Issues with hard 20s

[jimmy carter]

Alright so I run a DnD group that uses the 4th edition rules. Now that that is aside i recently ran into some DMing issues, and they wanted me to post their ‘triumph’ here. Problem One, I have traditionally run the rule that if the group rolls a hard 20 on a D20 they have an automatic success this allows them to do awesome things. Second I allow my group when doing skills to roll then tell me what they want, or do what they want then roll. Now this has lead to comical episodes. They roll a hard 20 and make an NPC do something comical typically...

They needed to infiltrate a fort used to inspect cargo to retrieve an artifact. After their kill-happy Halfling ran in and was subdued in 2 rounds and put in detention they decided to screw the plan (which I didn't know). They approached the local Mage guild with a plan for financing, they rolled a hard 20 on a diplomacy (which was a 38), and so by the rules it was a success to my heart ache. They had decided they wanted to drive 3 "casks" of alchemist fire into the inspection bays of the fort.

The casks were 8 foot diameter by 10 foot long. Not realize how much this was I agree (I was going to follow my rule). The casks were to be driven into the inspection bay by a gang of thugs which a second hard 20 got what they wanted. Now to the math and design. They were going to have the casks detonated by pulling a lever that would set of a compression cap thus puncturing the bottom of the container allowing the alchemist fire to reach an ignition source.

The cask was 8 diameter by 10 long this yields a volume [V=.785(d)(d)(h)] of 502.656cubic feet. The gallon capacity [g=7.48(V)] is 3759.867 gallons. Knowing that there is 128 fluid ounces in a gallon, that means [128(g)=(fl. oz)] that their was 481262.960 fl. oz per cask. I decided that a flask of alchemist fire is 6 fluid ounces, meaning that was [(fl.oz)/6=flask count] 80211 flasks (rounding up). There are 3 casks making a total capacity of 240632. Using the new 4th edition rules and making the weakest version of Alchemist fire that would make 481263d6 damage or 4812630 gold worth of stuff.

Now remember one guy was stuck inside. Doing a separate episode the trapped member broke out and fought his way around the fort. By random chance he found the artifact and bailed out. While at the same time group drove the 3 casks in the bays, when they went to detonate the devices malfunctioned creating a flame impingement on the casks. This Lead to a BLEVE (boiling liquid evaporating liquid explosion) basically gasses inside the container lead to a catastrophic (explosive) failure of the vessel (see this video of an example of a grill propane tank http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAyuq...eature=related). This basically leveled the structure. Destroying countless magic items and creating a rift to another Plane, effectively derailing the campaign, yet again.

[The_Blue_Sorceress]

Well, I don't see anything wrong with taking natural 20s as automatic successes, so long as you don't mind stuff like this happening now and again. I'd consider capping damage on explosions like this in he future however. Not so much that it doesn't succeed, but enough so that it doesn't derail the game. Nearly 500,000d4 damage is a bit excessive.

Blue

[Dark Herald]

Is there a question? Are you looking for advice? houserules?

[Tsotha-lanti]

So every time the players roll a dice for no reason, they have a 5% chance to be able to make anything happen? (Because apparently common sense does not apply to automatic successes, huh?)

Yeah, great rule there.

[BobVosh]

Well, I don't see anything wrong with taking natural 20s as automatic successes, so long as you don't mind stuff like this happening now and again. I'd consider capping damage on explosions like this in he future however. Not so much that it doesn't succeed, but enough so that it doesn't derail the game. Nearly 500,000d4 damage is a bit excessive.

Blue

Perhaps letting them have 5 million gold worth of stuff too.

So every time the players roll a dice for no reason, they have a 5% chance to be able to make anything happen? (Because apparently common sense does not apply to automatic successes, huh?)

Yeah, great rule there.

*agrees* I hate autosuccess/failure on skill roles. I hate the +/- 10 on ones and 20s as well.


Hmm, I sure hope you make a depression effect go on. Major magic distributer goes under, all those workers out of work, etc, spiraling downward out of control, BUWHAHAHAHA.

Er. Ya. Also for 5 million gold of damage SOMEONE involved with that bizarre hold complex of magic items knows a high level wizard. Someone with some sort of divining. I don't know 4th enough but I sure hope scrying/etc still exists.

[Tsotha-lanti]

Automatic success / failure isn't the issue so much as a complete lack of common sense is. No result on any dice roll should allow PCs to do the patently impossible (what that is varies according to the game, obviously). A 20 on a Climb check does not allow you to scale a completely smooth outwardly tilting wall of ice (unless, of course, it's that kind of game; in Hero-level RuneQuest, that'd just require a regular Climb roll). A 20 on a Diplomacy check does not let you talk anyone into doing anything. This is also a Diplomacy problem, specifically - lots of people seem to think that a Diplomacy check can let you do anything. No matter how persuasive you are, the beggar won't give you his last coin; the mother won't let you kill her child; the king won't just abdicate and hand you the crown.

