How DnD Skill System is Bad

[deaddmwalking]

What K was advocating is dumping useless rolling, and that I can get behind. The fly skill in pathfinder is a great example of a bunch of extra rolls that nobody wants to make. Everyone would be happy if that part is just stripped from the system.

This part I agree with. The next part, I don't.

I don't see why you couldn't do the same thing for Jumping. Do we really need a resolution mechanic where sometimes you jump 5 feet and another time you jump 15?

Yes, sometimes you need to know if you jump 5 feet or 15 feet. Now, if you don't want a chance of failure, you don't need a skill for it. Heck, you don't need a skill for it at all if you'd like to roll it into a straight attribute check (saying it's a physical ability and not something that can be trained). Even if you assume it can be trained, it doesn't necessarily follow that you can train to +23 (skill) while the maximum human contribution from Athletic ability is +4.

But whatever you do with skills, you need a resolution mechanic that determines if a human can jump over a 10' chasm, and whether a Bullywug can or cannot do the same. Because even if it is low-level adventures, people like overcoming those kinds of challenges. Since you can envision them in an Indiana Jones style adventure, and that type of fantasy is popular, you sometimes need to know how well you jump.

[PhoneLobster]

Because even if it is low-level adventures, people like overcoming those kinds of challenges. Since you can envision them in an Indiana Jones style adventure, and that type of fantasy is popular, you sometimes need to know how well you jump.

Jumping chasms however is a bunch of total bullshit.

Because of several issues.

The first is, everyone likes the idea of risky leaping of bottomless (or functionally bottomless) chasms. But the reality is that when it comes to single roll jump checks NO it is NOT in fact cool to loose characters to jump check failures.

Now you can get around that with NON-fatal chasms that are actually... kinda shallow. But you then need to reimagine your scenarios into weird edge case chases not supported by the rest of the system and so on to make them relevant.

Not to mention even if you DO think it's cool to use whatever level of risk you have set your chasms to, jump checks even remotely resembling d20 jump skill checks are DEEPLY inappropriate for representing sensible or balanced levels of risk. Because they rapidly become "This guy jumps it on a 1+, this guy fails on a 20-, and MAYBE this guy gets to flip a god damn coin or die".

You would be better representing your risk in that scenario with representing falling into chasms by actually making an attack on some kind of more balanced common defense stat to see if a character falls in... and having actual jump distance be largely uniform and non-random.

Hell even if you wanted it to be an active jump roll, it's still almost 100% better if Jump is one of your abilities handled by a base attribute, and at a stretch your super jumpers just get a huge flat bonus from static ability options. The 3.x Jump skill at all stages was a big pile of ass.

[Cyberzombie]

Yes, sometimes you need to know if you jump 5 feet or 15 feet. Now, if you don't want a chance of failure, you don't need a skill for it.

The question isn't between having a roll versus the DM pulling a random jump number out of his ass. It's about having a fixed number instead of rolling.

We know how far we can move or fly in a turn without touching a single dice. Why not do the same for jumping?

It can start based on your ground speed, maybe something like 1/3 of your ground speed? Unless you have a separate jump speed listed. So a frog might be Move 15, Jump 40.

It takes just as much space as writing Jump +22, only now you don't have to crack open the PHB to look up the obscure rules for jumping that you only bust out once every 10 sessions.

[Sashi]

Did you actually just try to claim that the only way to simulate granularity/abstraction of say, a Climb Check, without a skill+roll mechanic would be if people were willing to "do the action that is being handicapped" and actually try and climb on the fucking ceiling with variable amounts of handy cap bonus gear?

Really? because as bat shit fucking crazy as that sounds that it the ONLY way that statement of yours parses or appears to have any fucking relevance to what anyone else is saying on this thread.

Yes, I claimed exactly that.

Tell me how you can figure out if Spider the Rogue is caught by his Pod-Person clone (who's stats are a literal photocopy of his character sheet with "evil pod clone" written on it) in a chase on the ceiling without resorting to one of the following things:

Determinism ("a tie means he gets away")
Rolling dice (Flipping a coin, Rock Paper Scissors, and "I'm thinking of a number from one to ten" also count here)
Magic Tea Party ("Can the door be locked to slow the pod-clone down?")
Physical challenges that somewhat represent the scenario ("If I can tag you in one minute the pod-clone gets your character")
Less physical challenges related to the scenario ("Let's play Mirror's edge, and if you beat my time you get away")
Bullshit challenges, physical or otherwise, completely unrelated to the scenario (jenga, pushups, darts, crossword puzzles)

At this point I'm actually hoping that there is one, because it could be awesome.

