed is a DC based skill system.
No it's not. A percentage based system where success equals your ability score plus training, task resolution modulated by difficulty by bonus or penalty up to the GM, is not a DC-based skill system.

Nor is D&D NWP system, roll under ability score, with difficulty modulated as a penalty to the ability score by the DM.

Even one where ability scores + training determine number of dice vs a static TN (ie dice pools), task resolution modulated by difficulty by bonus or penalty up to the GM by adding or subtracting dice, is not a DC-based skill system.

Even one that uses dice pools with a variable TN being modulated by the GM still isn't a DC-based skill system.

The defining characteristics of a DC based skill system are:
D20 rolled
With bonuses from training and natural skill/focus (some combination of proficiency and ability score)
TN set by GM within recommended range (the "DC")
Roll above TN (ie higher roll is better)

[NichG]

As far as non-DC skill systems I would say (not a comprehensive list):

- Systems that aren't about resolving questions of success or failure
- Systems in which skill investiture unlocks fixed things that the character can then just do without a 'check'
- Systems in which skills determine and scale passive perks that apply to the character - for every point of Athletics you can run 5% faster, etc.
- Systems in which task difficulty is not determined but is emergent, and skills/rolls give you a means to navigate that. E.g. bidding systems, systems with side effects and buying off side effects. Imagine e.g. playing chess but where your skill rating sometimes lets you cheat or make pieces move differently than the normal rules, and the same is true of your opponent.
- Systems where skills determine a pool of points or resources that can then be used for things going forward - Draw as many Sword Moves as your Kendo skill rank, ... Or 'roll Stealth to see how many times during this infiltration you can pass through a guard's sight line without being spotted'

[Satinavian]

For me a "skill based DC system" was always something where you roll something based on your skill (skill bonus, dice pools growing with skill etc, whatever) and compare against a number representing the Difficulty of the task at hand (and also allowing degrees of failure success, not only pure binary outcomes).


That is obviously far far broader than the D&D group of skill systems which i all hold not in high regard.

[MetroAlien]

one of the more interesting systems I know is in the German RPG "the dark eye" (Das Schwarze Auge)
I'm running off my foggy memory from many years ago, so feel free to correct me.

"attribute" and "skill" ranks are completely separate, iirc

rolling a DC on a skill may involve up to 3 attributes.
the player must roll lower than each of their attribute scores.
(I think attributes are capped at 20 to represent critical failure)
the player can use their skill ranks to offset the rolled dice.
the equivalent of DC is assigned by the DM as bonus/penalty to the skill rank

for example,
rolling a "climbing" check [5 ranks + 3 for easy DC],
with "Dexterity" [11, rolled 8],
"Strength" [13, rolled 17]
and "Constitution" [11, rolled 12]
the player then can use up to a total of 8 points to bring the "CON" roll down to a 10 and "STR" to 12 and succeed.

I forget if the number of successes was important or not.

[Cluedrew]

YouÂ’re drawing the line at multiple rolls? I mean, as much as itÂ’s in character for me to poke fun at 4e for what it isnÂ’t, IÂ’d still argue that 4e skill challenges are DC based. Well, a really odd "DC and successes" wuzzle, with an emphasis on DC, whereas (some rolls in some editions of) WoD involved a simple hybrid "DC and successes", with an emphasis on successes.Yes, I would describe that, and similar systems of combining results are not DC systems because you could swap out how the component check works and the aggregate system work work the same way. Or if you want to focus on just the implementation that combines DC checks: The difference between one and multiple feels significant that should be acknowledged.

And yeah, there are parallels between this resolution system and others, but that doesn't mean they are the same.


The defining characteristics of a DC based skill system are:
D20 rolled
With bonuses from training and natural skill/focus (some combination of proficiency and ability score)
TN set by GM within recommended range (the "DC")
Roll above TN (ie higher roll is better)Pretty much this yes, I might explicitly add that the "DC" represents the difficulty of the task and I don't care what you call the numbers that go into your modifier, just as long as it represents the character's ability to do the thing. It is probably excessive around here, but in general you can have other inputs that represent other things. (Blades in the Dark for instance cares more about risk than difficulty.)

