One of the most talked about changes in the One D&D playtest is the decision to make all natural 1’s auto-failures and all natural 20’s auto-successes.
My first gut reaction to this was: That’s a terrible idea!
Upon further reflection, however, I’ve realized that this reaction is primarily built on my experience with pre-5th Edition versions of D&D, and that under the design principles of 5th Edition it’s probably irrelevant. (We’ll come back to that.)
But here’s what I don’t get:
You’re making all natural 1’s and natural 20’s work the same for simplicity and clarity? Sure. That makes sense.
But, simultaneously, you’re adding a whole bunch of weird, nit-picky rules about which specific types of attacks and which specific types of character can get critical hits in combat?
That doesn’t make sense to me.
In any case, I was going to move on to explaining why the new auto-fail/auto-success rules for ability and skill checks isn’t as big a deal as you might think, but it quickly morphed into a wide-ranging discussion of why the 5th Edition skill system is broken garbage built on top of questionable design principles.
So… buckle in.
It’s been awhile since I did a good ol’ fashioned D&D rant.
WHY BOUNDED ACCURACY?
Let’s start by talking about bounded accuracy. Endless ink has been spilt on this topic, but I think one of the clearest way to understand bounded accuracy — what it is, why it works the way it does, how it’s supposed to be used — is to look at the design lineage which created it.
To do that, we need to go back about twenty years to the development of the Epic Level Handbook for 3rd Edition. The concept was to extend play past 20th level, allowing players to continue leveling up their characters forever.
The big problem the designers faced was that different classes gained bonuses to core abilities — attacks, saving throws, etc. — at different rates, which meant that their values diverged over time. By 20th level, the highest and lowest bonuses had already diverged so much that the difference exceeded the range of the d20 roll. This meant that any AC or DC you set would either be an automatic success for some PCs or impossible for others.
The designers of the Epic Level Handbook tried jumping through a whole bunch of hoops to solve or ameliorate this problem, but largely failed. As a result, the Epic Level Handbook was a pretty flawed experience at a fundamental level (and its failure may have actually played a major role in Wizards of the Coast abandoning the OGL and the doom of 4th Edition, but that’s a tale for another time).
On that note, fast forward to 4th Edition: The designers knew this was a problem. (Several of the designers had actually worked on the Epic Level Handbook.) They wanted to avoid this problem with the new edition.
Their solution was to level up everyone’s bonuses across the board: Classes would be strong at some things and weak at others, but the values wouldn’t diverge. This methodology was, furthermore, wedded to 4th Edition’s design ethos of “level up the whole world with the PCs” and more or less fundamental to its My Precious Encounter school of encounter design.
Fast forward again, this time to 5th Edition: The 4th Edition of the game had burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp, and 5th Edition’s mission was to win back the D&D players they had lost. The whole “level up the world” ethos was widely identified as one of the things people who hated 4th Edition hated about 4th Edition, so it had go.
Bounded accuracy was the solution. Importantly, bounded accuracy was about two things:
- Controlling AC & DC so that the target numbers never become impossible for some of the PCs.
- Controlling bonuses so that the results don’t become automatic successes for some of the PCs.
In other words, all of the results exist within that boundary. Hence, “bounded accuracy.”
If you go back to the original problem experienced in 3rd Edition (and which metastasized in the Epic Level Handbook), you can see how this solves the problem. It also avoids the 4th Edition problem where your numbers get bigger, but your results never actually improve because the numbers increase in lockstep: As long as the DCs remain consistently in bounds, the moderate increases to the PCs’ bonuses will see them succeed more often as they increase in level, resulting in high-level characters who feel (and are!) more effective than 1st level characters.
BOUNDED ACCURACY & AUTO-RESULTS
This is also why my initial gut reaction to the new auto-fail/auto-success rules was wrong.
You don’t want a nat-1/nat-20 = auto-fail/auto-success rule in 3rd Edition or 4th Edition because the range of results shifts over levels and between characters: There are DC 35 tasks that you just can’t do unless you have a +15 bonus and that’s by design.
For years, in fact, I and many other people have preached the gospel here: Skill checks should not auto-fail on 1 or auto-succeeds on 20!
But bounded accuracy in 5th Edition means that you should basically never be setting a DC that is impossible for one of the PCs to achieve. So having a natural 20 automatically succeed is irrelevant because it should already always be succeeding.
And if, in your opinion, a character should be succeeding on a roll of 1, then you shouldn’t be rolling those dice in the first place. You don’t make a Strength (Athletics) check to see if someone can walk across an empty street. Default to yes.
BUT BOUNDED ACCURACY IS BROKEN
What complicates this, however, is that bounded accuracy for ability checks/skill checks in 5E is broken.
The first problem is one of implementation: The instructions for setting check DCs are incorrect, which results in DMs setting DCs that break bounded accuracy.
The short version is that, for legacy reasons very similar to why I had my gut reaction to the playtest mechanics, the DC range in 5th Edition is treated as if it were the same as low-level 3rd Edition, including by the designers and the advice in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. But this isn’t the case. A skilled 3rd-level character in 3rd Edition likely has a +8 or +9 in the skill; the same character in 5th Edition has +4 or +5.
Note: The elimination of the Take 10 mechanic in 5th Edition for all practical purposes except passive Perception also has an effect here, but we won’t dive down that rabbit hole today.
This includes several key pieces of advice, which are given in various places throughout the 5th Edition product line and reflected in the design of official scenarios and the like. (From here, this advice also percolates into designer diaries and third-party books, videos, tweets, blogs, etc.)
- DC 10 is the baseline “easy” check, relevant to unskilled characters.
- You should rarely or never call for PCs to roll for DCs under 10.
- You should step up your DCs by 5 points (going from DC 10 to DC 15 to DC 20).
