Big Skills

[tussock]

So, in the first 3e module, with the Goblins and Kobolds, near the start of that you either go Left or you go Right. One way is Goblins first and the other is Kobolds first and that matters if you happen to set them up to fight each other and one is slightly easier even if you don't. Not mattering much, but it does.

If instead, there was a search check to find a secret door that lead to the Goblins-first option, that is obviously gating a player choice. But who cares? If there's a real choice that changes the story in some way, why not gate one of the options? They both have to work in some way for it to be a valid choice (rather than, you know, you can go Right and continue or you can go Left and die no save, surprise!) so why not gate one?

And if coming back some other day and trying again with some better tools or allies or whatever is to be a valid choice, why not gate all of them? Trying again after you've gained some valuable intelligence about progress blocks doesn't actually take that much table time.

In the case of the module, the players didn't even have useful information about the choice they were making, it was really just hang left or hang right. A secret door would have added information of the type "this isn't the usual way in here" and made it a better choice. It's even a cool thing to blow right through it and find the secret door at the end, because that works as a story too. "The better thing you might have done if only you'd known" is a valid story, especially if you really could have known with different choices in build or equipment or play. Because then those things matter.


But that's true for anything. Yes, you might not have the right stuff to take the left path, because it needs some spell or skill or gear or whatever and you can choose to not have that, but also you might not roll high enough to take the left path and that is also a valid game experience. So that the dice also matter.

In exactly the same way that sometimes you fail your surprise avoidance roll and the dragon eats you and you have to get raised from the dead like a common Fighter. Or you fail to find the demon-slaying arrow until after you kill the demon.


And I get some people are arguing that the dice shouldn't matter and player empowerment must overcome all that randomness, but fuck that noise.

[Mord]

Mord. The letters themselves were never the point. The information is the actual content that I've been on about. That information leads to the players choosing to take route X, Y, or Z. That's why it's important. That's what you will want the players to have. That's why I said no matter what way you lock it from them or how you have them earn it you will want them to have it so the players can make informed choices on actual major plot points.

I've already said that it's not clear to me what specific information it is that you consider so important. Is that critical info "catch[ing] wind of the bbeg's plan" or is the critical info the details of the plan that are contained in the letters?

Imagine the set of all possible story paths. Routes X-Z as you identify them are part of this set, and you must have the "key information" for those paths to be accessible, but why are they the only paths that could produce a good story and/or a good time for players? Why is there no Route W which does not require the "key information?"

Routes X-Z may well be the only routes in which the story moves in the direction the GM had in mind, but forcing the story to conform to what the GM had in mind is railroading. If that's the kind of campaign you're running, then it's completely appropriate to just say "you find the letters" whenever is most convenient to your script and Search checks are a counterproductive waste of time.

[virgil]

Wait. That seems wrong. I. Wonder. Why.

Guess someone else will have to answer, since you're admitting ignorance.

Why can't gated content, influenced by random factor, make an upcoming fight harder or easier? Why can't content be gated and have sufficiently numerous points to permit the overall adventure end-state to be as certain as a fight's outcome?

Why isn't the anti-random faction advocating for Gumshoe more, even if only as a source of inspiration? You get as many or few pieces of content as you're willing to ask out of the DM without any dice gating it.

[Kaelik]

There is both a Concentration check and a Reflex save for Wall of Stone. There is a roll for both the caster and the target. Why do you got to be such a stupid asshole?

The concentration check doesn't apply unless you are an idiot or already fucked, and the Reflex save has nothing to do with creating a Wall of Stone.

Easily your most annoying attribute is that once you commit to some insanely wrong point you double down and get worse and worse every time you post.

All you had to do was just admit that Randomness is not player agency, but it is still the greatest thing to ever exist and makes you hard and you wouldn't be the dumbest person in a thread.

But no, you double down from randomness being player agency to claiming that player agency is 100% derived from randomness, so resources investment and player decisions can't even create agency, even though in your initial post you recognized them as sources of player agency.

Now you've doubled down so hard that you are seriously claiming that when someone casts Wall of Stone to create a wall of stone that doesn't trap someone inside and only you know, exists as a wall, perhaps as part of a building, or to fence off a corridor or something, that this is not really player agency, but if, and only if, someone is standing adjacent to them, causing them to have to cast defensively, and thus requires a concentration check (they they succeed on a 1 and therefore don't roll) that would be real player agency, because a die roll would be involved. (Even though it wouldn't, but I guess the transitive property of dice agency would gift agency to that decision.)