That's not to say that automatic success / failure doesn't suck as a rule. It does.


Also, another note on the OP: damage on stuff like alchemists' fire is not based on volume, and certainly wouldn't increase linearly with the amount of explosive material. (Heck, it doesn't even really work like that for real explosives.)

Edit: What am I thinking? I just accepted the most ridiculous premise ever - that alchemist's fire is an explosive. It is not. It's an incendiary. It's a special, extra-flammable oil. The splash damage is splash, not explosion - you throw it at something, it shatters, and flaming oil splashes on things.

Yeah, you really screwed up there, jimmy carter. (Good name choice, I guess?)

[charl]

The only comment I can think of is that those calculations would have been much easier and nicer looking if you had been using metric.

EDIT: Also, as mention, alchemist's fire is basically the DnD version of Greek fire, which is basically medieval napalm. It doesn't explode, unless you have some way to put it under high pressure.

[KKL]

That has potential for awesome plot hooks for the PCs to clean up their royally huge mess.

I'd extrapolate, but at the moment I'm tired as heck.

[ericgrau]

Dunno about 4e, but atleast in 3rd hard 20's don't apply to skill checks.

Furthermore, diplomacy is not a method of ordering people around no matter how good you are at it: There is no DC for something that isn't really diplomacy; you just plain can't do it with diplomacy.

Flasks tend to be 16 oz. pints. Check the listed weight of alchemist fire in 4e to verify (16 oz = 1 lb. = 1/2 kg). Second that many pints would be highly expensive and unlikely to be stored in large kegs; more likely even large quantities would be in seperate flasks. Not to mention safety issues. Third, again I dunno about 4e, but in 3.5e total immersion in fire does only 20d6 damage. There is a point where you simply cannot be covered with any more fire no matter how much there is around you.

I also agree with Tsotha-lanti.

[KKL]

Dunno about 4e, but atleast in 3rd hard 20's don't apply to skill checks.

OP DID say that it was a houserule.

[ericgrau]

OP DID say that it was a houserule.

Alright, then this applies double:

I also agree with Tsotha-lanti.

It's a lousy houserule.

[KKL]

It's a lousy houserule.

I have to agree.

[Khatoblepas]

So every time the players roll a dice for no reason, they have a 5% chance to be able to make anything happen? (Because apparently common sense does not apply to automatic successes, huh?)

Yeah, great rule there.

Come now, this rule may not make sense, but with a good amount of mitigation, a similar idea could work. Because, you know, common sense DOES apply to automatic successes, or should, at least. This was just a bad implementation, and sarcasm won't solve anything. First you think, "why does this rule exist?" The OP's reason was, he wanted the heroes to be able to do awesome things. However, he doesn't want the heroes to be able to derail everything by getting people to do whatever they want. Basically, one-in-a-million chances that happen nine times out of ten.

Each time the players roll, you must decide whether a 20 would be an automatic success or not. Obviously, you have to use your imagination here.

Leaping across a rooftop, after being thrown off balance by a near fatal wound? Yes.
A completely inept liar bluffing their way through the palace guards by pure chance? Yes.

The above are dramatic and cinematic, or just viable to the story as a whole.

A dry fiscal meeting with the mage guild? No.
Attempting to gain a following? No.
Bluffing the King into giving you his kingdom? No.

The above are boring, cheap, and not really very fun.

Obviously, some actions will fail no matter how high you roll, i.e ridiculous stuff, or stuff that shouldn't rely on a natural 20 alone. But things that are plausible but not probable, then automatic success should apply.

Use some common sense, and this houserule actually works (after all, heroes gotta feel heroic sometime.) So to the OP - pick and choose which natural 20s are auto successes. That way, the game won't be derailed.

[jimmy carter]

The rule is somthing that was meant to be for cenematic movie moments, and usually it is taken with a grain of salt and rarely used. My world have a loose story line, and a moresnad box feel, and for those of you who mentioned it, yes there was a huge impact not to give away story points since my groups is reading this but yes the economy was grossly effected, the rift is a site for an infernal invasion and a massive fortification (can you smell major story flux). I did not blindly allow them to do this. I did roll against them and rolled a hard 1 on the first and a 3 on the second. I understand people run groups different ways, and nearly all of you disagree with this aparently. My group wanted me to post this as more of a humorous encounter, and show their creativity, but thanks for all your imput and critisism.