The specific expression of this advice varies, but is fairly consistent. In the DMG, for example: “If the only DCs you ever use are 10, 15, and 20, your game will run just fine.”
But if you run the math, what you actually want is:
- DC 8 is the baseline “easy” check, relevant to unskilled characters.
- DC 12 should probably be your default difficulty.
- Thinking in steps of two is probably more useful: DC 8, DC 10, DC 12, DC 14, etc.
As I said, though, this is primarily a problem of praxis. In isolation, it could be trivially solved with better advice.
The more fundamental problem is mechanical: There are a handful of class abilities which trivially — but hilariously! — break bounded accuracy.
The rogue, of course, makes an easy example here. Expertise doubles proficiency bonuses, changing a range of +2 to +6 into a range of +4 to +12. Combined with ability score modifiers, this almost immediately turns most reasonable DCs within the system’s bounded accuracy into an automatic success for the rogue, and it gets worse from there.
Reliable Talent then comes in for mop-up, making the rogue’s minimum die roll 10. The rogue is now auto-succeeding on every proficient check, and in their chosen Expertise any DC that could challenge them is probably impossible for every other PC.
Of course, those are exactly the DCs these hilariously broken abilities pressure the DM to assign. Partly because they want to challenge the PCs. Partly because it just makes sense that these PCs should be able to achieve things the PCs without the hilariously broken abilities can’t do.
The end result, of course, is exactly the problem bounded accuracy was introduced to eliminate.
The new auto-fail/auto-success rules technically patch this up a bit:
- You’ve set a DC too high in order to challenge the hilarious broken character? At least the other PCs won’t auto-fail.
- You’ve set the DC “correctly” for bounded accuracy? The hilariously broken character can at least theoretically still fail.
But only in the crudest sense.
OPINION: THE TONE OF BOUNDED ACCURACY
So all of that is basically just math.
Now I’m going to digress into a purely personal opinion about why bounded accuracy makes the 5th Edition skill system suck.
Let’s start by talking about why bounded accuracy works in combat: Hit points.
Although the typical Armor Class of a monster shifts upwards slightly as they increase in challenge rating, virtually every monster in the Monster Manual can be hit by a 1st level character. This works, of course, because the amount of damage the monsters deal and the number of hit points they have do increase: The 1st level character can’t readily defeat an adult red dragon because (a) the red dragon will smush them with a single attack and (b) the 1st level character would have to hit them a bajillion time to whittle away their hit points.
The real advantage of this system is that it allows lower CR monsters to remain relevant: An encounter with twenty CR 1 dire wolves probably won’t threaten a 15th-level party, but if you add them into an encounter with CR 13 storm giants, they won’t be completely irrelevant (since they can still hit the PCs and the PCs won’t necessarily auto-hit them).
But, of course, the skill system doesn’t have hit points or damage rolls. The “dire wolves” of the skill system never get easier to kill and you never become able to take on the “red dragons.”
As Rodney Thompson wrote in the article which introduced bounded accuracy to the world: “An iron-banded door is just as tough to break down at 20th level as it was at 1st.”
This creates a really weird dynamic where at 1st level your characters struggle with dire wolves, casting dancing lights, and picking the lock on the back door of the tavern. And at 20th level they’re soloing Smaug, summoning meteor swarms from the heavens, and… still having trouble picking that lock or kicking down that door.
And I don’t like it.
I recognize that there are other valid opinions here, but I would vastly prefer a skill system that unlocked abilities on par with all the other systems in the game (spells, combat, etc.). Having this weird, stagnant cul-de-sac creates some really bizarre effects in the fiction.
So what you’re left with here is a dichotomy. If you like the design principle on which bounded accuracy is built, you’re nevertheless left with the fact that 5th Edition’s implementation of it in the skill system is hilariously broken.
And if, like me, you DON’T like the tonal implications of bounded accuracy in the skill system, then it’s just fundamentally undesirable AND broken.
THE SKILL LIST
Generally speaking, if you have a skill system in an RPG, then you want that skill system to be comprehensive. In other words, there should be skills covering the full gamut of tasks that PCs are likely to attempt. Or, to flip it around, you never want the GM to reach for a skill check and discover that the skill doesn’t exist.
Comprehensiveness should not be mistaken for minutia or complexity: You can achieve a comprehensive system by having forty different skills covering every sub-field of science, but you can also achieve it by just having a single Science skill. D&D 5th Edition could hypothetically achieve it by having no skill system at all and just having characters be directly proficient in ability scores.
The 5th Edition skill system, of course, broadly fails this basic criteria. I am constantly reaching for skill checks and then struggling to identify a skill which covers the task.
You can patch up some of these shortcomings by embracing the Skills With Different Abilities variant rule, in which skills can be paired to different ability scores depending on how they’re being used. For example, let’s say that you wanted to canvass a neighborhood for information. Non-variant 5th Edition lacks any skill clearly covering that, but if you use the variant rule you can create a Charisma (Investigation) check and get what you need.
When you do this, however, you end up exacerbating another problem that I, personally, have with the system: Overlapping skills.
I vastly prefer a skill system in which I, as the GM, can call for a clear, definitive skill check. You may still end up with situations where players would like a different skill to apply (and you’ll need to make a ruling on that), but it’s a rare thing instead of affecting every single mechanical interaction in the game.
If you have a very large list of skills, the advantages of that expansiveness can, to some extent, justify the cost to precision if the skills end up with overlap. But despite having an incredibly short (and incomplete) list of skills, 5th Edition still ends up with overlapped skills (e.g., Athletics and Acrobatics).
But okay, let’s lay my personal preferences completely aside: 5th Edition has a short, concise skill list because it wants to keep the options streamlined. And it’s willing to accept the clunkiness of incompleteness to keep that relatively streamlined list.