This sort of goes against what I said about the random number before. I think I do care about the random method in I think it has to be uniform. I don't think a d20 is needed, a d10 would work just fine too. But the uniform distribution feels pretty important, I can remember debates between the sides of uniform vs. bell curved (which is rarely sharp enough to look like an actual bell curve).

[Jama7301]

*Returns from a mountaintop holding the tablet of Numenera*

Their DC system is fascinating to me because, to me, it carves a nice balance between "Specialist can do this easier" and "Everyone can Try".

The way, well, Everything works in Numenera is that you assign the task a level. There's a chart giving descriptions about like, how easy a level 0 task is versus the hardest task, level 10, and every step in between. The DC for the check is Level x 3, and you roll a flat 1d20 to see if you succeed.

Why yes, this does mean that levels 7-10 are Impossible By Default.

Instead of adding to their roll, players modify the difficulty of the task in a few ways. First, your training. If you have an Inability at the task, it's Harder by a step. If you're Practiced (default), it's +/- 0. Trained makes it -1, and Expertise is -2. Take that Level 7 (DC 21) task you're an Expertise at, now it's Level 5 (15) for you. If you have an Asset on the task (Gear, ability or Assistance), you can lower it by an additional 2 stages: Level 3 (DC 9). If you just gotta be sure though, apply some Effort. Effort costs points out of the stat pool that's associated with the task, and you can apply up to a number of levels of Effort equal to your Effort stat. So if your character has Effort 2, you can apply 1 or 2 levels of effort. Let's say we feel comfortable with just 1, to save some points. That same task from before has now dropped to Difficulty 2 (DC 6).

Through a combination of preparation, training, and pushing yourself, that difficulty DC of 21 is now a DC of 6 for you. The person untrained in it may only be able to get it down to 9, but they might need both levels of Effort to get it there, thus spending more of their resource for powering abilities and their health (Your health total is a combination of your 3 stat pools). And since Effort can't exceed your Level + 1, nobody can just outwork every challenge through pushing themselves.

One shot of it I ran recently, the brawler was stuck in a room and needed to make an Intellect check. Was a Level 5 check, so he pushed himself twice, draining over half of his limited Intellect pool, and was able to use the NPC as an Asset. A DC 15 task became DC 6 and he hit an 11 on the die.

I think the Numbers in a lot of D20 games lead to a lot of issues for me, relating to DC. I feel the need to have to scale for difficulty, which I have to resist because otherwise it just makes no sense. With a system like this, I can just say "Is this something a normal person would struggle with? OK, difficulty 4" and then it's not guaranteed they can pass, unless they want to burn the resources to bring it to 0. It puts a choice in players hands and also makes helping each other way more useful.

[MetroAlien]

what causes a lot of misunderstanding is that there are 2 separate 'scales' of difficulty.

Macro difficulty - what can a low-level character do VS a high-level character

and micro difficulty - is this task more or less difficult in the moment than another task?

As for specialist characters just 'nuking' certain skill checks compared to 'laymen' characters, that just comes down to the GM's skill, imho.

This mostly only becomes an issue when using the 'video game' philosophy of level, erm... sorry, campaign design, where fixed challenges exist statically in a pre-determined environment and anyone can approach them if they like.

[Quertus]

Yes, I would describe that, and similar systems of combining results are not DC systems because you could swap out how the component check works and the aggregate system work work the same way. Or if you want to focus on just the implementation that combines DC checks: The difference between one and multiple feels significant that should be acknowledged.

And yeah, there are parallels between this resolution system and others, but that doesn't mean they are the same.

A horse is not a human, but they are both mammals (and animals, and have bilateral symmetry, and…). I think, so long as we have words to explain both the differences and the similarities and to uniquely identify the individual items, it should be fine.