Presumably likewise the decision to cast Dimension Door or Solid Fog is also not reflective of player agency at all, because no dice are involved, and dice are the only source of player agency. Unless someone threatens them, and then the concentration check causes agency to exist.

You fucking moron. Just admit that randomness is not player agency.

[Sergarr]

Why have dice rolls in combat? You know the final outcome. What are you going to do, declare game over because they rolled poorly? What makes combat, a part of the game with less forgiveness of failure than finding love letters, acceptable to have random elements that Search should not have?

Pretty sure that, as it has been already said, combat is more acceptable to random elements because there is actually far less randomness in there, or rather, the random elements combine with player choices in a way that makes the end result far less uncertain, more granular, and less insulting than "roll d20+mods to beat this target number, and if you failed, you're potentially screwed forever from doing the thing you wanted to do".

Notice that in combat, there's usually a variety of different things you can do. With skills, there is, in many typical cases, no "choose how to do this thing", with the exceptions of "take 10/20" rules, which makes the already random results feel far worse, because you can't even do anything to potentially improve how you do that thing, outside of level ups - and spells, which basically bypass the whole skill system completely, thus making any investment in skills pointless.

Speaking of spells, it seems that they already do the job of the skill system far better than the current skill system does, by at least providing you with actual inputs other than "to roll or not to roll". It also has far better scaling on its effects. Maybe the Big Skills idea should, instead of trying to do anything with the existing skill system, just replace it with a range of universally-accessible spells, buyable/improvable with skill points? I think this has been already proposed by someone before in this thread, but I haven't seen any actual discussion of that. Seems like everyone switched to the "rolling is always bad vs some rolling is bad vs some rolling is good vs rolling is always good" free-for-all.

[MGuy]

Mord. The letters themselves were never the point. The information is the actual content that I've been on about. That information leads to the players choosing to take route X, Y, or Z. That's why it's important. That's what you will want the players to have. That's why I said no matter what way you lock it from them or how you have them earn it you will want them to have it so the players can make informed choices on actual major plot points.

I've already said that it's not clear to me what specific information it is that you consider so important. Is that critical info "catch[ing] wind of the bbeg's plan" or is the critical info the details of the plan that are contained in the letters?

Imagine the set of all possible story paths. Routes X-Z as you identify them are part of this set, and you must have the "key information" for those paths to be accessible, but why are they the only paths that could produce a good story and/or a good time for players? Why is there no Route W which does not require the "key information?"

Routes X-Z may well be the only routes in which the story moves in the direction the GM had in mind, but forcing the story to conform to what the GM had in mind is railroading. If that's the kind of campaign you're running, then it's completely appropriate to just say "you find the letters" whenever is most convenient to your script and Search checks are a counterproductive waste of time.

Mord it does not matter what specific details are in the letters. It seriously doesn't. It doesn't matter how many different things players decide to do with the information. Please concentrate on the point I'm making with the details I gave. I'm not going to have you distract me by trying to find out minute details when my point does not require it.

[deaddmwalking]

Speaking of spells, it seems that they already do the job of the skill system far better than the current skill system does, by at least providing you with actual inputs other than "to roll or not to roll". It also has far better scaling on its effects. Maybe the Big Skills idea should, instead of trying to do anything with the existing skill system, just replace it with a range of universally-accessible spells, buyable/improvable with skill points? I think this has been already proposed by someone before in this thread, but I haven't seen any actual discussion of that. Seems like everyone switched to the "rolling is always bad vs some rolling is bad vs some rolling is good vs rolling is always good" free-for-all.

People will be justifiably upset that their character cannot attempt to do something that any person 'with thumbs' could attempt in real life. A character is more than a pawn in the game.

One major criticism of feats was that each new one limited the play space - actions that originally could have been attempted by anyone with the imagination were now restricted to characters with the proper feat selection. As the number of feats expanded to several thousand and each character would have approximately 1 dozen feats, the number of things a character could not do increased dramatically. This was not as much of an issue with a feat that removed a penalty to an action.

[Username17]

Kaelik, you don't roll search checks to find things on top of the desk or in the middle of the floor. You don't roll concentration checks to cast spells outside stressful situations, and you don't roll attack rolls to swing your sword outside combat. Yet the rules for search checks, concentration checks, and attack rolls all exist. And it's important that players can choose to make them and know what the range of results would be if they did.