Unfortunately, that’s when 5th Edition slides up next to you and says, “Hey. Did I tell you about my OTHER skill system?”
Because, of course, it has one: Tool proficiencies. Massively overlapped (both with itself and with the skill list), not remotely streamlined, and more often confusing than not.
And also nonsensically crippled, because if you play according to the rules as written you can only make tool proficiency checks if you’re using the tool. So, for example, you can be a skilled carpenter, but that in no way translates to an ability to notice shabby construction, identify building materials, etc.
I’ll fully admit that, as far as I can tell, literally no one actually plays the game this way (including the designers), opting to allow this kind of knowledge-based tool proficiency check. But “a rule that nobody uses as written” is a pretty reliable indication of a rule that’s completely busted.
SKILL LOCK-IN
Finally, it’s fairly difficult to pick up additional skills in 5th Edition. In fact, it borders on the impossible unless the DM is using other optional rules like feats. (I suspect the move in 1D&D to make feats non-optional and add more of them will help with this somewhat.)
This makes it quite difficult to adjust your character in response to the evolving circumstances of the campaign, something which skill systems are usually ideal for (since you can, in most such systems, make a multitude of adjustments during character advancement).
In the grand scheme of things, this is a fairly minor complaint. But if I’m going to write up a grand rant on all of my problems with the 5th Edition skill system, I should at least try to be complete about it.
HOW WOULD YOU FIX IT?
For 1D&D? I wouldn’t. Backwards compatibility, in my opinion, is more important than tweaking the skill system.
Look, I told you this was a rant right at the beginning.
But if I had a time machine, could go back to 2014, and get a designer to listen to me:
- Make flexible ability score pairing the standard rule, not a variant.
- Eliminate the redundant skills.
- Add additional skills to provide a comprehensive skill list.
- Get rid of tool proficiencies.
And I’d make a strong case that bounded accuracy is the wrong call for the skill system and allow skill use to level up just like spell selection, combat efficacy, etc.
FURTHER READING
Untested 5E: Streamlined Skills
D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations
Preach! I’ve always felt the designers really fumbled the skill system in 5e. You can see what they were going for—streamlined, but enough to offer meaningful choices during chargen—but the result sort of failed at both.
At this point I prefer skills as binary locks—you can’t attempt X check unless you have the right skill—and if you need a roll, use the appropriate ability score.
I really value your reviews and critiques of this genre. I have not found another reviewer that is able to point out both the good and the bad in the products they review. Most end up regurgitating the synopsis and saying how great it is. I was wondering if (hoping) you had an interest in reviewing some is the pathfinder 2 material — specifically the adventure paths.
Could you elaborate on the skill checks you mention not being covered in the 5e spread?
I’ve combined sense motive/gather information from 3e and indeed use carpentry/smithing/other tools as more robust skills. Curious what else you.may be dealing with
My problem with the 5E skill list is that it has some broad and some very niche skills (which I think was a similar problem I had with 3.5 as well) Everyone chooses the broad skills like perception and acrobatics/athletics because they are definitely more useful in more ways, and the niche skills are left to languish. I feel there needs to be a bit of a middle ground in some ways.
The other issue I have is that the character sheet bakes in the original ability stat that the skills are connected to, making the house rule of changing the ability a stat is connected to pretty hard to do.
Also personally I’ve always felt d20 rolls are a little too swingy and they can feel a bit eh when you roll them. Every time I have used a dice pool system it has felt a lot more robust and interesting.
D&D isn’t traditionally associated with a long list of skills, and such systems have disadvantages too: I want to siphon gasoline in a Mad-Max style game. Must I have a “siphon gas” skill? How about a 1920s gangster campaign? Do I use “Streetwise?” Should a PC who has siphoned gas successfully in the past need to roll at all? What if I understand the scientific principles but never actually did it physically?
I think the solution needs to be on the design side of the equation, and I hate the idea of skills as binary locks. The players should propose what they want to do and what skill they want to apply, the GM should determine both the DC and what range of results can be expected, and then should apply levels of success or failure. Because there is no such thing as a generic “I gather information” action. What do you want to gather? How? Where?
And you can dial in the check based on story needs as well. PC wants to break down a door and the (bad) design means if they fail, the adventure ends? Then any roll breaks down the door and the check determines whether it happens safely or not: on a “1” they make so much noise and take so long that everyone on the other side has been alerted and set up ambushes; on a good success they burst through and take the occupants by surprise.
When multiple skills could apply, provide different things depending upon the skill. Maybe that high roll on Animal Handling means the mule not only agrees to move, but it follows you around for a while; try to solve the same problem with Intimidation and the mule is terrified of you on a high roll. These results may not always matter mechanically, but they enrich the story and can often lead to legendary results (the PC whose Animal Handling successes turn her into a Doctor Dolittle character; the battle-scarred barbarian whose worst injury is a displaced shoulder from bad encounters with doors). This approach means that knowledge checks produce different kinds of information from differing perspectives, and gives that PC who gets a “30” on a DC 15 check something to make them feel good about themselves without breaking the game.
Concur greatly! As a follower of Alexis over at Tao of D&D I’m trying to home brew his Sage Ability stuff. It’s a work in progress but for my table it’s a move in the right direction
I’m curious, as someone who hasn’t really played 5e, what skills you find to be missing in practice. The things that pop to mind for me are:
* Engineering (5e seems to expect tool proficiencies to fully cover this, yet A5E’s designers felt the need to add it back into their variant)
* Gather Information/Streetwise (which you briefly make the case for, and some of whose functions are under “other Charisma checks” in 5e instead of having a skill; PF1 has Diplomacy eat it, but I disagree)
* Exertion (four out of the six “unmodified Strength check” examples 5e has strike me as the kinds of strongman tricks I’d group under such a skill)
* Linguistics (why is being a linguist a feat only?)