[shadzar]

Damnnit Shadzar, we were having a perfectly good discussion before you showed up.

dammit vagrant, someones cock was having a good time until your removed your mouth from it and your hands to type that post...so go back to sucking a barrel of cocks rather than posting and a lot more people will be happy.

[Username17]

It's only adding insult to injury when you realize that you could just give people abilities and save design time and play time. For example, rather than trying to fit all of the various levels of Climbing skill into some dice-rolling mechanic that covers low and high ranges of skill, you could just say "Beginner Climbing lets you scale low-difficulty walls at 10' a turn and Advanced Climbing lets you scale high difficulty walls at 10' a turn, medium at 30, and low at 30'. Make a DC 15 Reflex save to half damage if you fall."

So your new plan is that if someone wants to perform an action, even a basic physical action like climbing a wall or sneaking across a courtyard, that you should create a selectable ability for it. Or a "feat" if you will, as that's a term for a selectable ability we're all familiar with. And people who want to perform those actions in the present have to have taken these particular feats ahead of time.

Who are you, and what have you done with K?

Last I checked, the real K was openly contemptuous of the "make it a feat" school of design, and rightfully so because of how poorly it extended to new scenarios.

-Username17

[K]

It's only adding insult to injury when you realize that you could just give people abilities and save design time and play time. For example, rather than trying to fit all of the various levels of Climbing skill into some dice-rolling mechanic that covers low and high ranges of skill, you could just say "Beginner Climbing lets you scale low-difficulty walls at 10' a turn and Advanced Climbing lets you scale high difficulty walls at 10' a turn, medium at 30, and low at 30'. Make a DC 15 Reflex save to half damage if you fall."

So your new plan is that if someone wants to perform an action, even a basic physical action like climbing a wall or sneaking across a courtyard, that you should create a selectable ability for it. Or a "feat" if you will, as that's a term for a selectable ability we're all familiar with. And people who want to perform those actions in the present have to have taken these particular feats ahead of time.

Who are you, and what have you done with K?

Last I checked, the real K was openly contemptuous of the "make it a feat" school of design, and rightfully so because of how poorly it extended to new scenarios.

-Username17

Nope. My plan is to give people a large pool of baseline abilities through a section entitled something like "Basic Actions."

Everyone should be able to do basic climbing, and basic stealth, and basic jumping, basic research with books you can read, and all kinds of basic crap that doesn't need rolls. Trying to fix that to some super-granular mathy subsystem with lots of rolls is pointless as both a game design exercise and a play exercise.

Advanced "skills" work fine as selectable abilities, but at the point where they show up I don't really care if they are actual supernatural powers or super-skills. Feel free to put "Scholar" next to "Seer" where one takes books and one takes pools of magic water and both do advanced research and information gathering.

[Ghremdal]

So why just not use a mechanic that allows you to resolve conflicts without a lot of pointless rolls? Like taking 10, or using shadowruns system to convert 4 dice to 1 hit.

I am not a fan of using a d20 for skills, but being able to take 10 and 20 solves a lot of the problems, and you still have the option of rolling if you want to but for most things you should not need to.

Giving everyone the ability to take 10 in combat on skills might even work out.

[Username17]

I don't see any advantage in turning the skill system into pure Mother May I. You roll a die to see if you succeed or fail because it saves time. Without the die roll, the player and the MC just have an argument about whether they can do something for every fucking thing they want to do. Even D&DNockermensch or Apocalypse World are better than not rolling dice at all, because a bad die roll feels more impartial than an MC telling you to go fuck yourself and generates less argument.

-Username17

[Cyberzombie]

I don't see any advantage in turning the skill system into pure Mother May I. You roll a die to see if you succeed or fail because it saves time. Without the die roll, the player and the MC just have an argument about whether they can do something for every fucking thing they want to do. Even D&DNockermensch or Apocalypse World are better than not rolling dice at all, because a bad die roll feels more impartial than an MC telling you to go fuck yourself and generates less argument.

I don't see how it's Mother May I.

