One thing we often do is we gate the ability to roll on a check through whether or not the skill is trained - for example in our games with lockpicking, you can only attempt to pick a lock if you have proficiency.
This prevents the situation where the character with years of training and practice in a specific niche skill beefs it, but someone with no idea what they’re doing then tries and succeeds - we say some things are only possible to try if you know how.
Don’t apply this house rule to everything, but it’s worth considering, especially in games where your party can casually drop a +10 or a +15 onto any skill check through the right magic to force a success anyway.
if you’re going to let dice determine probability, then use the right probability dice. d10’s can be chained to make a number between _ and infinity if you have enough dice. need a number between 1 and 1000? use 3d10. first die is 1000’s place, second die is 100’s place, third die is 1’s place.
My observation is that when push comes to shove, the one good at a thing absolutely cocks it, only for the worst at the thing to catch it in the best way possible.
DM: Decipher this thing. Roll for int.
WIZARD: 3… that makes 7…
BARBARIAN: 19, that makes 17…
WIZARD: ಠಗಠ
DM: ಠ‿ಠPerhaps a good DM or table could create good narrative spins for this…
sneaky edit: replaced [lenny face]s with relevant emotes
one of my players once created character so dumb, he can barely speak. at one ocassion during an fight he asked to roll for intelligence (he traded most of it for strenght) and got nat20. Nobody could stand the dumb mountain of flesh, suddenly telling everyone strategy tips.
A nat20 isn’t an automatic success on skill checks, but there shouldn’t even be a roll for something that is outright impossible. Unless there’s some plot reason why this otherwise mentally challenged character would suddenly become fluent and a top notch strategist out of the blue?
Depending on what skill they are rolling, a nat 20 doesn’t necessarily mean they just instantly have all knowledge of the thing they are deciphering.
Let’s say it’s an ancient form of Elvish, and the character speaks Elvish. They’d know modern Elvish, and might be able to use that to discern enough to get the general gist of the writing, but not a perfect translation. Which could come into play later on to hilarious effect.
If they used uh… I forgot the skill name but the generic “adventurer knowledge” one, they might not know what it says at all, but they may be able to know what language it is, who wrote it, and what they might expect based on knowing about the script in other dungeons.
If it’s an arcana check they could understand it is magical, and what it does; maybe activate/deactivate it but not how to recreate it or translate it, per se.
I actually now want to make a character that’s just super knowledgeable. No ability to fight, or even cast magic. They just know everything about everything.
Personally I’d rather have a character who has approximate knowledge of all things. Like, correct enough that progress can occur, but with enough wrong that they’re hopelessly misguided or just generally not getting things. Bonus points if they’re really arrogant about their intelligence.
So just playing as the average Lemmy user? Seems boring and like you would still get in lots of fights.
I take this more as the character just guesses and somehow gets it right. Or at least close enough.
Lindybeige once put dice rolls into a different perspective.
Rather than the dice describing how well the action was performed, his suggesting was that the dice would describe the environment.
In this case, that would describe how complicated the code is. One of his examples were for athletics, where he thought of it as describing how tall a wall is. Your athletics was 14, this wall turned out to be 15, sorry, you just barely didn’t make it over.
Though it gets a bit weird if you take into account the player looking at their environment and making decisions, faced with Schrödinger’s Wall.
Or just luck. Like with lockpicking, it’s possible to bang a keyed lock and pull on it and get lucky with the pins all lining up and it opens. There’s vibration devices that work by doing this constantly until it works. The odds are much lower than 5% (without a vibrator), but dnd is supposed to be fun and exaggerated odds can be fun.
I’ve played a homebrew game that was based on the devil may cry world, where the cut scenes were constantly full of crazy shit, so the GM decided that the crazier the idea you came up with, the more likely it was to succeed, and it was fun. It did really help that he was very good at thinking on his feet and let the game flow more naturally instead of getting stuck in situations where a player succeeding at some random thing they want to do breaks the whole campaign.
For the scenario shown in the OP, a character could get lucky and guess what runes mean. The context could give clues, or maybe one rune looks kinda like something else, is a red herring on its own, but just happens to lead to the correct conclusion in that particular case.