* Disguise (did they assume that acting and costume design were closely related enough for Deception to cover both?)
* Bureaucracy (the larger umbrella I’d have 3.0/3.5’s Forgery fall under, which would also include stuff like taking out loans without winding up with a bad rate)
* You roll Arcana for stuff to do with arcane classes, Religion for stuff to do with divine classes, and Nature for things to do with primal classes. …What do you roll for things to do with martial classes?
This is useless for D&D as a product, for reasons of both backwards compatibility and branding, but — I think bounded accuracy is a good design ethos for D&D. D&D just has too many levels.
Where can I read more about the math behind the DC setting? I’m curious as to why exactly you should set DCs in steps of two with DC 12 being the default difficulty.
Justin, do you have more thoughts anywhere on the rise, fall, and fall even further of 4th Edition? I’m still a bit mystified by quite how badly it got monstered, to coin a UK politics phrase.
And somewhere, a WotC exec smiles. “Good,” they croon. “Let the hate flow through you…” 🙂
Unrelated to this post, but I recently picked up Planegea and was very impressed. Your team does good work!
I think I like bounded accuracy in depicting a world where any peasant *can* swing a stick and hit a troll, but a legendary warrior can do it *a lot more consistently*. Even demi-god heroes like Hercules spend SOME of their time doing things no mortal could do (like picking up the sky) but other times having problems that might also happen to normal people.
In fact, that describes what I think is the problem with DnD skill system. That most adventures have SOME of the time doing “normal people but better” things and some of the time doing “things routine for an expert but impossible for anyone untrained”, and no single d20+skill system works for both. I think the desire to have skills that the rest of the party can’t blunder into is where the HIGH modifiers and DCs come from, and I think that IS needed, but the solution of having a d20 with a really high DC doesn’t really work.
I don’t think this only applies to niche things. There’s a lot of every day adventuring things like “you went to seminary, Cleric, do you remember the epithet worshipppers of Baal use for Mammon?” It’s reasonable that someone who spent several years studying would know this a LOT better than someone off the street, way more than a first level religion skill check modifier. And I think the same applies to things like rogue skills: it’s fun to have things which (a) the character is an expert at compared to four other characters guessing but (b) still have interesting gameplay. Like the problem of the ranger being GOOD at tracking, but making that interesting, not just a “you automatically succeed without need for a check”.
I’m not sure what I WOULD do. The system I want to move towards is (a) having a wider skill list, but saying, “ok, as a first level character, you can’t be a world-class acrobat as that would be too powerful for adventuring, but you can be a world-class linguist or achitect if you want”, allowing some texture between skills without blowing out the balance of the skills that are most relevant for adventuring. And (b) having levels of expertise in characters and tasks, and guidelines that say when doing a task 5 levels above your expertise is DC 15, when DC 12, when DC 20, and when impossible: allowing you to default to “add d20” if you want, but to use something else when it makes sense without special casing it every time. But that’s a new system, I’m not sure what I’d do to fix the existing skill system…
I’m curious what think about using 3d6 in stead of a d20.
I have an idea that it would reward proficiency and punish having no proficiency.
At the same time I have a feeling it would make high dc checks out of bounds for low level characters, except if they worked together and used a tool to help them.
In your example with the iron bound door, if two characters helped each other with crowbars it would make them far more likely to break the door down.
@SD:
Pathfinder vs. 4th Edition, Grr… is probably the broadest overview.
Every Edition of D&D goes into D&D Essentials in particular later in the video.
The D&D Core Sets is mostly just fun.
The short version is:
– They created not-D&D and put D&D on the cover.
– The marketing was tone-deaf at best.
– They canceled all their third-party licenses, alienating everyone who was a fan of Dragon, Dungeon, Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Dragonlance, etc. (They also blew up the Realms, alienating a lot of Forgotten Realms fans.)
– Having used the OGL to create an industry-wide network of support products all aimed at the D&D core rulebooks, they became convinced this was a bad thing and voluntarily stepped aside, leaving a vacuum that someone else could easily step into (and have the entire 3E support network aimed at THEIR game). They did this while simultaneously locking Paizo out of 4E, despite Paizo controlling the subscription lists for Dragon and Dungeon magazine.
Basically, they did virtually everything possible to alienate as many D&D fans as possible while simultaneously doing everything possible to encourage and promote the creation of a competitor offering to let all those alienated fans continue playing the game they already loved.
Also, 4E was badly designed.
You don’t have to take my word for it: They’d radically revised skill challenges, one of the core mechanics of the game, four times within the first three months the game was released. And they were still redesigning the monster math all the way up to 4E being cancelled.
People talk about 4E “getting the math right” and stuff like that, but the reality is that it was actually quite awful at mechanically achieving what the designers said they were trying to achieve. (Something which was a persistent problem for WotC.)
This is the thing that bothered me the most about d20 and was not fixed in 5th ed. I think its handled well in Microlite. I used the idea of stat + skill in my homebrew and have a short list of broad area skills like Physical, Knowledge and Survival to represent trainable bonuses with leveling.
I agreed to many parts, excluding the bit about expertise and reliable talent. You are supposed to excel in skills you are an expert in, not to mention that with proficency bonuses slow increase it’s never an auto success until reliable talent, where you are presumed to be a rogue capable of dealing with international threats.
Something I’m surprised you don’t seem to have mentioned here is that the probable reason they did the critical hit/fail of nat 1s and 20s is that pretty much every table of players around the world already does it even though it isn’t in the rules. I think WotC has just shrugged and said, “Fine, well I guess we’ll change the system to fit what you guys think it should be.”
And I think that’s actually a really weirdly cool aspect of design.
