(in D&D at least)
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It’s technically homebrew, but basically every table Ive played at will give you a little bonus if you roll a 20 for a check and a little negative if you roll a 1. But we still kept that a 20 does not necessarily mean an auto success and a 1 is not necessarily an auto failure. You still need to beat the DC
Agreed, auto success on a skill check nerfs challenges.
If the DC is so high that the PC doesn’t succeed with a 20, it seems too random to give it to them.
Then again, it depends on the situation: a nat 20 trying to convince the penny pinching tavern owner to give you a discount seems like fun even if the DC should be infinite; but when dealing with something story related, I’d stick a little closer to the rules.
But at the same time, if the DC is so high that no roll could succeed, then they shouldn’t be rolling for it in the first place
You’re right, but I don’t know most of my PCs stats. If the DC on a lock is 21, I’d expect a rogue might make it, but another PC who has never picked a lock wouldn’t.
Worse! At just level 7, a rogue is likely to have +11 and Advantage to pick a lock, which combined with Reliable Talent means they can’t fail a DC 21, and have a 1/2 chance of beating a DC 26.
So if you want there to be uncertainty and challenge, you have to make the DC more like 25-28. Making it all the more likely that the lock should be impossible to the rest of the party.
If I wanted to formally add ability check crits I would make them add/subtract something from your result. Not automatically pass/fail, because the consequences of that are bonkers.
Not automatically pass/fail, because the consequences of that are bonkers.
Agreed
This. You only need dice if the odds are dicey.
I agree, and if I think an DC might be too high for a player, I just ask them first “Wait, what’s your <skill here>?”
I recall a Zee Bashew video that I can’t seem to find that referenced a chart of how willing someone was to help when requested. The idea being the scale isn’t from “I will actively hinder you” to “I will sell my estate to aid you” but rather from less then helpful to more helpful.
For example, if you asked some haggard clerk about a quest the scale might be:
- Critical failure, the clerk directs you to the job board for details on any job.
- Failure, the clerk may point out there specific job on the board and direct you to it.
- Success, the clerk tells you that the person who posted the job is staying somewhere in town.
- Critical success, the clerk may share a rumor they heard in addition to telling you where the poster may be staying.
Regarding a discount from a penny-pinching inn keeper, perhaps it could go:
- Critical failure, payment for the entire stay is required up front. Extending your stay is not permitted.
- Failure, They are not willing to lower their prices
- Success, they will offer a lower price if you bundle extra services like meals, drinks, and baths.
- Critical success, they will offer you the bundle rate without bundling.
For stuff that isn’t story related, and if the group is in the right frame of mind, I’d ham up 1 and 20 on social roles. Nobody is selling their estate, but they might decide they take a shine to the PC or something else that’s fun. Similarly, a nat-1 could get the NPC offended, so they refuse a request grumpily or only help grudgingly.
Otherwise, I think what you’re saying is how I’d play it.
This is the way
Mutants and Masterminds has (effectively) a +5 if you roll a 20, but no extra penalty for rolling a 1.
They absolutely do, and the bonus effects are listed in the description of each skill action. Oh. you mean in D&D. washes hands
Hello fellow Pathfinder!
Dating back to 3rd critical skill checks in D&D suck because a lot of skills are written as pass/fail.
Example: picking a lock. If we want to add criticals, a 1 breaks the lock; mostly okay, with the long acknowledged fringe problem of experts being incompetent 5% of the time. What does a natural 20 get? I adore opportunities to be creative, but there’s not a lot better than, “You did it perfectly.” A regular success earns that according to the rules, I don’t want to take it away. A speech about how cool and ninja the PC is can come off pretty cringey to me. The correct mechanical answer would be to let the 20 roll over to the next check because the PC’s in the zone or whatever. Not awful, but it doesn’t directly reward the player right when they rolled the 20, which is the occurrence we want to feel good. We’re also rewriting several rules at this point.
Meanwhile, PF2e baked degrees of success into everything. On a crit fail they break the lock, on a fail they leave traces of their fruitless efforts, on a success they get one success toward opening the lock while scuffing it up a little, and on a crit success they get two successes and leave the lock looking pristine. The players don’t feel cheated when they get a normal success and scuff up the lock. The 20 has some reward for most characters. The 1 has a setback, even a reasonable setback for an expert with a +25 trying to open the DC 10 lock on Grandma’s rickety shed.