Though it would be fair for the next (unsuccessful) roll to give actual useless red herrings. It’s probably better for the GM to do the rolls for the player so they don’t know if it’s a nat 20. I like this for any kind of information gathering rolls, like spot checks, because it allows players to second guess roll results without it being meta gaming. Also pre-rolling some of those can help, because “roll a spot check” tells the players that there’s something to spot, even if they all fail. And not asking can imply there’s nothing there.
i think the real answer is using whatever makes sense in context: if your character has some experience with the language they could have a brainwave where they see a connection with their existing knowledge, whereas if your character has no way of actually figuring it out they might for example look at the number of characters and blurt out some sounds that fit and that turns out to be correct (or just close enough).
“Umm…‘mellon’?”
“Ok your dumbass character gets the genius idea to ask someone who knows more about runes to read them.”
The runes are written in English.
This made me laugh really hard
Sadly, the elf only knows Common and Elven.
This reminds me of it’s always sunny when Charlie, who is illiterate, realises he can read Irish gaelic because his childhood penpal, who turns out to be his father, wrote to him in Irish.
My bestie had a character who only had a +1 in Charisma, but this was the highest in the party, so she became the party face. And she never rolled lower than 19 total when making Charisma checks for that character. The dice clearly had plans.
Or when the awkward friend wants to play a bard and the butterfly plays a fighter with CHA as a dump stat, then becomes the face anyways because they love roleplaying and can manipulate the GM IRL
I was once GMing for that same bestie in a 3d6-based system. I told her to roll, then realised her stats weren’t high enough for her to succeed, so told her not to. She gave me a look, picked up the dice, and rolled a crit. Out of SPITE. And this is 3d6, so it’s a 1 in 216 chance.
She didn’t need to manipulate me. Either I went along with it, or my dice would be forever cursed.
They’re the “Say Friend and Enter” runes. Gandalf couldn’t figure them out but Merry (accidentally) did.
Actually my inspiration to use the “your character is too smart” sometimes when a smart character flops a roll
“You’re too busy getting lost in the many potential complex solutions to the riddle, and are hopelessly consumed by it’s mysteries” for “when is a door not a door” or similar
That sounds like fun!
Just read that scene last week, actually. I forgot Gandalf’s cope entirely.
“I was trying to so hard to remember obscure lore I forgot we weren’t all paranoid psychos in those days”
The bottom bit looks like Loss;
:.|:;it was Frodo who figured it out
Sounds like a possibility for a really creative story moment. Maybe the comic book that character always carries around with them just so happened to use the same runes as their “secret language” and the author of that comic is some super nerd for that specific language.
Your daily reminder that"Nat 20" doesn’t apply to skill or ability checks. It’s applies to combat only.
It does in fact apply to skill checks and ability checks. Nat 20 just means rolling a 20 naturally on the dice before any modifiers are added :) I think what you meant was that “critical success” only applies to combat! In this instance, the natural 20 still means it’s the highest possible roll for an ability checks which gives it the highest possibility of success.
Just a daily reminder that someone can always come around and surpass in pedantry. (Sorry I couldn’t resist :) No hard feelings meant)
I love it. I’m not even mad…well…maybe a little. Lol
Thanks for being a good sport!
Bad faith and pedantry aren’t the same.
The comic very clearly implies that the nat 20 caused their dumbass character to be able to decipher the runes.
If it didn’t, the player wouldn’t have announced “Nat 20”, but the actual score, wirth modifiers taken into account.
Nat 20 is very, very commonly used by GMs to mean “critcal success” in or out of combat, no matter the explict rule. Same goes for nat 1 being a “critical failure.”
Why? Because it makes the game better for everyone to have these rare rolls rewarded or hilariously punished.
The trouble with doing that is that you end up in the stupid situation described by this comic!
I wasn’t arguing in bad faith. Everything I said was factual, honest, and trustworthy. You are correct that a nat 20 caused them to be really smart and have the best chance to read the runes (nothing shows them actually reading it to be fair). This is because the nat 20 is the highest possible roll available to the player, before modifiers are added! In many instances, rolling that high passes skill checks up to “Hard” (according to the DMG) automatically unless you have some negative modifiers. With the assumption that this player was attempting something actually attainable, this high roll is translated as the character having the absolute epitome of their ability to translate the runes (whether or not it is successful.)