JackV > In fact, that describes what I think is the problem with DnD skill system. That most adventures have SOME of the time doing “normal people but better” things and some of the time doing “things routine for an expert but impossible for anyone untrained”, and no single d20+skill system works for both.
I was coming to post almost exactly this but the above quote largely beat me to it.
The 3.5 system works great for the latter use case, but except in reasonably narrow ranges of levels the clunk is clearly visible in combat. Bounded accuracy combined with hp (assuming one accepts the disassociated mechanics of hp, at least with respect to humans) models combat, particularly bulk combat, much better but fails badly on ‘expertise’ skills – nobody untrained should have any chance of picking the lock on the back door of the tavern in the first place, and level advancement doesn’t give rapid enough bonuses to these skills (whoo! My chance of opening this door increased from 45% to 55%! I really feel like a badass now!) compared to combat and spells.
(Level advancement has always been one of D&D’s biggest disassociated clunks of course; rate of improvement in combat and spells in both systems is crazy rapid, in a couple of months of adventuring you turn yourself from a weak novice to a crazy strong expert, but that seems to be accepted as a core part of the system – if you want to play something working at a more realistic advancement pace there are other games.)
I totally get your points about the philosophy problems and the maths problems, but I just haven’t found them to ever cause actual problems at the table.
What I have found to cause problems are your points about the awkwardness of the list of proficiencies. I think the problems are caused, in the same way that the confusing ability modifiers are, by a desire to have the 5e character sheet look like the 3e one. They wanted to have a list of abilities with little numbers next to them, with names that skills had in previous editions.
The actual system that 5e uses, that is clear(ish)ly described in the book, but confused by the character sheet is:
When attempting a skill check, roll a d20 and add the most relevant ability modifier. If you have relevant training, add your proficiency bonus.
If the skills and tools which you are proficient in were just listed on your sheet, without a number next to them and without the idea that the list was supposed to be exhaustive, I think this is probably how people would actually play.
While I generally agree with your assessment, I’m not sure that this means that bounded accuracy is broken in 5e (and maybe I’m just unfamiliar with 5e; I mostly play Pathfinder).
While there may be a certain pressure for DMs to assign extra hard DCs to challenge characters with Expertise, there shouldn’t need to be skill checks for which Expertise is required unless it’s not something the players are expected to attempt. This might partially be the fault of having the DC table go up to 30, when most characters have a cap of +11 at level 20 (unless I’m missing something, there’s just the +6 proficiency bonus and up to +5 from the ability score, excluding magic items I suppose), but the high-DC checks really should be reserved for things you generally shouldn’t be expected to attempt, such as using diplomacy to get your worst enemy to help you in the middle of a fight (or basically any example from the high end of the DC table for 3.5/pathfinder 1e skills). It’s possible, and maybe a Bard/Rogue with expertise could pull something like that off, but it shouldn’t be a task presented to the characters and expected that they attempt.
And for low DCs that the rest of the party have a chance at, I don’t think it is an issue for rogues and bards to just be extremely good at the few skills they get expertise in (particularly since this is a maximum of 4/19). For the most part, this just means that the possibility of failure is significantly reduced, allowing the party to bypass such problems easily, but as long as it’s limited to certain types of challenges it shouldn’t break the game. If you build your adventure around the assumption that a certain type of task is hard, then it obviously will cause problems if the Rogue always succeeds, but it’s similar to the argument that Fly makes physical obstacles too easy to bypass. If you have characters that can easily bypass certain obstacles, you shouldn’t run adventures which rely on those obstacles being hard.
And while Reliable Talent means that rogues succeed at most checks which other members of the party would have a chance at, it’s still limited to their proficiencies, which overlap with the Expertise skills and leave a number of skills that the rest of the party have a chance of being able to use without being overshadowed by the rogue.
In some ways I think that Reliable Talent and Expertise just give Rogues a way to excel at non-combat tasks in a way that competes with Wizards and their plethora of utility spells, though again I’m not very familiar with 5e’s balance as a whole, so feel free to point out if I’ve missed something entirely.
@Narsham: I’m curious what your frame of reference is for saying that D&D has “traditionally” not had a long list of skills. Have you seen how many non-weapon proficiencies AD&D 2nd edition had?
Personally, I think the concept of bounded accuracy is a sound one, even if the execution was flawed. (Though I think a lot of the problems you described could be solved by a) making “skills with different abilities” a core rule rather than a variant, b) remembering that it *is* permissible to set DCs above 20, and c) bringing back Take 10 and Take 20.) I don’t like it when you have to be super-optimized to stay competitive at higher levels, or when DCs scale with your level just because you’re higher level.
Having played D&D from 3rd through 5th editions as well as both editions of Pathfinder, I’ve never been bothered by any of the issues you talked about in 5e. Conversely, I don’t like the fact that PF2e adds your level to trained skill checks but not untrained ones. The consequence is that at higher levels, if you aren’t trained in something, there’s no point in even attempting it. Which in turn means less flexibility in party composition, since you’ve got to make sure every skill is covered. Even at lower levels, I’m beginning to feel the effects. My 3rd-level wizard has a +8 to his spell attack bonus, and we frequently encounter enemies with ACs of 20+, which makes me feel like it’s not even worth casting any spell that requires an attack roll.
I’m also not that bothered by overlapping skills. On the one hand, I don’t see why a small, nimble character shouldn’t be as good at running, jumping and climbing as a big, muscular one. On the other hand, allowing Acrobatics to do everything Athletics does and then some, depreciates the latter skill. My solution would be to use the examples in the PHB as a hard guideline for which skill is applicable, but also allow Athletics to be used with Dexterity if appropriate.
I am confused by your statement that characters are still struggling with the same locked door at 20th vs 1st level. Their proficiency has increased, and if they are a rogue they will auto-succeed on that lock with reliable talent as you pointed out. So where is the problem?