Saying someone needs the super jump feature to jump 30 ft is no more MMI than saying they have to roll a DC 30 on a jump check.

All games have binary abilities. There's no check to try to cast a fly spell, either you can or you can't. A 2nd level wizard doesn't flip out because he can't try to get a lucky roll to cast fly, so I'm not sure why it would be any different for jumping, swimming or picking locks.

[PhoneLobster]

Tell me how you can figure out if Spider the Rogue is caught by his Pod-Person clone

Back in the day when "Minigames" was a new thing to talk about around here I was among the first, if not flat out the first to advocate a chase minigame/mechanic for exactly this scenario.

Over the past five years or more I have experimented with exactly such minigames and mechanics.

My conclusion? They are a pile of bullshit that players are distinctly not interested in. As with most minigames, it becomes interesting, and learnable when fully integrated with the main minigame, and is generally avoided as much as possible otherwise.

People do not want to magically use a different type of "variable" movement the moment the "chase" music starts and then use a standard type of fixed combat movement the moment the "combat" music starts. They want to move, and they want to perform combat actions, and they want that all mixed together and they want it compatible and consistently intuitive.

Standard ground movement for combat works VERY nicely in RPGs as a fixed distance and if you don't pull unmitigated giant divides in movement/range between characters "chases" work remarkably well as opportunities for a round or two to follow and attack, grab, stand in the way of, or knock down a character for a few rounds while their superior movement somehow grows a gap or involves a mode that can get them past some obstacle unnavigable by their pursuers.

I very much like the direction I have gone by simply having a large amount of fixed movement and binary movement type abilities interacting with a "Big Fat Squares" style positioning/timing system. Opportunities to stop escapes and means of determining chases to the limited degree that I need to work out pretty nicely.

The closest thing I have to a variable skill roll is that actual combat attacks most likely will be made during the encounter, and my Stealth mechanics, if used in the encounter, are still largely roll based (but nothing like 3.x resolution).

And really, the Stealth conceivably COULD be a series of binary abilities where the character just needs to reach a location where their conditions are met and they can declare a hide action from pursuers. On the occasions that my current methodology ends chases with stealth that is pretty much exactly what happens in practice anyway.

[deaddmwalking]

Yes, sometimes you need to know if you jump 5 feet or 15 feet. Now, if you don't want a chance of failure, you don't need a skill for it.

The question isn't between having a roll versus the DM pulling a random jump number out of his ass. It's about having a fixed number instead of rolling.

We know how far we can move or fly in a turn without touching a single dice. Why not do the same for jumping?

It can start based on your ground speed, maybe something like 1/3 of your ground speed? Unless you have a separate jump speed listed. So a frog might be Move 15, Jump 40.

It takes just as much space as writing Jump +22, only now you don't have to crack open the PHB to look up the obscure rules for jumping that you only bust out once every 10 sessions.

I don't disagree that having a fixed distance that you know you can reliably jump is a good thing. A d20 is awfully swingy.

In the opening post, I already talked about how the granularity between counting each +1 doesn't work for me. I'm using Trained +5/Expert +10 and it works fine.

But even if you knew that someone could jump 10 feet (because they have a 30 foot movement) you're going to come into a situation where they want to jump further. In movement, we do have ways of going faster. You can double move. You can charge. You can run.

If your sheet says 'Jump 10' then people are legitimately going to need to know how they can increase that. Is that a standing jump, or a running jump? Is that discount the use of a pole to assist with vaulting?

In 3.0, rather than 3.5, with a jump check a running jump was 5 feet +1/point over 10. So if you rolled a (modified) 23, you'd jump 18 feet. I admit that it was obscure and the 3.x answer of 'your check equals your jump distance' is easy to remember.

To PhoneLobster's point - nobody wants to fall down a chasm and die. Nobody wants to die at all. But they simultaneously want to believe that the possibility of failure and/or character death exists.

I agree 'save or die' sucks. Having a way to cancel or replace the result is a good thing.

In my system, we have fate points. You can use it to save you (or sometimes to succeed). If you needed a 10 to make the jump, if you use a Fate Point, that's what you get. If you would fall and die, you can use a fate point to change the result. Maybe you fall but catch yourself on a tree limb... Maybe you catch the edge of the chasm and are forced to hang around for a while. Or maybe you fall and take massive amounts of damage but survive with all of your bones broken.