You picked the dumbest fucking counter example I can imagine. There are in fact lots of abilities in D&D that aren't rolled, or which interact with rolls in sufficiently indirect fashion that you would have had a leg to stand on claiming they didn't have a roll. But you picked a fucking spell with a save that is bypased by strength checks. There are literally three fucking potential die rolls in the action you chose to name as the example of something that had zero. You fucking failed this conversation and now we can all point and laugh.

The existence of actual abilities that don't have die rolls at all doesn't actually meaningfully argue against the idea that having your abilities interpreted by impartial icosohedrons gives you more agency than having your abilities interpreted by the whims of a fickle MC. It's an incoherent line of argument to attempt. But you failed to even get that far because you set yourself the dadaist goal of naming an action mediated by zero die rolls and the one you named has three and not zero.

-Username17

[Sergarr]

Speaking of spells, it seems that they already do the job of the skill system far better than the current skill system does, by at least providing you with actual inputs other than "to roll or not to roll". It also has far better scaling on its effects. Maybe the Big Skills idea should, instead of trying to do anything with the existing skill system, just replace it with a range of universally-accessible spells, buyable/improvable with skill points? I think this has been already proposed by someone before in this thread, but I haven't seen any actual discussion of that. Seems like everyone switched to the "rolling is always bad vs some rolling is bad vs some rolling is good vs rolling is always good" free-for-all.

People will be justifiably upset that their character cannot attempt to do something that any person 'with thumbs' could attempt in real life. A character is more than a pawn in the game.

One major criticism of feats was that each new one limited the play space - actions that originally could have been attempted by anyone with the imagination were now restricted to characters with the proper feat selection. As the number of feats expanded to several thousand and each character would have approximately 1 dozen feats, the number of things a character could not do increased dramatically. This was not as much of an issue with a feat that removed a penalty to an action.

I don't see why "doing something that any person with thumbs could attempt in real life" requires retaining the 3e style skill system. It seems to me that anything that falls under that category could be honestly put inder a big block of "things you can simply do and things you simply cannot do". It's like movement, you don't demand players to have feats to be able to move in different ways, you just give the ability to do these things free of charge. The difficulty of doing hard-but-still-ultimately-possible things (like jumping higher than usual, or searching a huge castle for clues) in many, many cases could be far better represented with increasing the amount of time they take to complete. It's almost certainly better than the 3e inane "if you failed to bash this door once, you are magically forbidden from trying it again until you level up!" bullshit.

The existence of actual abilities that don't have die rolls at all doesn't actually meaningfully argue against the idea that having your abilities interpreted by impartial icosohedrons gives you more agency than having your abilities interpreted by the whims of a fickle MC. It's an incoherent line of argument to attempt. But you failed to even get that far because you set yourself the dadaist goal of naming an action mediated by zero die rolls and the one you named has three and not zero.

-Username17

The bolded part is self-evident, obviously. But there seems to be a third possible choice - where your abilities are interpreted by yourself. Wouldn't that give players even more agency, without inserting randomness via dice rolls? I believe that was the angle Kaelik was going for, with his example (though there are far better abilities for demonstrating that) - with Wall of Stone, you can make it in any shape you desire - which could be used for fun creative things, like using it near a ladder to turn it into a slide, and GM can't just outright say to you "but you can't do that" without a good excuse. And there's no dice rolling involved in shaping it - you don't have to "roll Int vs some DC" to determine whenever you can actually shape it over a ladder or not, you can just do it, free of charge. In fact, adding any such check would actually reduce player agency, relative to the existing situation - because then they would be basically forced to use it the boring way, or else risk being randomly fucked over by an unlucky dice throw.

[ACOS]

People will be justifiably upset that their character cannot attempt to do something that any person 'with thumbs' could attempt in real life. A character is more than a pawn in the game.

One major criticism of feats was that each new one limited the play space - actions that originally could have been attempted by anyone with the imagination were now restricted to characters with the proper feat selection. As the number of feats expanded to several thousand and each character would have approximately 1 dozen feats, the number of things a character could not do increased dramatically. This was not as much of an issue with a feat that removed a penalty to an action.

I've always thought this thinking was kinda weird -- it seems to me that feat-plosion (a)regulated play space (as in "to make regular") and (b)added to the play space. Given that d20 is supposed to be an exception-based ruleset, I'm pretty hard pressed to think of any feat, as a function of simply existing, that infringed on the space that was previously relegated to simply "with thumbs". Rather, it seemed to cut down on the "mother may I" -- which, I guess for some groups, very well could have been functionally the same thing; but I imagine those same groups might just as likely have ignored "infringing" content.
That being said, my table(s) did feel that some skills got nerfed from feat-plosion (which were promptly ignored); but "skill system" and "with thumbs" are different things (albeit related).
Also, when feats were first a thing, nobody could seem to make up their mind over what exactly a feat was supposed to be in terms of game currency; it wasn't until almost the end of the production cycle that they finally (sorta) started to get that shit dialed in.