@Bran: The rogue being hilariously broken does not fix the system.
“The car’s AC is broken.”
“Sure, but the windshield has fallen off, so that’s OK.”
@Justin
I guess I am still a little confused by the part in your article “And at 20th level they’re … still having trouble picking that lock or kicking down that door.”
Leaving expertise out of it, a 20th level character still has +6 proficiency and higher relevant attributes than a level 1 character.
So at level 1 they try and break the door say its DC15. They have +3 from Strength and +2 from proficiency so about 50% chance of success. At level 20 they have +5 from Strength and +6 from proficiency which is about 80% chance of success. Is the problem that this is too small a difference?
One of things I really dislike about 5e is the lack of horizontal progression, and how it warps everything in the game. 5e is designed so that each class role is heavily protected mechanically. Each class on gets better at the stuff it is suppose to focus on, and there is minimal customization preventing players from building characters that reach across classes effectively. This is a massive problem because is your party doesn’t have the person who does X, everyone else is effectively a 1st level commoner and the party is screwed. See above examples with rogue & doors. It’s actually worse than it appears since automatic successes isn’t engaging for the player who is doing it anymore than it is for the rest of the group who can’t contribute creating a temptation to raise the DCs to challenge the player who can do it and voiding the entire point of bounded accuracy. This kind of “guess what tools you need” at a character generation level is incredible frustrating as it hamstrings both the players and the GMs. Imagine a fantasy heartbreaker where only the fighter can contribute in combat, and imagine designing encounters and challenges in such a system!
I think that skills to be handled more like combat is; each class provide a “base skill bonus” that scales with level based on what each class would be good at, and use feats to provide ways to upgrade existening skills and obtain new ones.
Ie. Let Wizards have the fast progression in arcane and knowledge skill but slow proession in everything else; Fighters can have military skills at fast, crafting at average and everything else at slow; etc. There could be an skill focus feat that works like weapon and spell focus feat, and a skill training feat to upgrade slow progession levels in a specific skill to average levels, then to average to fast if you take it another time. I’m just throwing out ideas.
Response much appreciated, thank you Justin. I have rose-tinted glasses for 4e but I’m older and wiser now – some grounded retrospectives will do me good!
I suspect that 1D&D is ditching expertise as it currently exists. You can see a hint at how that will function in this excerpt:
If you have Proficiency with a tool, you can add
your Proficiency Bonus to any ability check you
make that uses that tool. If you have Proficiency
in the Skill that’s also used with that check, you
have Advantage on the check too. This
functionality means you can benefit from both
Skill Proficiency and Tool Proficiency on the
same ability check.
Michael> One of things I really dislike about 5e is the lack of horizontal progression, and how it warps everything in the game. 5e is designed so that each class role is heavily protected mechanically. Each class on gets better at the stuff it is suppose to focus on, and there is minimal customization preventing players from building characters that reach across classes effectively. This is a massive problem because is your party doesn’t have the person who does X, everyone else is effectively a 1st level commoner and the party is screwed. See above examples with rogue & doors
But that’s not too much of a problem if the scenario isn’t full of chokepoints. There shouldn’t be one way of solving a problem in well-designed stuff run by good GMs. If anything’s universal it’s combat, and most characters have at least some way to contribute there. The tavern door is in the way? Pick the lock, bash it down, use an unlock spell, shoot out the lock, steal the key, sneak through when someone else opens it, break a window and climb through, bribe someone to leave it unlocked, hide in the tavern when it’s open, or just knock on it and punch out whoever answers. GMs should avoid hard chokepoints and players should be imaginative about dealing with soft ones.
Specialisation is a design philosophy, and I see it mostly as a tradeoff against power. If you have powerful abilities you need to put limits in place elsewhere – otherwise at best everyone’s the same and at worst everything’s a pushover for these jack-of-all-trade specimens. D&D as a simulation heads towards the superhero end of the scale once you get to high single digit levels, so inevitably there’s going to be a lot of specialisation in play. (There could be other tradeoffs, such as making high power level rare, but D&D doesn’t go that way either).
There are other systems that don’t allow such superhuman levels of ability or make it much more difficult to acquire (Runequest is the one I’m most familiar with, but there are others) and it can certainly suffer the problem of samey characters (in RQ the GM and players have to make an active effort to diversify characters at creation time and in play). It’s much more “normal humans having adventures”. That’s not to say those are better systems – just that you select the system for the type of game you want to play. (As Justin has previously pointed out, D&D does have some flexibility to allow for this by narrowing the level range of play).
@Dave
Have you seen the quality of material that gets published bu WotC? Checkpoints are not uncommon, and the lack of advice in the DMG about how to actually run a game and game structures mean that a lot of new DMs won’t know that this is a problem and they will have to fix.
I have no issue with specialization as a choice, but 5e makes it the only thing you cam do outside of multiclassing which always has issues. If it was something you could opt into, I wouldn’t be griping about it. It’s kind-of silly too. They have subclasses, so they could have been introduce a lot more variety into the classes at a very low complexity cost.
I thonk we arrived at the same point but through different paths. Instead of doing all or nothing skills, a better choice would to be model skill progession in the same way as attack bonus works in 3/3.5/pf1. Steady growth fro everyone, but a wide effect range to differentiate between classes.
I’ve been looking to Vampire the Masquerade (and the storyteller system in general) as well as Cyberpunk and older editions of DnD to create a more comprehensive list of skills. Thoes systems (minus the dnd ones) I find are excellent at enabling roleplay, so I’m trying to reword DnD to include them.
Figuring out what they are though is difficult, but this article sure is giving me some ideas.
Yeah, I won’t argue with that. But I like it up here in my ivory tower where all GMs are perfect, or at the very least, readers of the Alexandrian.