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Also a reminder that Pathfinder 2E has a significantly better system for criticals, in a way that makes sense for ability checks. It has degrees of success and failure, and a crit only moves it one degree higher or lower, so a crit can potentially still be a failure if your really bad at something or it’s very hard.
Really, P2e is better at almost everything, especially making it so you don’t need to remember tons of exceptions like D&D5e. You also aren’t supporting Hasbro, which is always a good thing.
Also a Nat 20 / Critical Skill check doesn’t guarantee success, just the best possible result.
Could be Pathfinder 2e and raised their result from failure to success, or any of the playgroups that house rule it so a 20 does apply which in my experience is so common it might as well be the default
Critical Skillchecks is an optional rule in the Dungeon Master Guide 5e on page 242.
They are as optional as feats and multiclassing.
If a Nat 20 (the highest you can ever roll on a 20-sided die!) doesn’t succeed, what was the point of rolling in the first place?
Generally speaking it’s considered bad practice for a GM to call for rolls that literally no one in the party can succeed at, but as with anything in tabletop roleplaying there is nuance.
There could be a narrative reason for the player to not know just how difficult something is and you don’t want to give it away by just telling the players they can’t succeed. If the most capable member of the party rolls a 20 and fails then the “reward” is the narrative of the attempt and learning what you’re up against.
Or maybe someone in the party could succeed but for whatever reason the child-prodigy wizard with a strength of 8 wants to try lifting the portcullis. It wouldn’t make any sense for them to actually do it.
I house rule it to anything where dumb luck might help anyway. deciphering a language you know nothing about? nah. lockpicking a simple lock despite not really having much of a skill? woah, you don’t know wtf you did but things clicked. you could probably force it open with a high enough strength check too but hey.
If someone wants to jump into a cavern and use strength to flap his arms to fly, rolling a d20 can be to see how much the person fucked up. A 20 isn’t an automatic success.
Same when someone mixes a potion, the d20 may be to see how much it will poison the creator if they drink it.
Roll to see how badly you fail.
the tension before DM can put on a self satisfied look and say “even that wasn’t enough”
Generally speaking, to shut the player up about it
You could technically have negative modifiers that would make it impossible for you to succeed, where others might.
You’re right in that your DM likely will not even let you roll…but it’s still possible.
In BG3 (which mostly follows d&d 5e rules) you succeed in a skill check with DC 30 on a natural 20 even if you have less than +10 as a modifier on the roll
Are you sure a 20 has no special meaning in checks in d&d (I presume you mean in d&d as it’s the most popular system)?
Yes he is and no it does (edit: has) not. That is a common house rule Larian implemented into BG3, but it is not part of the original rules of DnD 5e.
I’m glad you know them so well. In what way is such a popularly used rule not a rule?
Incidentally I find it interesting that d&d 3.5 specifically calls out that a 20 isn’t automatic success, and a 1 is not an automatic failure, where 5e removes that clarification, simply saying “if the roll plus bonuses is less than the DC the check fails”.
That looks to me like they are leaving it more open to the common house rule
I think you answered your rethorical question yourself: If it is not in the official books, it is not an official rule.
And I would not say that they leave it vague. To quote the PHB: “To make an ability check, roll a d20 and add the relevant ability modifier. As with other d20 rolls, apply bonuses and penalties, and compare the total to the De. If the total equals or exceeds the DC, the ability check is a success […]. Otherwise, it’s a failure, which means the character or monster makes no progress toward the objective[…].” That does not leave much room for interpretation. It plainly say that if the exceed, then they succeed and if they don’t, than they fail. Yes they don’t make an explicit remark about critical results, but they don’t need to, because such a rule was never meant to exist in 5e aside attack rolls and death saves.
Not to say that you can’t make it a rule at your table (same as with everything else), but there is still not much room for missunderstanding the official print.
To expand on the other comment, to include in the rules everything that doesn’t happen would be insane. If it isn’t in the rules it isn’t in the rules. You don’t have to list every possible thing that a player may say applies for it to not be included. If a player falls out of their chair, does that change the result? It isn’t included in either of these rulesets…
Why not roll Luck?