[RukiTanuki]

As a side note, d20 Modern indicated that each successive doubling of the quantity of an explosive added a single die to the amount of damage inflicted. (It's the only place I've seen such a rule for d20 systems.) In this case, more than 2^16 == 65536x the quantity of alchemist's fire was used (but not double that), so you'd only add 16d6 damage to the amount a single vial would inflict. Certainly not rift-inducing.

*ahem* Not that I'm speaking from experience, or had a campaign hosed by a crit/fumble roll resulting in a grenade going off on a pallet of RPG rounds, or anything. :D

[Tsotha-lanti]

That's like a reverse-geometric progression or something? Seems reasonable enough in D&D / d20. Most RPGs (Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, probably GURPS, too) use a non-linear progression for explosives.

[metagaia]

While Jimmy's style of DMing is certainly not my cup of tea; (I would blanch as a DM and ruthlessly exploit as a PC) it's a little unfair to be so hard here, since it seems the players had fun in causing this...spectacle.

If you are going to do automatic successes, I would do them in such a way that the victory is phyrric if it's something silly. Swimming up a waterfall? take 10d6 non-lethal damage and roll a reflex save for each item to make sure it's not washed away. Ask for finance from the mages guild? Agree but make the repayment a major issue. Bluff the thieves into taking the barrels inside? Make it so that they are then immeadiately resent to the thieves guild home, which is right next to the mages guild.

[Arkon86]

I'm one of the players in this group and this post was supposed to be humorous. The point was that there are problems that happen when there are very creative players that have high educations and characters with huge social mods and contacts with large and powerful organizations.



OK, This wasn't completely out of the blue. We had connections to the Mage's guild in the first place. The guild also hates the organization that we struck out at. The idea was presented to the Mage guild as an opportunity to strike a blow to this organization. The player who did the negotiating has a huge diplomacy mod and rolled insane while giving a reasonable presentation.
We ended up getting the guild to fund the operation and if we were caught then we were on our own. The GM didn't know what we were planning until the plans were presented and everything was ready to go. Our GM lets us have quite a bit of free reign when we are getting creative, even if it ends up completely screwing over something. He created the world and therefore can choose to use our actions as events that will impact the future of the world. Characters are already heroes at lvl 1 and at higher lvls they are able to impact the world in huge ways. He runs his world so that this is reflected.
The hard 20 rule hardly every applies since he only lets it work of the opposing roll is below a 5 or something. However there are times where things are impossible and things automatically fail.
Now, whether or not the explosion should have been that large the GM and I disagree but he is a firefighter and has had quite a bit of training in explosives so I didn't press the point too hard.
He decided the rift was formed from the large amount of magical items being destroyed at once.
By us not be railroaded, the campaign is free game for us to either finish or fail utterly. He has stated that if we completely screw it up he doesn't have any problem with us failing and the world being overrun. You might say that the world is ours to save or break.

[Arkon86]

Most of the things we try to do that are pretty insane are accumponied by a huge series of rolls. Sometimes there are characters that try to do something and because they fail their rolls in such a way that they actually die. Such as leaping onto a monster flying over a pit and failing to make the leap back to land after said monster is killed (always funny). Our group sometimes runs as a cross between epic heroes and The Three Stooges, but it is fun to play that way. Half our group is evil and the other half is good ATM. It makes for an interesting dynamic.

Oh and the wagons weren't driven in by thugs. We payed bums to dress as thugs and told them that there was a 40 sec delay from when the trigger was pulled and when the carts would go up... there was no delay. As it turned out our GM decided that the bums felt they had a better shot at pulling this off if they dressed up as priests, unfortunately they happened to be dressed as priests of our Paladin's Patron God so he is now currently on the **** list and is trying to get back onto his god's favor. Oh yea, we called it "Operation, Hobo Surprise"

Trust me its not easy to take advantage of our GM, but the opportunity is there to do some huge things, they just don't always turn out well... OK, maybe they more often then not turn out poorly. But we have fun playing in our dysfunctional group.

[Ravens_cry]

As I player I like the idea of hard 20's. It means that whatever I do that requires a role, I have a 5 percent chance of doing. Not much, but it is enough for hope.

[Shpadoinkle]

So... you're basically complaining about a houserule that you made for a game that you're personally running?

[Arkon86]

So... you're basically complaining about a houserule that you made for a game that you're personally running?

sigh, no one is complaining

[OneFamiliarFace]

So... you're basically complaining about a houserule that you made for a game that you're personally running?

As has been stated, the OP is just posting a humorous story at the behest of his PC's. This isn't much different than the "what's the weirdest thing you have done to your DM" threads.

I personally wouldn't allow this to happen, but I have been questioning recently how valid keeping a stable campaign world is. If we are DMing for the players, and the players have fun doing whatever it is they did, then rock on.