But you can't get rid of all the stupid ways to die because while nobody wants it to actually happen, it's important to believe that it totally could.

[hogarth]

I don't see why you couldn't do the same thing for Jumping. Do we really need a resolution mechanic where sometimes you jump 5 feet and another time you jump 15?

You don't need it. But real life has continuous levels of difficulty (e.g. I can always jump 1 foot and I can never jump 30 feet, but there are some distances in between that sometimes I can jump and sometimes I can't), and so restricting tasks to always-fail/never-fail feels unrealistic. Of course, in certain genres you don't care about "feeling realistic" and in some genres you do.

[Username17]

I don't see why you couldn't do the same thing for Jumping. Do we really need a resolution mechanic where sometimes you jump 5 feet and another time you jump 15?

You don't need it. But real life has continuous levels of difficulty (e.g. I can always jump 1 foot and I can never jump 30 feet, but there are some distances in between that sometimes I can jump and sometimes I can't), and so restricting tasks to always-fail/never-fail feels unrealistic. Of course, in certain genres you don't care about "feeling realistic" and in some genres you do.

This. Plus, if you lay down your system as a set of "always" and "never", and you come across an ambiguous case, then it's going to be an MC call whether you automatically succeed or automatically fail. And that's just asking for butthurt. You're literally asking the MC to resolve ambiguous cases by arbitrarily bringing down the ban hammer on individual players when they want to do things and have good reason to think they can succeed. That's fucked.

-Username17

[violence in the media]

I know it goes against the idea of the "unified mechanic" and all, but do we have to roll skills on a d20? Just because we use that for saves and attacks?

What if skill checks were rolled on a different size dice than other checks in the system?

[Sashi]

No real reason except that it lets a +1 to a skill roll be the same size as a +1 to a die roll and allows "social defence 15" to be directly comparable to "AC 15".

I'd really prefer to keep "skill checks" as a d20, and then remap the result to represent some other die if you need to.

Alternatively, you could just not have a "jump skill" at all, and give people jump abilities like 5+1d10 feet or 1+1d3 squares.

[Josh_Kablack]

Re: Jumping.

It can just be a bloody movement mode. If you have Jump (20') you can jump a 20' chasm. If you only have Jump (5') you throw a rope or look for a way around the 20' chasm.

If you really really want to have the "exciting" edge case where the precise distance isn't known, you wed it to some sort of "extra effort" mechanic with a random component -- like how Feng Shui has Fortune Dice, or HERO has pushing via spending extra Endurance. That way a character with Jump (20') always knows the 20' leap is safe, a character with Jump (5') always knows the leap is unsafe, but a character with say Jump (15') has the option to attempt a maybe / maybe not leap by expending something.

[Cyberzombie]

This. Plus, if you lay down your system as a set of "always" and "never", and you come across an ambiguous case, then it's going to be an MC call whether you automatically succeed or automatically fail. And that's just asking for butthurt. You're literally asking the MC to resolve ambiguous cases by arbitrarily bringing down the ban hammer on individual players when they want to do things and have good reason to think they can succeed. That's fucked.

I don't care much about the realism end of it. Wizards can fly at level 5, so the fact that a fighter might be able to do a 20 ft vertical jump consistently doesn't really bother me.

As for the ambiguous case, I'm just not seeing how this happens. It's like move speed 30 ft, there are no ambiguous cases. The ability tells you how far you can move. So I don't see why jump 30 ft or fly 30 ft somehow have more ambiguity. The DM tells you how wide the pit is or draws it out on the map, and now you know if you can jump it or not.

I don't understand how having a fixed amount of movement is somehow more open to ambiguity than having a variable amount of movement. They're the exact same thing. If anything having the fixed amount puts more power in the hands of the player, because you know how your ability works. Most players are happier casting a fireball than burning charges off a Wand of Wonder.

[K]

I don't see why you couldn't do the same thing for Jumping. Do we really need a resolution mechanic where sometimes you jump 5 feet and another time you jump 15?

You don't need it. But real life has continuous levels of difficulty (e.g. I can always jump 1 foot and I can never jump 30 feet, but there are some distances in between that sometimes I can jump and sometimes I can't), and so restricting tasks to always-fail/never-fail feels unrealistic. Of course, in certain genres you don't care about "feeling realistic" and in some genres you do.