Granted, said feat-plosion certainly jacked-up relative opportunity costs, which certainly can be an issue -- the result was that characters were pushed further and further towards being specialists (which itself is a mixed bag). Of course, I don't know that you can do much of anything that involves expanding on the ruleset (in terms of character options) that doesn't increase relative opportunity costs, without simultaneously shifting (eventually to the point of breaking) the game's baseline expectations.

[PhoneLobster]

The bolded part is self-evident, obviously. But there seems to be a third possible choice - where your abilities are interpreted by yourself.

Well actually it isn't entirely self evident because it's actually a bit hard to say which is worse, GM charity or coin flip charity.

But more importantly it isn't actually an exclusive choice. You don't get to get away from arbitrary GM whim with your search checks or your knowledge checks. In every scenario described on this thread so far the search check is always generated by arbitrary GM whim.

THEN you either add a random dice roll for failure or not.

It's a choice between GM charity... and GM charity with a random chance of failure for no reason. Player agency never gets a fucking look in unless you start talking about search action requirements, and even then that isn't a flat out alternative but an additional layer on top of either GM charity or GM charity + dice roll charity.

There is no scenario here where it ISN'T a matter of relying on the GM to give you something on a whim. You don't get to go "well since I suddenly ROLLED A DICE you MUST now give me things for knowledge (star trek trivia)!" that's sadly not how these skills work, nor is it how they CAN work, nor has there been a single person insanely arguing that they SHOULD work like that on this entire thread.

[ACOS]

It's almost certainly better than the 3e inane "if you failed to bash this door once, you are magically forbidden from trying it again until you level up!" bullshit.

I'm not sure if this example was simply random, or if it was purposely selected. Either way, I think it's a bad example.

But there seems to be a third possible choice - where your abilities are interpreted by yourself. Wouldn't that give players even more agency, without inserting randomness via dice rolls?

That depends on how you expect this to be applied. It certainly appears to add the randomness of "making it up as I go along".

[Kaelik]

You don't roll concentration checks to cast spells outside stressful situations. . . and it's important that players can choose to make them and know what the range of results would be if they did.

So to be clear, rate on scale of 1-10 the player agency in the following three situations:

1) A player casts wall of stone to make a fucking wall. There is no one being trapped in the wall, and there is no one threatening them. They just want a wall.
2) A player casts wall of stone to make a fucking wall. There is someone adjacent to them, but the way the rules of this hypothetical 3e game without houserules work, they get to cast the spell no matter what without a concentration check. As before, there is no intention to trap anyone in the wall.
3) A player casts wall of stone to make a fucking wall. There is someone adjacent to them, so they have to roll a 1d20+19 against a DC 20 to cast the spell. There is no desire to trap anyone in the wall.
4) A player casts wall of stone to make a fucking wall. There is someone adjacent, so they have to make a check of 1d20+11 against DC 20 because they have a con of 8 and are minimum wall of stone level. No one is trying to capture anyone.

Now, if you say that 3 and 4 have different amounts of player agency than 1 and 2, you are fucking idiot and liar.

If they have the same amount of agency, then HEY FUCKING IDIOT, MAYBE AGENCY ISN'T MAGICALLY IMPARTED BY DICE.

You picked the dumbest fucking counter example I can imagine. There are in fact lots of abilities in D&D that aren't rolled, or which interact with rolls in sufficiently indirect fashion that you would have had a leg to stand on claiming they didn't have a roll. But you picked a fucking spell with a save that is bypased by strength checks. There are literally three fucking potential die rolls in the action you chose to name as the example of something that had zero. You fucking failed this conversation and now we can all point and laugh.

Hey frank, remember that time that someone cast Wall of Stone not because there was person adjacent to them that they wanted to trap in a wall, but because they wanted to make a goddam wall, you know, the most common use of Wall of Stone?

Remember who they do that with literally zero rolls, because they just get to make a goddam wall. Remember how that is player agency, because the rules that let you create a wall without rolling dice are player agency.

The existence of actual abilities that don't have die rolls at all doesn't actually meaningfully argue against the idea that having your abilities interpreted by impartial icosohedrons gives you more agency than having your abilities interpreted by the whims of a fickle MC.