I actually don’t mind pass/fail skill rolls in D&D or other games. Rolling a 20 is inherently satisfying to me. But I adore the DC+10 critical threshold for making a good build feel like it was time well spent, in or out of game. And since the natural 20/1 and critical rules are connected at the hip, I’ll gladly take them both.
D&D has all the money in the entire hobby, basically, and they still make terrible design decisions like this.
Rolling a nat 20 and getting a crit is the jackpot of d&d mechanics. Don’t design a system where sometimes you hit the jackpot but don’t win anything. That’s an objectively bad choice to make.
I 90% agree. I think most of the opposition to this comes from people exhausted with habitual boundary-pushers who think that a nat 20 means they can get away with defying the laws of reality.
Like, no, a nat20 persuasion does not convince the merchant to give you half his stock and all the money in the register… He would go broke and he’s got a family to support, along with his own survival that your nat20 does not also convince him to stop caring about.
But at the end of the day, a lot of GMs who are sick of that need to be sent the dictionary page for the word “no.” The occasional use of it really does improve the quality of the game, and I’m sure plenty of players will appreciate not letting aforementioned boundry pushers continue to waste time on impossible pursuits that do nothing to move the game forward.
I’ve seen this easily solved by assuming the 20 succeedes but the DM decides how exactly.
“Okay. The dragon loves you know. They realize you have their old lover’s eyes. You remember this too. Old tales in your family that you thought were a joke. You are apparently related. And they do love you now.”
If you can’t trust your players to act like adults and show some basic maturity. That’s a different issue.
This is also a great way to handle it; malicious compliance/monkey paw. Makes for some humorous moments.
And yeah, if a player is constantly having to be told no, a talk may need to be had, and if it can’t be resolved, they probably need to go. It’s also a reason why Session 0’s are so important; talking out what’s expected of the campaign both on the part of the players and what the GM has in mind.
Having that 1 player being stalked by a horny dragon for the rest of the game, just in case.
“No” needs to be said before the roll, IMO. Then If the player insists on doing something impossible anyway, just role-play the failure. With that said, actions that are in a narrow sense impossible can still have positive outcomes and if there’s the potential for that then I’d say roll for it. The proverbial dragon seduction attempt can still possibly flatter a dragon with a big ego enough to benefit the PC even if it doesn’t get the PC laid.
You need to qualify this statement with what you believe should happen on a nat 20.
what you believe should happen on a nat 20.
Consistency.
My point is that setting up the expectation of a moment of triumph and then diluting it with exceptions is going to create moments of disappointment at the table.
If a nat 20 is going to be a big win it should always be a big win. That’s so intuitively true that most people just play that way despite the rules.
Well DnD consistently doesn’t have criticals outside of attack rolls and death saves.
Like the person you replied to asked, what would you even expect to happen on an ability crit? If the DM only lets you roll on things that would be possible for you, then you would succeed on a 20 anyway. If the DM lets you roll on impossible things, then you have a 5% of doing the impossible. Neither option is good.
I absolutely let a 20 or 1 have extra effect whenever it makes sense and feels right. But having it be a core rule would be a PITA.
Not to mention that it would make skill checks even more driven by randomness, which is already a problem.
what would you even expect to happen on an ability crit?
Extra information, owed a favour, make a friend, get a small reward, get a clue to a larger reward, impress someone important, uncover a secret, get forewarning of a danger, hinder a rival, gain advantage on something, opponent is exhausted/confused/embarrassed and must pass a saving throw to act…
Skill check crits would be just like combat crits except there’s way more scope for fictional as well as mechanical benefits.
That’s still not clear what you mean, all of those things are typically the results of a success. Do you mean nat 20 should always succeed? Do you mean nat 20 should always be a success with extra benefits? Do you mean nat 20 should always give you a side benefit even if it fails? You need to be more clear.
D&D is that way, though. Every time you see a natural 20 for anything that isn’t an attack does not automatically succeed unless people are using homegrown, which they often are.
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I don’t mean that it’s ultra rare, just that it serves the same function as a jackpot - it’s the best possible outcome, the thing you’re always hoping will happen when you scratch the ticket, press the button or roll the dice.