The problem with your valid point is that DnD is not a genre that needs variable jumps. Indiana Jones never misses his jump check and falls to his death because heroic drama can only handle a very small amount of slapstick comedy.

Sure, Polevaulter: The RPG or Toon-Jump 2000 needs variable jumps and a rigorous jump mini-game, but those things are nonsensical in a game where jumping devolves quickly into that useless thing that non-flying monsters do.

In a fantasy game where the very feel of the genre depends on the PCs being good at what they do, auto-fail and auto-success is needed to allow PCs to do anything. PCs won't jump over a chasm if even one member of the party might fall to his death, they won't let a PC talk if that character might get an diplomacy-encounter-ending botch and someone else won't, and won't try to sneak into anywhere if one person might alert the guards and fighting or fleeing the guards is not a reasonable option.

Secondly, the point that the DM can set auto-fail or auto-success conditions is wildly silly because DMs could always do that; setting a DC 35 Climb check for a party with a best Climb check of+7 is just as easy as declaring that a wall it too difficult to climb. There really is no way to prevent DMs from designing encounters that you will/won't win by using some mathy dice-rolling scheme.

At best, you can set almost auto-failure and almost auto-success conditions and then let people roll while pretending that giving them a tiny chance for success/failure was somehow fair. Some number of people will fall for that despite the fact that it's a transparent ruse, but your game won't actually be better and they will figure it out eventually. Eventually, the party where everyone has a +15 Climb check are going to wonder where all the DC 15 walls went.

Thirdly, auto-success and auto-fail doesn't matter to anyone. People never complained that wall spells made walls 100% of the time and there was never a big uproar over other spell effects that did or did not work in a binary fashion. History has spoken on this issue.

[spongeknight]

Thirdly, auto-success and auto-fail doesn't matter to anyone. People never complained that wall spells made walls 100% of the time and there was never a big uproar over other spell effects that did or did not work in a binary fashion. History has spoken on this issue.

Nobody is really upset about having autosucceed abilities in various situations- it's the autofail abilities that make people frothing mad. Imagine a game like this:

Player: I try to jump over the chasm to catch Grognard the Two-Fisted as he flees
GM: You can't, you have 5' Jump and the chasm is 10'
Player: Well, what if I took a running start?
GM: No, your jump is 5', that's as far as you can go
Player: I've got these two axes that I looted earlier. Can I try using them to hook the edge of the chasm when I jump? Will that at least let me make it across, even if I have to climb up afterward?
GM: Nope, you can only go 5'
Player: If I use my quarterstaff as a makeshift pole vault can I get, say, a +2 circumstance bonus to some kind of roll to determine if I can exceed my normal jump distance?
GM: nope
Gary Oak: I've got 10' jump, so I just jump across and continue the adventure. Smell ya later!
GM: Okay, Gary took the ability that lets him automatically continue the adventure, so Player go play some Smash Bros while your character runs around the long way and fails to contribute.

I mean, if you have autosucceed/autofail, then either the DM only runs situations where everyone can autosucceed or somebody doesn't get to play because they autofail. That's what actually happens. Either tasks don't matter anymore because everyone succeeds at them all the time or some people succeed and some people go home for the night because their characters aren't tall enough to play. This actually matters more if you are doing some Indiany-Jonsey things; the wizard with a -1 jump check still has a reasonably good chance to dive out of the way of the giant boulder coming at him by leaping across the 10' chasm, but in a binary system he would fail and die automatically, which would obviously and justifiably piss that player off. Yes, failing the jump check would suck, but not getting the jump check would suck a whole lot worse.

I'd be fine with an autosucceed mechanic where adventurers who are so good at their jobs can't fail some things- like the Shadowrun example where you can just buy successes when you get good enough- but a completely binary system would fuck people far more than having a low chance to succeed.

[Kaelik]

spongeknight, that sounds really fucking dumb. If not making the jump is so terrible, then when someone rolls a failure how is that not every bit as bad if not worse than someone not being able to make the jump in the first place?

[deaddmwalking]

It'd be nice if we were all rational actors, all the time, but we're not.

While we all agree that failure usually sucks, it seems like people want to remove failure as a condition. While that might make the game better in a lot of ways, it won't make people happy. They don't want to fail, but they want to believe that failure was an option. They also want to see others fail.