Hey frank, remember the actual rules of the game, and character investment decisions, and player choice? You know, all those things you used to be aware of whenever you were making arguments that 3e has more player agency than bear world, but then you forgot about as soon as you needed to fap to how dice create all agency?

[Sergarr]

It's almost certainly better than the 3e inane "if you failed to bash this door once, you are magically forbidden from trying it again until you level up!" bullshit.

I'm not sure if this example was simply random, or if it was purposely selected. Either way, I think it's a bad example.

Why is it a bad example? Some important skills (like knowledge, or decipher script, or sense motive - in other words, skills that are quite likely to be content gates) work in that way, you know. If you fail them, you can't retry them without going through hoops; else you would be able to brute-force them through repeated attempts... except, since spells aren't affected by this bullshit limitation, all obstacles that can be bypassed by repeatedly casting spells are bypassed by repeatedly casting spells, and the skill system only works as a really, really bad crutch at the first few levels, until you get the actual abilities worth a damn.

But there seems to be a third possible choice - where your abilities are interpreted by yourself. Wouldn't that give players even more agency, without inserting randomness via dice rolls?

That depends on how you expect this to be applied. It certainly appears to add the randomness of "making it up as I go along".

I don't see how making things up adds randomness. Unpredictability, yes, randomness, no. Key difference here is, once you've figured out a clever solution, you can keep freely using it again and again without waiting for the Dice Gods to have mercy on you. It's how most of the stupid wizard fighter-breaking tricks work, you know - there isn't much randomness involved in "I'm flying 500 ft above you and drop save-or-dies until either you die, or I ran out of spells, at which points I teleport to safety and repeat the process next day, all this time remaining out of range for fighter to attack".

[ACOS]

Why is it a bad example?

because there is nothing that stops someone from bashing against the door over and over. And if a single bash isn't enough to knock down the door, then at least the PC can continue to deal damage to the door until it runs out of HP.
Sure, you could then say something like "but wooden stick vs iron door", but that would be adding constraints that don't actually have anything to do with a PC's capacity to retry.

Some important skills (like knowledge, or decipher script, or sense motive - in other words, skills that are quite likely to be content gates) work in that way, you know. If you fail them, you can't retry them without going through hoops;

Yes; but bashing a door is not on that list.

Sorry -- I didn't mean to get distracted by the example.

I don't see how making things up adds randomness. Unpredictability, yes, randomness, no.

I'm not sure that this distinction is meaningful. For the purposes of trying to run a game, they basically have the same effect.

Key difference here is, once you've figured out a clever solution, you can keep freely using it again and again without waiting for the Dice Gods to have mercy on you. It's how most of the stupid wizard fighter-breaking tricks work, you know - there isn't much randomness involved in "I'm flying 500 ft above you and drop save-or-dies until either you die, or I ran out of spells, at which points I teleport to safety and repeat the process next day, all this time remaining out of range for fighter to attack".

Once you stumble on a trick that works, and then you keep spamming it, you are no longer in the realm of making shit up - you're now defaulting to a known quantity.
The moment something was "made up because I wanted it to work, because me", that moment of unpredictability might as well been random as far as anything about the game was concerned. After that, it is now a known quantity. But what about the next scenario that involves "make something up that I want to work, because me"? Not that "thing" you did before (because you already used it before, so you're not "making it up").

At some point, players need to be careful about going out of their way to invent "clever tricks" -- there eventually comes a tipping point where it just looks like they're just trying to make the GM dance like a monkey simply for their own infantile amusement .... which is the same point at which we've just created yet another gygaxian dick.
Moderation, good sir.

[deaddmwalking]

Speaking of spells, it seems that they already do the job of the skill system far better than the current skill system does, by at least providing you with actual inputs other than "to roll or not to roll". It also has far better scaling on its effects. Maybe the Big Skills idea should, instead of trying to do anything with the existing skill system, just replace it with a range of universally-accessible spells, buyable/improvable with skill points? I think this has been already proposed by someone before in this thread, but I haven't seen any actual discussion of that. Seems like everyone switched to the "rolling is always bad vs some rolling is bad vs some rolling is good vs rolling is always good" free-for-all.

People will be justifiably upset that their character cannot attempt to do something that any person 'with thumbs' could attempt in real life. A character is more than a pawn in the game.