I guess it says something about me, that I’m interested in naming the largest grouping, “uses DC”, more than in naming the small grouping, “only used DC”. Or maybe it just says I’ve bought WotC’s koolaid.

[Zuras]

As for specialist characters just 'nuking' certain skill checks compared to 'laymen' characters, that just comes down to the GM's skill, imho.


The issue isn’t that some tasks are impossible for non-trained characters—that is up to the GM and logic of the story. The problems arise when the system does this automatically, or is otherwise hard for a GM to easily correct during play. Constantly escalating DCs exacerbate this problem and don’t provide any easy mechanical solutions for the GM.

Saying GM skill can solve the problem isn’t accurate and also implies that the issue is system-agnostic. In my experience that’s not true—for example 5e doesn’t have an airtight skill system, but because of bounded accuracy a DM has lots of ways to tweak the odds without distorting the rules. Pathfinder 2 has a much bigger issue with this because those escalating bonuses are also working as niche protection in the system.

[Satinavian]

The issue isn’t that some tasks are impossible for non-trained characters—that is up to the GM and logic of the story. The problems arise when the system does this automaticallyWhy would that be a problem ? Many tasks should be impossible for untrained characters and if a system does that naturally instead of relying on the GM to overrule the skill rules all the time to prevent stupid results, that is a mark of quality.


Honestly, the more often the skill sytem is ignored because it would not produce something sensible, the worse the skill system is. That is why rules stating "the GM can decide no roll is needed/possible" instead of "the GM should only have people roll if the matter is relevant" tend to be a red flag. It is as if designers know there are issues and instead of fixing them limit the use cases.

[Zuras]

Why would that be a problem ? Many tasks should be impossible for untrained characters and if a system does that naturally instead of relying on the GM to overrule the skill rules all the time to prevent stupid results, that is a mark of quality.

Making everything a windowed treadmill system means that every character interested in succeeding at their skill checks must become more specialized over time. Instead of a non specialist having a small chance to be useful, it drops to zero. Worse, even someone trained but not specialized will soon have no chance of success. I’d much rather have a bounded accuracy system that only specialists can break, or include special perks only available to specialists to mechanically reward their specialization, than represent excellence purely by ludicrously escalating numbers.

Additionally, if a player has invested a significant fraction of their character build into being good at something, it might be nice to give them something a little more engaging than a single pass-fail roll.

Now, my issues with the D&D 3.5/Pathfinder style non-bounded skill numbers are based on the criticisms I’ve read from others, not personal experience, but I’ve found 5e’s system pretty resilient, and easy to get what I want from without too much pondering. If you want something hard but not impossible, where the experts will shine, simply setting a low DC check but applying disadvantage due to the circumstances works really well.

It also aligns with my sensibilities fiction-wise, because to me the difference between an expert and a novice is more often that the expert can do the task upside-down in the dark wearing gloves, not that the novice can’t do the task at all (especially for non-crafting adventuring tasks).

I grant you this may be more preference for bounded systems and a bias against big numbers and lots of modifiers. I have been quite happy with 5e and Fate, where lining up more than a handful of bonuses and a re-roll for any task is generally impossible.

[Satinavian]

Making everything a windowed treadmill system means that every character interested in succeeding at their skill checks must become more specialized over time. Instead of a non specialist having a small chance to be useful, it drops to zero. Worse, even someone trained but not specialized will soon have no chance of success. I’d much rather have a bounded accuracy system that only specialists can break, or include special perks only available to specialists to mechanically reward their specialization, than represent excellence purely by ludicrously escalating numbers.Or, you know, stop increasing DCs with level. Same tasks should always have the same difficulty. There doesn't need to be a treadmill and bounded accuracy is neither the only nor a particularly elegant method to avoid it.