It’s your chance to have that YOU WIN BIG moment. Setting up that mechanic and then creating situations where it doesn’t apply is intentionally designing disappointment.
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I disagree that 1% chance is a jackpot but 5% isn’t. I’m using jackpot as an analogy for the emotional impact of a rarer, higher tier win mechanic - I don’t think specifying a number is useful here. That feeling can happen with a range of different rarities.
I’m not following your point about nat 1s, free gimmes or supply and demand.
I think we’re using very different ideas of game design. Are you using good design in the sense of like “tactically balanced”? I think of good game design as setting up and meeting player expectations for fun while minimizing frustration.
The game sets up rolling 20 and critting as a win big moment. To occasionally then deny players that fails to meet expectations and creates disappointment. That’s why I think it’s bad design. And why most people don’t play it as written.
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Elden ring absolutely does meet player expectations - challenge is the expectation of the souls-like genre.
6 Charisma can roll a 20 and be able to convince whomever of whatever
Certain people should never be able to make certain successes
only as amazingly as they are capable
I don’t disagree with any of this but I’m not talking about how the win should look in the fiction.
It’s just that when you roll a crit but don’t get a crit, most players will get extra disappointed. That’s a fact of the human experience that no rules text will ever change.
Good design accounts for the reality of how people actually use a thing.
FWIW, inconsistency is one of the things I hate the most about the game design in Elden Ring. It does not properly communicate the actual impact of stat upgrades at different levels (e.g. 39-40 vigor is a significantly higher jump than 40-41 vigor) and enemies will have resistances or weaknesses to different damage types that often feel arbitrary/poorly communicated (e.g. the Magma Wyrm, a creature that breathes fire, is more resistant to fire than the Fire Giant; Borealis, an icy dragon that breathes ice, is nearly as resistant to fire as the Fire Giant; Hero of Zamor, an icy man that shoots ice, is weak to fire).
Elden Ring’s design is essentially a form of trial and error that often punishes you for choosing poorly, relying instead on metagame knowledge (patterns from previous Souls games, online discourse) to patch up its shortcomings. Fun as all hell when you know what to do, but its systems are incredibly arcane for newcomers.
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If you make like five skill checks per game, yes it is rare and it’s way more fun to treat it like a crit success. It’s not a job, it’s a weekend activity that is supposed to bring joy.
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I’m not speaking to how the designers intended, but at the end of the day if a 20 is a crit success on skill checks it is a jackpot mechanic. You could go months without getting one in game and when it happens it’s absolutely like hitting the jackpot
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I think we’re talking past each other here-- everyone is saying it SHOULD be a rule and everyone they know does it anyway so it’s “part of DND”.
It’s like stacking +4 cards in uno. Might not be in the rules, but everyone knows to do it.
They do if the DM says they do, y’all get way too hard for the rules as written.
Not to mention which game you’re actually playing.
Yeah, the people that do rules as written, or follow a book for a campaign to the letter, to hard often end up taking the fun out of it.
My first ever campaign I was an outlander ranger with high survival. We started in a swamp and it was written “pass survival check, if fail, roll to go in a random direction”. I somehow failed 7/8 rolls with +7 (bad luck). We spent the whole session going round in circles and ended up further away from our objective than we started.
I felt awkward/stressed, and the others just felt bored/frustrated.
Chatting with more seasoned players afterwards they were like “yeah, that shouldn’t be how it normally goes, but it’s not your fault, DM should have a fail safe for stuff like that. First rule is ‘is it fun’. Just cause the campaign says ‘do x’ doesn’t necessarily mean you should if it’s not fun for anyone”
That’s why I really enjoy the “fail but” or “success except” mechanic were even failing still advances the plot. Maybe you get lost however stumble upon something that can help with the objective.
Yeah, one of the other players in that sesh was a forever GM, he was saying how he will maybe do one big “bad roll, bad consequences”, but then if it happens again something like “you go in the right direction but you twist your ankle in the brush” or “it takes twice as long” or something
Ok, but if the 20 doesn’t succed, why did you let them roll in the first place?
Maintaining the illusion? Not revealing the (impossible) DC?