One major criticism of feats was that each new one limited the play space - actions that originally could have been attempted by anyone with the imagination were now restricted to characters with the proper feat selection. As the number of feats expanded to several thousand and each character would have approximately 1 dozen feats, the number of things a character could not do increased dramatically. This was not as much of an issue with a feat that removed a penalty to an action.

I don't see why "doing something that any person with thumbs could attempt in real life" requires retaining the 3e style skill system. It seems to me that anything that falls under that category could be honestly put inder a big block of "things you can simply do and things you simply cannot do". It's like movement, you don't demand players to have feats to be able to move in different ways, you just give the ability to do these things free of charge. The difficulty of doing hard-but-still-ultimately-possible things (like jumping higher than usual, or searching a huge castle for clues) in many, many cases could be far better represented with increasing the amount of time they take to complete. It's almost certainly better than the 3e inane "if you failed to bash this door once, you are magically forbidden from trying it again until you level up!" bullshit.

Part of it comes from a desire to limit bias as the GM. If I know what my players abilities are, if the results are entirely deterministic based on what they have selected, when I am designing a scenario I must constantly confront the question of whether I want the PCs to find some thing or not find some thing. Do I want them to be able to convince the king to help, or not? Do I want them to find the secret entrance, or not? As a GM, I don't really have a preference - I want the players to choose what they'd like to do. But I am subject to bias, whether conscious or unconscious. Choosing a 'reasonable' challenge and knowing that the party might not be able to overcome it actually makes the design process easier. Further, it can be done in a generally party agnostic way - if I write a scenario but don't end up using it, as long as the ranges make sense I can use it for another group with completely different abilities without having to adjust the challenges to ensure they could be beaten by the party.

I also don't always know exactly what the difference is between a 'DC 15' and a 'DC 16' wall climbing check. If a wall is supposed to be slightly harder than another, a +1 or +2 DC might seem appropriate, but if I know the party can scale one and not the other is it even appropriate (assuming that it makes sense from the perspective of the story). What I do know is that those type of incremental adjustments aren't likely to 'shut anyone down' unless we're on the very high end of their range to begin with.

People will be justifiably upset that their character cannot attempt to do something that any person 'with thumbs' could attempt in real life. A character is more than a pawn in the game.

One major criticism of feats was that each new one limited the play space - actions that originally could have been attempted by anyone with the imagination were now restricted to characters with the proper feat selection. As the number of feats expanded to several thousand and each character would have approximately 1 dozen feats, the number of things a character could not do increased dramatically. This was not as much of an issue with a feat that removed a penalty to an action.

I've always thought this thinking was kinda weird -- it seems to me that feat-plosion (a)regulated play space (as in "to make regular") and (b)added to the play space. Given that d20 is supposed to be an exception-based ruleset, I'm pretty hard pressed to think of any feat, as a function of simply existing, that infringed on the space that was previously relegated to simply "with thumbs". Rather, it seemed to cut down on the "mother may I" -- which, I guess for some groups, very well could have been functionally the same thing; but I imagine those same groups might just as likely have ignored "infringing" content.
That being said, my table(s) did feel that some skills got nerfed from feat-plosion (which were promptly ignored); but "skill system" and "with thumbs" are different things (albeit related).
Also, when feats were first a thing, nobody could seem to make up their mind over what exactly a feat was supposed to be in terms of game currency; it wasn't until almost the end of the production cycle that they finally (sorta) started to get that shit dialed in.

Granted, said feat-plosion certainly jacked-up relative opportunity costs, which certainly can be an issue -- the result was that characters were pushed further and further towards being specialists (which itself is a mixed bag). Of course, I don't know that you can do much of anything that involves expanding on the ruleset (in terms of character options) that doesn't increase relative opportunity costs, without simultaneously shifting (eventually to the point of breaking) the game's baseline expectations.

I think Power Attack is a good example of this kind of thinking. In 2nd edition you could play mother-may-I with the GM for a trade-off for a 'wild swing' that might do additional damage. Or perhaps a bonus to attack for a penalty to AC as you stop worrying about defense. As soon as these kinds of abilities become feats, you can't access it unless you have the relevant feat. There are a number of 3.x feats that should likely be available to everyone. Anyone can use 'defensive fighting' (-4 Attack, +2 Dodge bonus to AC). Why can't anyone use 'wild swing' (-4 attack, +4 damage)? You can only trade attack for damage if you have Power Attack.

Feats like Two-Weapon Fighting weren't as restrictive - the feat makes it clear that ANYONE could fight with two weapons, but the penalties are prohibitive. Still, there are times it might be worth it (like if you can only hit on a natural 20 anyway).