Now, my issues with the D&D 3.5/Pathfinder style non-bounded skill numbers are based on the criticisms I’ve read from others, not personal experience, but I’ve found 5e’s system pretty resilient, and easy to get what I want from without too much pondering. If you want something hard but not impossible, where the experts will shine, simply setting a low DC check but applying disadvantage due to the circumstances works really well.
Every single version of D&D has an utterly horrible skill system. Yes, 3.x+Pf are bad with making DCs and giving meaning to those rising skill level. And that is without considering nonsense like "average humans have only one level and thus only 1-4 skill points". But 5E basically gave up and uses lolrandom for everything with the DM supposed to restrict rolling to cases where randomness makes sense. It's only slightly better than one of those cointoss systems.

Nearly every RPG system with a heavy skill systems does it better. Splittermond, TDE, SR (barely), Gurps, SIFRP ...

[Tanarii]

Given of the 4 DC-based skill systems, at least 2 (3.P and 4) and by reputations 3 (PF2) of the 4 out there go with DCs and bonuses that can grow larger than the dice, and fail to handle it gracefully/naturally without heavy DM interference, I think it's fair to call it a problem.

The 4th DC-based skill system that successfully handles it is the one that doesn't allow that, 5e.

[icefractal]

Making everything a windowed treadmill system means that every character interested in succeeding at their skill checks must become more specialized over time. Instead of a non specialist having a small chance to be useful, it drops to zero. Worse, even someone trained but not specialized will soon have no chance of success. I’d much rather have a bounded accuracy system that only specialists can break, or include special perks only available to specialists to mechanically reward their specialization, than represent excellence purely by ludicrously escalating numbers.One solution to that is 4E-style skills, where non-specialists still progress by level and thus remain a fairly consistent amount behind instead of falling into irrelevance. Personally I'd make this one of three options (full skilled, partially skilled, not skilled) instead of the default for every skill, since certain things like surgery or bomb defusing should be left to the experts.

But this is only an issue if you're using a skill check as the primary challenge of a scenario. Like yes, if the entire encounter is "run this obstacle course" and it's represented by an Acrobatics check, then some characters will find it trivial and/or others will find it impossible. Which is a sharper distinction than a combat encounter where it's more like "moderately easy" vs "moderately difficult", and where results are shared to an extent (the berserker shredding the enemy front-line makes things easier for the assassin to reach the enemy casters, for example).

But that's because you're replacing a fairly complex situation with a lot of factors (combat) with a very simply solution that only has one factor (a skill check). Most Skill Challenge rules aren't great IMO, but they do somewhat mitigate this by adding more than one axis to be good/bad at.

And if the skill usage is only one part of a dynamic encounter, it's much less an issue (desirable, in fact) that different characters have very different approaches. For example -

Situation: The PCs are at the bottom of a tall icy cliff. At the top are frost giants throwing ice boulders down at them.
* One PC climbs the cliff at full speed, which is impossible for the rest of the party
* Another just stays on the ground and uses ranged attacks; they'll get to the top with the help of some rope once the battle is done.
* Another teleports up to the top, getting into position instantly but vulnerable to being knocked off the edge. Lucky this one can teleport, because he'd have trouble climbing even with rope.

The fact that the cliff is easy for one PC, difficult for another, impossible for the third isn't a problem, any more than the fact that a typical mage probably gets killed if they try to grapple the giants instead of casting spells, or that the barbarian making spellcasting gestures will accomplish nothing.

Because after all "something that one party member auto-succeeds at, while others have literally no chance" accurately describes casting spells, or a large number of other class features.

[Zuras]

Every single version of D&D has an utterly horrible skill system. Yes, 3.x+Pf are bad with making DCs and giving meaning to those rising skill level. And that is without considering nonsense like "average humans have only one level and thus only 1-4 skill points". But 5E basically gave up and uses lolrandom for everything with the DM supposed to restrict rolling to cases where randomness makes sense. It's only slightly better than one of those cointoss systems.

Nearly every RPG system with a heavy skill systems does it better. Splittermond, TDE, SR (barely), Gurps, SIFRP ...