I certainly agree that 5E is very restrictive where you pick all these background factors when you create a character and then – boom. Frozen with nothing to do but march along the path. There’s no idea that someone could have spent time as a blacksmith AND a soldier AND a hermit.
Or that an adventurer might want or be able to learn another one of these things. Although I think the latter is also a function of default D&D not being naturally well suited to very long term (decade-plus) game time campaigns (since you can get to level 10+ and superhero-to-demigod status in under a year of adventuring).
I also just want a better skill list in general.
Partly, to make more explicit how major mechanical parts of the game are supposed to work. E.g. 5e seems to assume that *spotting* a trap is not normally interesting (e.g. either you get bitten once then figure out how to deal with it, or someone notices in advance, but it’s not related to the rogue’s proficiency with traps) but *disabling* the trap is an interesting challenge (based on thieves tools proficiency). I think that’s a good principle and works better than emphasising “searching for traps” as an activity, I often follow a principle of “telegraph the traps REALLY HEAVILY so the players are paranoid when it’s interesting and relevant and may still get surprised if they can’t figure out the right things to look for, but don’t expect random traps just anywhere they go”. But I don’t think is DESCRIBED in the perception skill, or the thieves tool proficiency. Or what is and isn’t included in stealth.
And partly to add more variety if people are interested. E.g. more freely allowing a character to have experience in non-adventuring skills that *might* come up without having to shoe-horn it into one of the existing skills, especially knowledge, and allowing the core skills to be broken down in slightly different ways, e.g. allow someone to be good at foraging without needing them to invest in being good at tracking too, or vice versa. Those tweaks could be adjudicated ad-hoc for skills that aren’t central to the expect adventuring gameplay, with a few specifics spelling out when you can split a core skill and take part of it, without having everyone take the “useful” part only.
Justin’s early suggestion of using trained/untrained as auto-successes/failures leaving the DC roll for the set of characters for whom it’s more interesting possibly resolves more things than I’d realised.
I think you could take it further, even setting a different DC for characters depending on unproficient/proficient, or even an extra tier for expertise or a sufficiently high skill modifier. Like “knowing who the mayor of paris is” is something that you could clearly remember or not remember whether you’ve (a) never been to paris (b) visited briefly or (c) lived their for years, but you probably want to resolve this for ANY of those players by letting them roll history, not try to say “ok, if you live there you get +15 to facts about paris and the dc for knowing the mayor is 20”.
Partly this is my philosophy that people like rolling and it’s fun, so although for things that don’t directly matter, I *often* want to short-circuit the resolution, I do also often want to let the players roll for it. Even if it’s trivial, even if it’s impossible. That’s partly because “no” can lead to arguments but people usually accept the result of the dice even if the GM improvises what it means. Partly because it establishes the mechanics (as long as the GM doesn’t have to homebrew the resolution on the spot). Partly because occasional unexpected failures or successes lead to fun roleplaying moments. But most importantly because it gets the player engaged in the result!
@Jack V:
The best suggestion I’ve seen for trained vs. untrained skills in 5e is to impose disadvantage if you’re not proficient in a skill which would logically require some level of formal training (i.e. knowledge skills, tool proficiencies, and Medicine*). It makes it less likely that the ignoramus will outshine the expert because of a lucky roll, but doesn’t completely “lock out” PCs from attempting things they didn’t specialize in, and requires less GM fiat of what is or isn’t possible without training.
(*In conjunction with this house rule, I would say that healer’s kits grant advantage on Wisdom (Medicine) checks rather than bypassing the check altogether.)
Man, I can’t stand the skill list or skill system generally. It’s incredibly frustrating when they went through all the trouble of writing a general-purpose proficiency system. A better solution is to ditch it altogether. I think one of the two variant rules in the DM’s Guide (pp. 263-64; both of which simply rely on proficiency bonus plus some aspect of the character’s background) make more sense for D&D — which was never built to handle skills in a particularly elegant way. I also like the idea of a proficiency die as well, but that’s kind of a separate discussion and also breaks bounded accuracy at high levels. My two cents!
Index Card RPG has a great solution to the “iron door is still difficult” challenge: effort. Just like HP, a task will have effort points.
So picking the lock takes 10 effort? Great. at the beginning of your campaign, you’re rolling a flat d4 effort per round. Later on you could develop to have d6+2 when lockpicking. Similar to the way better weapons allow you to do more damage, a better lockpick doesn’t (functionally) decrease the DC of the lock, it just lets you bust through it in fewer turns.
Easy to hack over to 5e as well. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on ICRPG if you’ve read/played any of it!
Bounded accuracy is broken in 5e. PCs easily get +10 by level 10, even more depending on magic items. So they can already hit Tiamat at that level (AC 30). I use auto hit/miss to somewhat help combat this but I also ignore the AC 30 limit since when combat comes around everyone is bound to have one ability at +10 or higher so can hit the target. I ended up ignoring it and the game works fine. For context most of my campaigns for 5e have been at least 2 years, and half of that time (if not more) is spent at level 10-20. Which is a very different game than 1-9.
Skills I don’t worry too much about. Im more of the opinion that less is more and prefer no skills at all. Tried removing them and just using ability scores, but, both myself and my players kept using the old “I make a perception check” anyway so didn’t bother after that.
ICRPG effort sounds like a good work around.
@Trey: That helps somewhat, but still doesn’t make the skill system catch up with combat. That’s because combat effectiveness goes up by the fourth power: You hit more easily (1), you hit harder (2), you evade more easily (3) and have more health (4). That’s why despite the bounded scale you can fit both dragons and rats on it, because the increase at the top of the scale is enhanced by the fourth power.
Introducing task HP brings the skill system up to second power, by adding doing it more effectively (2) to having a higher chance of success (1). But to make it fully even, you’d also need to have a cost that you can evade more easily (3) and take more of before having to give up (4).