The bolded part is self-evident, obviously. But there seems to be a third possible choice - where your abilities are interpreted by yourself.

Well actually it isn't entirely self evident because it's actually a bit hard to say which is worse, GM charity or coin flip charity.

But more importantly it isn't actually an exclusive choice. You don't get to get away from arbitrary GM whim with your search checks or your knowledge checks. In every scenario described on this thread so far the search check is always generated by arbitrary GM whim.

THEN you either add a random dice roll for failure or not.

It's a choice between GM charity... and GM charity with a random chance of failure for no reason. Player agency never gets a fucking look in unless you start talking about search action requirements, and even then that isn't a flat out alternative but an additional layer on top of either GM charity or GM charity + dice roll charity.

There is no scenario here where it ISN'T a matter of relying on the GM to give you something on a whim. You don't get to go "well since I suddenly ROLLED A DICE you MUST now give me things for knowledge (star trek trivia)!" that's sadly not how these skills work, nor is it how they CAN work, nor has there been a single person insanely arguing that they SHOULD work like that on this entire thread.

There is no way to completely avoid 'GM Whim'. If there's a swamp in the campaign world, that's a GM decision. If there's a castle full of skeletons in the world, that's a GM decision. Most of those types of decisions are communicated largely in advance to the players, so while the GM created most of the scenario parameters, we don't really talk about them as 'whims'. But the GM won't communicate the exact details of the castle (like the layout, or what type of BBEG created the skeletons) barring the players finding a way to obtain that information. As I said above, when creating this, it's actually harder to decide if the players definitely will or definitely won't access 'reasonable content' - that is, things that you have put into the game because they seem reasonable. If you know there is a chance (say 50/50) that they will obtain something (and consequently that they won't) you as the GM don't actually know in advance how the scenario will progress. If you don't fudge your numbers or move content so it is 'found another way' then you're accepting that you're off the rails - while you may not be prepared for EVERYTHING, you are necessarily prepared for MULTIPLE POSSIBILITIES.

This is aimed mostly at ACOS. It's generally accepted that we roll damage instead of taking the average. 2d6+3 is 10 damage on average. But it absolutely matters that it is sometimes 5 and sometimes 15. A good example if if you're trying to break through a wall with Hardness 10. If you just take the average you'll never get through the wall. If you roll, roughly half the time you'll do 1 or more points of damage - the difference is you will certainly make it through. When you have a very clear line with pass/fail and no shades of gray you will run into the place where the PCs abilities are not 'big enough' more often. That place where they're 'usually not enough' but 'sometimes are' increases the number of options available to those players - and what's more, it doesn't require the DM to arbitrarily decide if the PCs are going to be allowed to do it or not - he just has to try to decide on what the approximate DC is that would allow a range of people to succeed in some set of circumstances (ie, a DC 20 lock is one that even a novice with 1 rank can open given enough time).

[MGuy]

If the GM creates a swamp or not that doesn't matter too much for the discussion. If the players decide they want to go to 'a' swamp it doesn't matter whether the GM planned on having one before or not. If the GM creates Castle Doom, whatever the layout of that castle, the players have no control over that. Notice, however, that what you mentioned has nothing to do with actual player abilities. The existence or non existence of a swamp doesn't matter as far as PC capabilities are concerned (unless they have a swamp only based ability which is just a shitty ability anyway). Whether or not the players explore these places has nothing to do with player capabilities but whether or not the players decide to go there. That is the players deciding what they do or don't do. Now you can change this, as the GM, by locking these places behind a content gate and then necessitating that players have whatever ability you desire before they can access it. At that point you are deciding things and not the players deciding it. GM's whims.

Now I've said this before but Search is ONLY useful IF the GM decides to lock content behind it. At no point do players have any say in whether or not Search is even worth having because they cannot decide whether or not things are hidden from them. In fact, in many cases they won't even know they are 'supposed' to search and they will likely never appreciate anything they missed with a search check. For those who like to compare it to combat, when you miss an attack or a spell fails you immediately know what you missed out on on a failed check. Search is 100% subject to the whims of the GM over and beyond other skills like Climb and Spellcraft.

Adding dice is just randomizing the player's ability to know that YOU'VE decided to lock content at all. If they fail they don't know, and the game continues on because they missed it, if they succeed congrats! You randomly got to introduce content that you decided on a whim to lock behind a content gate with a randomized lock on it.