It seems odd to me that so many people are out of hand bashing this DM's techniques when he has actually decided to just roll with the punches and do what a good DM should do (and something that is mentioned explicitly in the DMG): say 'yes' to your players as often as you can. Each of their actions merely leads to certain consequences which then lead to further adventure. In this case, the players now have to deal with a demonic invasion and (technically) have the deaths of all those killed by said invasion on their hands.

What usually stays my hand from saying yes is that I doubt my players would feel too worked up about something like that :-p.

[Arkon86]

As has been stated, the OP is just posting a humorous story at the behest of his PC's. This isn't much different than the "what's the weirdest thing you have done to your DM" threads.

I personally wouldn't allow this to happen, but I have been questioning recently how valid keeping a stable campaign world is. If we are DMing for the players, and the players have fun doing whatever it is they did, then rock on.

It seems odd to me that so many people are out of hand bashing this DM's techniques when he has actually decided to just roll with the punches and do what a good DM should do (and something that is mentioned explicitly in the DMG): say 'yes' to your players as often as you can. Each of their actions merely leads to certain consequences which then lead to further adventure. In this case, the players now have to deal with a demonic invasion and (technically) have the deaths of all those killed by said invasion on their hands.

What usually stays my hand from saying yes is that I doubt my players would feel too worked up about something like that :-p.

I actually tried to join the army that was invading, not that it would have lasted long being an infernal warlock that gets his power from the invader's enemies but it would have allowed us to accomplish a couple things at the time. I was about one social skill roll away, i had gotten 2 19 or 20s and needed a 3rd one. however I rolled something like a 3 and we ended up having to fight the leader of that area to escape

[Ponce]

I am always for reducing influence of auto failure/success or "critical fumbles." Good plans or well-built characters shouldn't be ruined by such a terrible rule.

[seeker312]

Obviously, some actions will fail no matter how high you roll, i.e ridiculous stuff, or stuff that shouldn't rely on a natural 20 alone. But things that are plausible but not probable, then automatic success should apply.

Use some common sense, and this houserule actually works (after all, heroes gotta feel heroic sometime.) So to the OP - pick and choose which natural 20s are auto successes. That way, the game won't be derailed.

I am the PC [Paladin - Primary Tank] that rolled the hard 20s (yes there were 5 or 6 in a row) for diplomacy for the funding and bribing... hehe.. Here's a few things that happened.. there were many instances that were rolled for this to happen and people were bribed off by us also .

Also, There was another thing that happened similar to this, but the rolls went the other direction for me. In a fight with an enormous wurm I lept onto it as the party fought... without thinking of the concequences for after the battle was over. It turned out the wurm came out of a 10 ft wide hole in the ground that was about 25 feet below where I lept on to. After numerous (low required) checks for jumping from the dead wurm's body falling into the hole failed, I wound up breaking a +3 or +4 (I forget which) weapon and converting gods just to end up surviving while my evil ally watched while eating popcorn.

The above and the OP's samples are how his house rules work. It's not one roll to determine success or failure unless it is a simple action. If it is complex such as convincing a major guild in a major city to fund a terrorist action it requres MANY rolls and I just got lucky ... and I had an enormous bonus to diplomacy anyways as he mentioned.

All in all I like the style, afterall, as Khatoblepas said,

heroes gotta feel heroic sometime.

[Behold_the_Void]

I'm not a fan of the rule myself, I hate rolling a 1 and having the DM arbitrarily gank me, and the idea that rolling a 20 means automatic awesome is just too common an occurrence for me to take it seriously.

[Coidzor]

Derailed the campaign? More like, segued into them having to clean up the mess they made.

[OneFamiliarFace]

I am always for reducing influence of auto failure/success or "critical fumbles." Good plans or well-built characters shouldn't be ruined by such a terrible rule.

I'm curious, though, about what constitutes a terrible rule. If, say, all the party and DM agree on it, and they like it and have fun with it (as is the case in this scenario), then I say run with it.

Even if people don't like this particular rule, then I can still see something like extreme success or extreme failure (by hitting or missing DCs which are far beyond those required for success or failure).

That, and any good plan, even without this rule, is still subject to wild variance in success or failure based on luck or differences in resources (this is especially true if the DM doesn't take an open hand in helping the PCs), as usually the PCs advantage in DnD is not a good plan, but simply more resources. And, part of any good plan (for the DM and players) is accounting for the wild success or failure of one's plans.

[Tsotha-lanti]

As has been stated, the OP is just posting a humorous story at the behest of his PC's. This isn't much different than the "what's the weirdest thing you have done to your DM" threads.

Where's the joke? It sounds like a story about really bad rulings.