I think it’s hyperbolic to call any of the 3e and later D&D skill systems terrible. They can break down at many points, but they do an adequate job of providing mechanics for the characters being skilled at various tasks related to adventuring beyond their natural talent.

I won’t argue if you’re saying they’re terrible because they misrepresent things by appearing to provide more crunch for non-combat resolution than they actually deliver. I personally would prefer an entirely fiction-first system like 13th Age or Whitehack use.

[Satinavian]

I won’t argue if you’re saying they’re terrible because they misrepresent things by appearing to provide more crunch for non-combat resolution than they actually deliver. Mostly i think them terrible because they compare so poorly to other systems.

I mean, if D&D skill rules were the best out there, i would be far more forgiving for their many drawbacks. But they aren't. In every edition they are only just some barely functioning clobbered together add on that didn't get any love. And it really shows.

RPG systems steal ideas from each other all the time. If D&D writer ever would have made an effort, they would have been able to come up with something better easily. But no, D&D is mostly a combat game and most of the rest is utility spells and class abilities.


Also i include the skill systems before 3.x in the "terrible" category. If anything those are even worse.

[icefractal]

So what would you consider an example of an RPG with a significantly better skill system? Because I'm thinking about those I've seen, and most I'd just call "fine" - they're unobjectionable, they work, but they're not some quantum leap over the D&D 3.x one.

Obviously some of this comes down to preference. Many people love player-defined skills / backgrounds, like 13A uses IIRC. But personally - I don't. I don't enjoy negotiating/begging/demanding when I'm just doing basic things like making skill rolls. So I'd much rather have it settled what my skills apply to rather than hash it out each time it comes up, and being able to decide "I'll take some ranks in Bluff" and know that's ok, vs worrying about "If I say that 'Secret Agent' includes being able to hack computers, is that too much?"

[Satinavian]

Obviously some of this comes down to preference. Many people love player-defined skills / backgrounds, like 13A uses IIRC. But personally - I don't. I don't enjoy negotiating/begging/demanding when I'm just doing basic things like making skill rolls. So I'd much rather have it settled what my skills apply to rather than hash it out each time it comes up, and being able to decide "I'll take some ranks in Bluff" and know that's ok, vs worrying about "If I say that 'Secret Agent' includes being able to hack computers, is that too much?"
I have similar preferences.
And i already gave examples. Among those Splittermond is what i currently like the most but TDE(4E), having a partial English edition might be a better comparison as it still easily overshadows any D&D version in this regard.

[Tanarii]

Obviously some of this comes down to preference. Many people love player-defined skills / backgrounds, like 13A uses IIRC. But personally - I don't. I don't enjoy negotiating/begging/demanding when I'm just doing basic things like making skill rolls. So I'd much rather have it settled what my skills apply to rather than hash it out each time it comes up, and being able to decide "I'll take some ranks in Bluff" and know that's ok, vs worrying about "If I say that 'Secret Agent' includes being able to hack computers, is that too much?"
Clearly oD&D has the best skill system ... none at all! :smallamused:

[Zuras]

So what would you consider an example of an RPG with a significantly better skill system? Because I'm thinking about those I've seen, and most I'd just call "fine" - they're unobjectionable, they work, but they're not some quantum leap over the D&D 3.x one.

Obviously some of this comes down to preference. Many people love player-defined skills / backgrounds, like 13A uses IIRC. But personally - I don't. I don't enjoy negotiating/begging/demanding when I'm just doing basic things like making skill rolls. So I'd much rather have it settled what my skills apply to rather than hash it out each time it comes up, and being able to decide "I'll take some ranks in Bluff" and know that's ok, vs worrying about "If I say that 'Secret Agent' includes being able to hack computers, is that too much?"

I understand people feeling that way, but I think that’s more a higher level of comfort with an existing system. 5e can have all sorts of problems with that—what is investigation versus perception, what is covered by arcana versus religion, history or nature, when do you need acrobatics versus athletics. If the DM is going to be a jerk, or even just has a very different understanding of the skill system, you will have problems.