[PhoneLobster]

There is no way to completely avoid 'GM Whim'. If there's a swamp in the campaign world, that's a GM decision.

Pretty much everything you just said on the topic there is irrelevant non-sequitor not in fact related to me pointing out that no, search rolls are not a superior alternative to the GM deciding when there is stuff to search for.

And out of all of it this is the only bit even tangentially worth responding to.

You don't get to argue total equivalence of all GM influence on all actions.

Again. Lets go back to the lightning bolts.

Knowledge (star trek trivia) is of unpredictable value based on arbitrary GM decisions. Star trek trivia might never be relevant to your adventures. It might never be useful.

Shooting lightning bolts is of unpredictable value based on arbitrary GM decisions. There can be enemies immune to lightning bolts. Maybe that's all the enemies ever. It might never be useful.

And yet those things are not of equal value the level of arbitrary GM influence on their value is also not of equal value.

Time and again people trying to talk up the value of a search or knowledge roll have relied on arguments of total equivalence. They've done it with all rolls being equivalent, all choices being equivalent, and as now even all GM influence being equivalent.

Similar. Does. Not. Mean. Equal.

[deaddmwalking]

And if the players decide to hide something? You know, so that NPCs may have to succeed on a search check to find it?

[Ice9]

I want to point out that "if the players don't know what they're missing, then does it really matter?" is an argument that invites quantum bears.

Sure, if you rely on the fact that the players are only see the facade, you get quantum bears. But if you forget that fact, or try to ignore it, then you're not actually improving player agency, you're just wasting time.

I should clarify, this isn't just about skill checks - a completely blind choice does not add agency. Go through any of three portals, with no idea what's behind them? Same amount of agency as having only a single portal. And that's true even if you (as the GM) decided ahead of time what was behind each portal and it's three vastly different things. Randomness does not, by itself, add agency.

So I'm saying that to have agency, you need two things:
1) The players' choices (which could include char-gen choices) decide between multiple different outcomes.
2) The players are aware that the choice exists, and have some info (not necessarily true and complete) to base their decision on.

[deaddmwalking]

I think it's fair to say that players are aware that there will be hidden things to find, so an investment in Search is likely to allow for the successful use of Search - but the specific number of times they could use the ability or what they would find will not be known.

Often, those types of ambiguities can be addressed before the start of the game by talking about what types of challenges there may be. The same conversation is worth having before a Ranger chooses a favored enemy.

[MGuy]

And if the players decide to hide something? You know, so that NPCs may have to succeed on a search check to find it?

I don't think it is any secret that I'm completely fine with opposed rolls. Players know about what they are doing (using whatever ability to hide something on them) and someone uses an ability to oppose that. I'd say Perception over Search but that's not terribly important for the point you're making.

[PhoneLobster]

But what IS the point he is trying to make.

Fine. The players want to hide something, you can make it work differently to the way it works when something is hidden from players if you need to...

...but you don't HAVE to you can just make it work the same way and if that means no rolls. it can totally mean no rolls. If you have a binary "I find secret doors" ability and PCs build a secret door then NPCs with that ability CAN just automatically find it like a PC would. Why would you think they can't or shouldn't?

It's like trying to defend the variable jump rolls over deadly chasms thing by saying "Yeah well, um what if the PLAYERS want to build a chasm that NPCs have to jump over? Eh? Eh?"

It's a non sequitur.

[deaddmwalking]

It's a non sequitur.

Not really. A chasm is a terrain feature. I have had groups decide that they could use the chasm for their own purposes and deliberately remove the bridge. This meant that they couldn't be swarmed by superior numbers, but they later had to cross the chasm themselves.

From the earlier conversation we had before, this comes to risk versus reward. Some players would prefer zero chance of failure - they know exactly what they can do and they will not attempt anything they could fail. Most will try to balance the risk versus reward. A 30% chance to successfully cross the chasm versus potentially being out of combat entirely might be worth it if you could end the fight immediately. Or not. Depending on the player.

[PhoneLobster]

It's a non sequitur.

Not really.

No. Really. Look up non sequitur, since you apparently just don't know what it means.

Trying to flip to NPCs has no bearing on the discussion. It does not refute that the rolled mechanic is bad for PCs, the mechanic does not have to be the same for NPCs, and if it were same and didn't include a roll that doesn't cause any problem for NPCs. It doesn't even prevent PCs from hiding items or putting chasms between themselves and NPCs successfully or otherwise.

It's a point to nowhere. An irrelevant digression. A god damn worthless brain fart.