Because I don’t have everyone’s modifier for every skill, ability, saving throw, and attack memorized off the top of my head, nor do I have magical foresight into whether or not they will choose to use abilities that would add more additional points on top of those modifiers.
You should at least have a general idea of your PC’s skillsets. As in, don’t let the country bumpkin make Arcana checks about monsters he’s never seen, or let the stick figure try to punch down a wall. If you look at a character in a situation and think, “there’s no way that could succeed,” then they shouldn’t be making a check.
Think of it from their point of view though. They want to try and do something. For me to just flat out tell them “no, there’s no possible way” is discouraging and robs them of autonomy. Obviously for crazy extreme circumstances I won’t let them, like “let me convince the king to abdicate to me!” type things. But if I think the DC should be 25 or something I’m not gonna bother wasting my time calculating what the theoretical maximum could be for the roll because I genuinely cannot know. The player can always do things I don’t expect or use other players’ things to help. For reasonable but implausible things I’ll allow rolls even if a nat 20 wouldn’t work because I’m not calculating what a nat 20 could theoretically be.
Plus, I often give people little flavor benefits for nat 20s even if they don’t have mechanical success.
don’t let the country bumpkin make Arcana checks about monsters he’s never seen
Why not? It could be fun! Of course non-critical rolls would be useless, but on a critical failure they could convince the whole party that dragons can’t see movement, and on a critical success they could buy mere chance figure out where its voonerables are (it’s a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!)…
or let the stick figure try to punch down a wall
Again, why not? All rolls, they take a bit of damage; critical failure, they break their arm or hand, and manage to dislodge a brick which starts a comically unlikely and extremely noisy Rube Goldberg chain reaction which ends up waking up and alerting all the guards; critical success, they hit the hidden button that opens the secret door (in another wall), starting a whole new subquest.
I agree. In casual play you can rely on veteran players to know their stats. If they’re the type to lie intentionally then they can leave the table. If they’re making mistakes then maybe something goes a little too easily, oh well. The best DMs i had didn’t give a shit and focused on rewarding players for learning.
No, you’re misunderstanding, I’m not saying the player, I’m saying the DM. I’m not going to waste everyone’s time at the table checking whether a 20 on the die could possibly succeed given their modifier when I can just ask them to make a roll. It’s way quicker.
Ah yeah i see. A roll skips you having to sort through character sheets introducing a silent pause in the narrative to determine whether a check passively succeeds.
I was a little confused by talk of character sheets because the players have them right there and they should be carbon copy with what the dm has.
I meant that for checks as the DM you can save time by relying on players who you can trust to know the game and be honest, rolled or passive. I argue that a DM that asks for my stats has not yet been any less immersive for me. It takes a split second and I’ll take it over railroading every time.
I think most people would say not letting you attempt to do something because they think your character can’t possibly have enough of a bonus to do it is railroading. Again, like I said, I don’t have foresight to know what the bonus might be. What if the bard decides to inspire them? What if the cleric uses guidance before? What if they have some item that gives them a bonus and they haven’t written that in and just add it in the fly?
I agree completely!
Tap for spoiler
I assume you’re just adding context because I don’t believe dialogue has clashing ideas any longer
I’m just disagreeing that allowing someone to roll when a 20 might not be enough is railroading.
Why the hell not? You’re the DM. Why do you not have copies of your player’s character sheets?
I regularly play in groups with eight player characters, Kolkani. Do you want me to check all eight of their sheets and all their abilities that could possibly modify their scores or just ask them to make a Blah (Foo) check check and see what the result is? It’s gonna be way faster for everyone to just ask them to roll.
How do you create fair encounters without knowing your player’s character’s stats? 🤨
I don’t think I’ve ever needed more information than character level and a vague sense of whether that character/player is more or less effective in combat/social encounters than usual to make them. I definitely don’t need to worry about whether they’ve got expertise in history, that’s something they can bring up when I ask them for a history check
Throwing whatever you please at them. It’s fair because they’re informed of the risks and given opportunities to adjust their plans.
Just because I have a sense of what modifiers are and might check during encounter building doesn’t mean I have them all memorized. That’s genuinely like over a hundred numbers to have memorized. Plus I can look at a sheet while building an encounter and not waste anyone’s time.
