Seerow wrote:Honestly? I'm not sure it's as bad as it seems at first glance. There's been a lot of posts here about where and how the skill system in D&D fails, and abstracting it further is probably a good thing. The passive perception strikes me as a particularly bad example. A better example to me is a character with a rating 4 disable device automatically succeeding at disarming any trap at 4 or below. But if it's a rating 5 trap, suddenly it's a challenge and he needs to start rolling. Personally I'd make it so you only auto succeed against things 1 lower than you, things on your level are like 50-50 (pre any modifiers that may apply), and above it's probably more like a 10-20% shot at 1 above, and 2 ratings above being impossible. Keeping numbers low while still separating what is possible for different characters I think is ultimately a good idea. I don't like skills with +120 skill bonuses,
You may not like +120 skill bonuses, but they can achieve the system you describe almost trivially.
Set the base DC of a task to 11. Then have each of what Mearls and Cook are describing as a "rank" add +20 to whichever side of the DC or bonus equation it occurs. Add a -10 "passive" penalty and tweak the auto-success rule and you have a system that does exactly what you ask for while needing fewer chart-lookups and less space in player memory than what Mearls and Cook are suggesting.
Here's a more-developed proof of concept:
Since we're re-inventing FASERIP here, let's go with
- 0 = Novice
- 1 = Apprentice
- 2 = Journeyman
- 3 = Expert
- 4 = Master
- 5 = Grandmaster
As our adjective ranks here - but really you can use any set you want.
Now when a Novice character attempts a novice task, they roll 1d20+0 against a DC of 11 and have a 50% chance of success. When an apprentice character attempts an apprentice task, they roll 1d20+20 against a DC of 31 and have a 50% chance of success.
and so on and so forth up until.....When a grandmaster character attempts a grandmaster task, they roll 1d20+100 against a DC of 111 and have a 50% chance of success. Ergo: EVERYONE HAS A 50% CHANCE TO SUCCEED AT TASKS OF THEIR RANK. just like you asked for.
When an apprentice character attempts a novice task, they roll 1d20+20 against a DC of 11, and auto-succeed without needing to roll. When a journeyman character attempts an apprentice task, they roll 1d20+40 against a DC of 31, and auto-succeed without needing to roll. ....
and so on and so forth until....When a grandmaster character attempts a master task, they roll 1d20+100 against a DC of 91, and auto-succeed without needing to roll. If we impose a -10 "passive" penalty for rolls that the player does not instigate, then they roll 1d20+20-10 against a DC of 11, and still auto-succeed all the time at tasks below their rank. (Unless our system includes other numeric penalties, which could allow for characters to fail tasks below their rank) ERGO: EVERYONE AUTO-SUCCEEDS AT TASKS BELOW THEIR RANK. just like you asked for.
Those are also what Cook and Mearls are describing, and I cannot figure out how what they are describing is
- Going to produce results that are at all different from that system I just outlined
- In any way simpler to use or explain than the system I just outlined.
Furthermore, my system could be simplified by stripping the adjectives out of it entirely and just relying on purely numeric +20s on either side.
So unless I am missing something here, there is a fairly obvious system that produces exactly the results Cook and Mearls have described in their articles, but is simpler than the system they are proposing. I really hope that I'm missing something, because otherwise Cook and Mearls are choosing unnecessary complexity.
Now in your post above, you asked for a stipulation that Cook and Mearls haven't. You say you wanted a 10%-20% chance for a character to succeed at tasks one rank above their own rank - and that gets a little tricky in a purely numeric system - but only a little. You can say that a natural 20 is an autosuccess on skill checks regardless of DC. That would give characters a 5% chance to succeed on tasks any number of ranks greater than their own, which isn't what you asked for. Instead you need to append a slightly clunky rule like "anytime a character would need to roll higher than a 20 on an unmodified die to succeed at a skill check, they may treat an unmodified roll of 17,18,19,or 20 as though it were twice the rolled value" This gives a character a 20% chance to roll a 34 or higher on the die, but caps the total value at +40. This allows exactly a 20% chance of success for tasks exactly one rank higher than the character's skill and (assuming no other positive modifiers) zero chance to succeed at tasks 2 or more ranks higher than the character's skill. Actually, let's skip the whole doubling the die thing and just set it to a fixed number.
- Set the base DC of a task to 11.
- Then have each of what Mearls and Cook are describing as a "rank" add +20 to whichever side of the DC or bonus equation it occurs. That is to say, a player rolls 1d20 + 20 * { SKILL RANK } against a difficulty class of 11 + 20 * { TASK DIFFICULTY RANK }
- Add a -10 passive penalty to rolls the player doesn't declare.
- Anytime a player would succeed on a 1, they don't need to ask to roll and the MC should describe what happens as if they had asked to roll and succeeded
- tweak the auto-success rule to read "anytime a character would need to roll higher than a 20 on an unmodified die to succeed at a skill check, they may treat an unmodified roll of 17,18,19,or 20 as though they had rolled a 35 on the die.
- Do not include modifiers other than rank and passive on either the skill bonus or DC side.
Is a skill system that does everything you ask for, despite that being more than Mearls and Cook are asking for, and this skill system takes less than 200 words to lay out, despite the redundancy in my description.
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