If Indiana Jones makes his jump check, one of the villains tries it to - but uh oh! He falls. Queue scream.

Failure is awesome when it happens to other people.

So people want a system where failure seems like a totally real possibility that could happen at any time, but for some reason, despite the probability approaching 100% as you make multiple attempts, it never does (to them).

I've enjoyed the conversation, and so far, I'm inclined to think that my current solution (trained +5/expert +10) is the way to go, with keeping a tight leash on DCs. I also give everyone a bonus on skill checks equal to half level - so a 10th level character is better than a 1st level character on untrained skills... On the outside with assistance and such, a DC 40 is conceivably possible, but is fair to consider 'near impossible'.

If you consider a skill list roughly the same number of skills as 3.x, how would you award increases in skills? Currently we allow players to choose a number of trained skills at 1st level equal to Int modifier +1, and then +1 skill each level. So a +4 Int character could have 5 trained skills at 1st level, or 2 skills with Expert and 1 skill with Trained.

On the one hand, I'm concerned that it is somewhat limiting to have only a single skill selection as you advance, but since there are only two states for each skill (trained/untrained), large number of skills each level would quickly allow every character to be an expert in every skill.

[Kaelik]

Jump is a stupid skill to talk about how the D&D skill system should work because it is a stupid fucking skill.

I'm going to have to go with Kablack on the first page, what do you want skills to do?

And if the answer is "define how people interact with the world" then Jump shouldn't involve fucking rolling, and if the answer is "customize characters by giving people minor shit they can do" then jump shouldn't involve fucking rolls.

Jump is just a terrible thing to emulate with a fucking roll of the dice. Plenty of other things might be okay for dice rolls, but fucking jump isn't one of them.

[Cyberzombie]

Player: I try to jump over the chasm to catch Grognard the Two-Fisted as he flees
GM: You can't, you have 5' Jump and the chasm is 10'
Player: Well, what if I took a running start?
GM: No, your jump is 5', that's as far as you can go
Player: I've got these two axes that I looted earlier. Can I try using them to hook the edge of the chasm when I jump? Will that at least let me make it across, even if I have to climb up afterward?
GM: Nope, you can only go 5'
Player: If I use my quarterstaff as a makeshift pole vault can I get, say, a +2 circumstance bonus to some kind of roll to determine if I can exceed my normal jump distance?
GM: nope
Gary Oak: I've got 10' jump, so I just jump across and continue the adventure. Smell ya later!
GM: Okay, Gary took the ability that lets him automatically continue the adventure, so Player go play some Smash Bros while your character runs around the long way and fails to contribute.

Or you could... I don't know... attach a rope to the other side and have the other guy climb across? Is lateral thinking dead in this game to the point that your entire game falls apart because the DM says no. If an obstacle is insurmountable with one tool, try a different one. That's what D&D is all about.

I'm also not certain why you seem to think you can't just have something like a pole vault add feet to your jump directly instead of granting a bonus to your roll. Just because you've got a fixed number instead of a die roll doesn't mean you can't have modifiers to that fixed number.

And one last question: how is it better for the game if someone falls to their death botching a jump check? Even if just falling means you have to run around the long way, you're still in the same scenario. A smart player is not going to attempt that jump at all if his odds are low. He will instead use lateral thinking, because it's a hell of a lot better than taking a d20 and playing Fifteen Sides of Fuck You.

[K]

Thirdly, auto-success and auto-fail doesn't matter to anyone. People never complained that wall spells made walls 100% of the time and there was never a big uproar over other spell effects that did or did not work in a binary fashion. History has spoken on this issue.

Nobody is really upset about having autosucceed abilities in various situations- it's the autofail abilities that make people frothing mad. Imagine a game like this:

Yeh, and that's the RPG design.

Having the villain escape because he teleported away or otherwise escaped and you can't follow is supposed to make you mad. Not being a strong enough climber to skip all 33 levels of the Tower of Doom and just fight the BBEG at the top is supposed to make people wish they had a better climbing skill. Taking damage because you got hit is supposed to be an unpleasant event.

Having limits is supposed to piss people off and that's good, and it's bad to let people MTP-weasel success past their limits. You've stopped even pretending to play a game when you decide to let people MTP up some circumstances where they get to win.

You can't play a game without limits and you can't tell a story without limits. Hell, you can't even do creative problem-solving if your problems don't have limits.