I never mentioned having them memorized. I specifically said you should have a copy of their sheets. lol
Do you want me to check all eight of their sheets and all their abilities that could possibly modify their scores or just ask them to make a Blah (Foo) check check and see what the result is? It’s gonna be way faster for everyone to just ask them to roll.
I never said I didn’t have the sheets. You keep trying to make this about access to sheets.
That’s partially less of an issue with fightclub
In addition to what the others have said, I think degrees of failure are often a fun thing to introduce whether they are in the rules or not (I’ll assume D&D 5E). It might be that a 20 with your +3 athletics isn’t enough to completely leap over that huge gap, but you manage to grab a handhold a few metres below the edge. You’ll have to take a turn or two to climb up, but you’re okay. The cleric’s roll of 3 with a -1 athletics, on the other hand, sees him plummeting to the bottom and taking a heap of fall damage
Yep, those are all great responses. I learned a lot.
Funwise, it seems like a good solution would be “failure… but!” approach.
So the player have at least some reward for doing the best they can even if it’s not enought to clear the chalange completely.
Once in a blue moon, an impossible check can impress a scale of difficulty on the players.
D&D example: a player with a high bonus attempts an Arcana check to figure out an enchantment and rolls well, up to a natural 20. I let the players have their moment of joy. Then I make a big deal of telling them they don’t have any idea what’s up with this enchantment. I really talk up how weird/complicated/confusing/impenetrable the enchantment is.
I’d be trying to prompt emotions I want the players and PC to share. Frustration, inadequacy. The players would viscerally know they need to try a different approach.
And because I gave the check a decent chunk of game time, it has more narrative weight. An interactive skill check is more substantial in the player’s mind than a monologue on the task being impossible, particularly if it stands out because they fail that check despite a super high result.
It’s a niche scenario, I admit. Most of the time just don’t ask for the check.
Sometimes, it’s about sending a message.
Some players don’t ask.
I… Don’t? Is that so magical?
Like, if something would need a DC 25 Acrobatics check, I ask the player “Wait, how high is your character’s Acrobatics? +3? Ah no sorry, you can’t do that.”
Because I don’t know what their max roll might be and it achieves them something, they gain knowledge that something is impossible for them.
Fuck you, Im dm so I get to pick what does and doesnt crit >:(
Exactly. Why not make them crit? It’s going to be up to the DM anyway to define what a “critical success” means on a skill check. There’s no hard rule like the extra damage that comes with crit successes on attacks. The DM gets to choose what a critical success on a skill check actually produces. The DM can easily just make sure the crit success isn’t game breaking.
Your players are in an audience with the king. The bard tries to be funny and tries to convince the king to give him his crown and hand the kingdom over to him. Actually making the bard the new king would break the game. But maybe a critical fail means the bard gets sent to the dungeon to be tortured for daring to make such a request. A critical success means the king will grant the bard one “wish,” ie, any reasonable single reasonable request that is within the king’s power.
The whole situation is fully in the DM’s power.
They do in PF2e. And it rocks
🤓 Pedant mode activated 🤓
🤓 Erm, ackshually, a natural 20 only increases the degree of success by one. This means, for example, if someone rolls a 20 on an attack roll, the total with modifiers is 28, and the defender’s AC is 30, the attack will be bumped up from a failure to a normal success, not a critical success. 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
To be even more pedantic: the original poster’s meme says skill checks don’t crit, not that nat 20s on skills are a critical success. Most skill checks in PF2e have a critical success tier. Thus jagermo was correct when they said that skill checks do crit in PF2e.
That being said, you are correct about how the whole tiering mechanic works and a nat 20 not always being a critical success. :)
Just because a Nat 20 isn’t necessarily the cause, doesn’t mean that skill checks don’t crit.
You are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
GURPS too
On page 242 of the Dungeon Master Guide 2014, it describes crit successes and fails as an optional rule.
As optional as multiclassing and feats.
Also grid based combat! If you want to be D&D purists, have fun but I’m glad my group isn’t!
Rule of cool
If something sounds fun it’s happening at my table.
If you roll a 20 on persuasion or something we’re going to have fun, but I’m not turning characters into literal gods (though that did happen one game)
They do at my table. Because it’s more fun, god damn it!