Coming from the other side, I find it utterly aggravating when the skill system won’t let you cover all the competencies your character would have based on an utterly bog-standard genre backstory. I don’t play with many players where negotiating things out is an issue, though.

I’d also argue that the fiction first/justify proficiency with backstory/tags method is more helpful for new players to effectively realize their character concepts without requiring up front system mastery. For a more complex system you need something like GURPS templates, which work fine but are going to scare off most casual players.

[Cluedrew]

A horse is not a human, but they are both mammals (and animals, and have bilateral symmetry, and...). I think, so long as we have words to explain both the differences and the similarities and to uniquely identify the individual items, it should be fine.Here my argument is roughly: A brick wall is not a brick.

Now, before we move on, the example here (4e's skill challenges) is actually... it has been a long time, so if it doesn't actually work like this than this just applies to systems that do match this description. But as I recall the skill challenge just combines the results of skill checks made during the challenge. It might give you some rules about when to make them but the difficulty is still largely decided in the same way it would be for any other check and your ability to do them is. So you could replace the skill check with any non-DC-based check that outputted success or failure and it would work the same way. You could use the Powered by the Apocalypse's moves even.

In other words, it seems that the DC is actually involved only incidentally in the skill challenge it seems strange to call it DC based. The connection seems to be one of transitivity; a brick in a brick wall, but here we could use stones and get a very similar wall out at the end.

[Tanarii]

4e skill challenges are not a DC-based skill system. They are a X successes before Y failures system. It doesn't matter if those successes are determined by rolling d20+bonuses vs DC or not.

It just happens to also be part of a set of rules that determines success/failure with a DC-based skill system.

[gatorized]

what's the alternative to dc based systems? I can't even imagine on that wouldn't have the same issues.

Opposed rolls, and it works quite well.



Finally, there are not in between results. So if you want anything between complete success and complete failure requires multiple checks. It works, and sometimes works quite well, but now you are pretty much putting another resolution system around your existing resolution system and sometimes it is kind of awkward.

Easy.

https://i.imgur.com/26NKOIF.png


So I'd much rather have it settled what my skills apply to rather than hash it out each time it comes up, and being able to decide "I'll take some ranks in Bluff" and know that's ok, vs worrying about "If I say that 'Secret Agent' includes being able to hack computers, is that too much?"

Depends on what secret agent is / what you want to do. If you're only interested in hacking, then just taking some ranks in Technology would be sufficient; if you want to be able to hack anything instantly, Machine Control would be more appropriate. If Secret Agent is a class and is supposed to make you like James Bond, then this could be achieved with some ranks in Tech, Vehicles, Covert, Charm, Streetwise, possibly Command, and the rest would just be mundane gear; you likely wouldn't even need any powers.

[Satinavian]

Opposed rolls, and it works quite well.Only for conflicts. And easily only for conflicts between actors who have stats ready. By far the most rolls i see in a typical RPG session don't have any opposing opponents.


Depends on what secret agent is / what you want to do. If you're only interested in hacking, then just taking some ranks in Technology would be sufficient; if you want to be able to hack anything instantly, Machine Control would be more appropriate. If Secret Agent is a class and is supposed to make you like James Bond, then this could be achieved with some ranks in Tech, Vehicles, Covert, Charm, Streetwise, possibly Command, and the rest would just be mundane gear; you likely wouldn't even need any powers.That argument was clearly meant for RPGs that have customizable/open ended skill lists. Something like "career : secret agent" as a skill, not a class. Icefractal seems to prefer systems where he can just put some ranks in discrete, well defined skills like Tech, Vehicles, Covert,Charm, Streetwise and command as opposed to systems where everyone has a couple of unique skills on his sheet that are nowhere explained in detail and where people don't really agree what exactly they cover and what not.

[truemane]

Metamagic Mod: Thread Necromancy