Quote Originally Posted by Sharur View Post
Ironically enough 5E D&D has an explicit fix for this: Passive skills. The only one that gets most people's attention is passive perception, because its listed in stat blocks, but all skills have a passive variant (8+Attribute+Prof Bonus, if any). Investigation get's its passive noted in the Observant feat for example.

So your boulder example shouldn't be a roll (its not a probabilistic effort, that you might try a second time), is a binary "are you strong enough. So your brawny warrior's 8+their high strength+probably their proficiency is compared to your arbitrary boulder lifting DC...and it better be higher than the scrawny wizard's 8+STR mod (quite possibly negative), who is unlikely to have Athletics proficiency...
Ubiquity basically doesn't let you roll if you have less than a 50% chance of failure, and Shadowrun has it's buying hits mechanism. That's not even getting into thing's like Burning Wheel's 'only roll if it's interesting'.

Such systems, especially in dice pools,,aren't anything new but they're also sadly not that common.

So in Ubiquity a soldier with Athletics 6 might not need to roll to climb a cliff with proper equipment even though a Diplomat with Athletics 2 would. Opposed rolls aren't so simple, but as a dice pool system results are more predictable than, for 3xample, D&D5e.