Taking a 10 is a strategic choice. You can automatically succeed because the DC is >10, or you can roll for it and try to get a critical success that comes with a random fringe bonus (such as extra XP, or making an action more permanent; like you crit a lockpicking check which just breaks the lock so it can’t be relocked) but also with the chance of critically failing (you broke the lock and now it can’t be unlocked!).
It also allows you to maybe succeed even if your stats would not let you. The DC is 50. With your bonuses, even a 20 would not beat the DC. But maybe fate intervened and you got lucky as fuck. Disco Elysium uses this a lot. Hell, there’s a whole sidequest locked behind a door that can only be opened if you roll a double 6.
2 things:
1: I’ve gotten disco Elysium, and Ive only played a few minutes, but I don’t remember it having rolls like that? How does one know what one is rolling? I played like 20 minutes of it 3 months ago, so maybe I’m misremembering.
2: that’s how my brother DMs. I once critfailed a lock picking so badly that my character broke his finger. My brother laughed his ass off
A lot of dialogue points and other actions will bring up a thing that rolls 2 D6s. Snake eyes is a critical failure, double sixes is critical success. The earliest point in the game where you can make one of these rolls is in your hotel room. Either by attempting to get your tie out of the ceiling fan, trying to piece together what happened with your shoes by analyzing the broken window, or by using the mirror and trying to stop making “The Expression.”
Many of them can be re-rolled later once you get more skill points. Others are one and done unless you reload or start a new game.
Many of them can be re-rolled later once you get more skill points.
It calls these white checks. Specifically they’ll unlock again (supposing you failed them) once you level up the skill or stat they’re associated to.
You can also find or buy dice that’ll unlock some of them.
Others are one and done unless you reload or start a new game.
It calls these red checks. And they’re often much more fun than white checks, especially when you fail them.
You can also find or buy dice that’ll unlock some of them.
Those actually do something? :O
They do! Each one reopens a different set of white checks, and reduces their difficulty! :D
The problem with DND¹ is that it’s a wargame cosplaying as a role playing game.
We’re not recreating historical battles. Let the players (and the DM) have fun.
1.— It boggles the mind that one of the early failed experiments at making role playing games (by slightly modifying the rules of pre-existing wargames) is still somehow the standard.
Sure, it was one of the main inspirations for the genre… but there’s a good reason we’re not still driving Ford Model Ts.
D&D today is almost an unrecognizable game from its first incarnation in the 70’s, though. I’m not really seeing the parallels to war games other than the fact that you have the option of using a battle map in combat, which is hardly unique to D&D.
To borrow your analogy, no one drives the Model T today, but cars still have 4 tires and a steering wheel.
It’s a game designed around math, combat, and dungeon crawling, not around roleplaying.
The objective isn’t to have fun roleplaying, but to roll the right numbers to maximise damage to the enemy. Any real fun comes from ignoring the rules and homebrewing.
The car might have gotten a few coats of paint over the years and maybe more ergonomic seats, but it’s still the same old chassis and engine underneath.
There are many games built around the concept of getting the players to have fun roleplaying, but DND has never been one of them, and if it ever became one it’d no longer be DND.
It’s also not really designed to make combat particularly interesting, other games manage that much better. Either shorter or narratively interesting.
Acrobatics does. Add an extra flip.
…If we fall off the rope bridge because you did a backflip I’m haunting you though.
I have zero regrets about my sick-ass backflip.
*in the core rules.
If you want to homebrew it then go for it.
I like the idea of extraordinary luck given to players. Giving everything they do a 5% chance of incredible success no matter the difficulty is such a small tweak to let some really hilarious, or awesome things play out. And they will take more risks knowing there is potentially a great reward. How do you balance this? 5% chance of terrible failure no matter how easy. No more automatic success. Sometimes shit just happens and when it happens, it really hurts.
And also, you can just make regular failure more punishing or even make success a monkey’s paw thing: "You want to seduce the lich?! already rolling dice “No, you fail. In your attempt to seduce the lich, his aura of evil has made you impotent. Permanently.” OR "YES NAT TWENTY!! DM deadpan for 10 seconds, then “I have a fetish for fingers. I’ll give you the information you want in exchange for a few those delectable, dainty fingers, half-elf” (Some temporary debuffs that can heal, and they get to skip the fetch quest)
Depends what system you’re playing