And you’d need to do this in a way that is actually fun. Numenera Destiny had a square scaling in its crafting system, and it sucked, because it made the easy tasks too easy too quickly.
@Alien I like that thought about the 4 powers, but I would posit that ICRPG does give space to do exactly what you’re talking about:
Powers 1&2 are the same, as you said.
For the third power (a cost that you can evade more easily – akin to having higher armor in combat), most scenarios in ICRPG involve an environmental timer: the walls of the trash compactor are crushing you – take damage every 1d4 rounds R2D2 hasn’t shut it down. You can gain abilities or loot that allow you to accomplish more effort at once or more often (but those are powers 1 & 2 again), but you can also gain the ability to slow down the timer itself. “Once a day, add a d4 to a timer of your choice). The formal time constraint is the only reason the third and fourth powers are relevant – it doesn’t matter if you can’t pick the lock faster if the storm troopers aren’t chasing you.
4.
A similar loot or ability could allow for all timer dice to be increased by one order, so a d4 timer is now a d6 timer for me (power 4), and I can slow it down (power 3) while more easily (power 1) accomplishing more effort (power 2).
ICRPG’s development system is almost entirely loot-based, and home brew is highly encouraged. I know there are items that slow down timers, but I’m not sure there’s anything in the core book that increases the magnitude of the timer dice. Would be a great piece of loot to build in!
Really appreciate this 4-power model. I’m going to work on incorporating all these methods into my game. Thanks!
@solomari: “Bounded accuracy is broken in 5e. PCs easily get +10 by level 10, even more depending on magic items. So they can already hit Tiamat at that level (AC 30).”
– If the player maxes out their main attack stat (which not all players will want to do*), and if they have a +1 magic item, then yes, they’ll have a +10 attack bonus, allowing them to hit Tiamat on a natural 20… which they could do at first level anyway. Even if they have a +2 weapon and can hit 10% of the time instead of only 5%, that’s not same as being able to hit reliably.
– Oh, but wait! Tiamat’s AC is actually a “paltry” 25 (it’s her CR that’s 30). And when you factor in boosts from the Archery fighting style, the bless spell, bardic inspiration, etc., PCs might actually be able to hit her reliably. Big deal. Hitting her isn’t the challenge (she’s Gargantuan, after all, she makes a pretty big target), it’s doing enough damage to inconvenience her before she annihilates you all in two rounds.
The point of bounded accuracy is to narrow the gap between levels so that low-level monsters can still pose a threat to high-level characters, and so that PCs of any level aren’t completely pathetic against slightly-tougher monsters unless they’re “optimized”*. At least in the case of your example, therefore, I’d say that bounded accuracy is working as intended. If a game mechanic does what it’s supposed to do, then by definition it’s not “broken”. You may not like what it’s doing, but that’s not the same thing.
(*Personally, I’d rather play a character with several good scores than one who’s exceptional in one score and average in all the others. I don’t like playing one-trick ponies, and I don’t like it when a game punishes me for not playing one. As I stated above, this is one of the issues I’ve run into playing PF2e. The last character I played was a wizard, and I rarely used my more damaging spells because it seemed like most foes had a 2-in-3 chance of saving against them, and then I’ve just wasted a spell slot (and a combat round).)
When a halfling with a -1 straight breaks it’s rope bonds by just smashing rounds of strength checks and tries to escape. Knowing that the DC for rope breaking is within the possible instead of roleplaying being caught, bound, or imprisoned etc…
There has to be an element of realism to the fantasy or we are just playing a game of make it up. Oh well this rope is special or each not increases the DC or they made a sleight of hand check to bind you and that sets the DC to break free or escape bonds…. Still wonky. The breaking part atleast.
3rd was decent with its skills but synergies and other small additions and later expansions kind of ruined it.
Instead of streamlining skills like combining ath and acro they added more skills that were world specific or new. This making more points needed to cover areas but not awarding more points.
Other systems did it better. Exalted had a chose a stat chose a skill roll your dice. It allowed for versatility and freedom but their skill list was designed for their world and dice system which include combat and magic skills like occult and martial arts.
Combat as skills sounds nice into you give out points and no one puts points into the non combat skills because they are used to DnD where combat is king and Using skills to RP out of combat is “annoying” to the players who built combat specialist which we see today.
But I agree 5th is too far gone. It had a great premise. Revise DND 2nd edition (2.5 really when you look at skills and powers, swords and sorceries, and combat and tactics from that edition) but the DC system they kept breaking as pointed out by the ranter.
@Narsham
Responding to your comment that you “hate the idea of skills as binary locks,” I think we’re actually in agreement—I just didn’t really explain myself.
Looking at your example: “I want to siphon gasoline in a Mad-Max style game. Must I have a ‘siphon gas’ skill? How about a 1920s gangster campaign? Do I use ‘Streetwise?’ Should a PC who has siphoned gas successfully in the past need to roll at all? What if I understand the scientific principles but never actually did it physically? … The players should propose what they want to do and what skill they want to apply, the GM should determine both the DC and what range of results can be expected, and then should apply levels of success or failure.”
The way I envision “binary locks” is actually quite close to this, but simpler. The PC wants to siphon gas, so they tell the GM they have the Streetwise or Science skill, and that should give them the knowledge they need. The GM agrees or disagrees, and nine times out of ten, that’s it—no roll needed.
If you know how to siphon gas, there isn’t really a meaningful chance you’ll fail, barring some extenuating circumstance like being in the middle of a fight. In those cases, skill points/ranks/bonuses/whatever aren’t even really necessary, you could probably just use the base ability scores in whatever system you’re playing: for example, an INT check if the fight is really distracting and you have to dredge up the scientific knowledge, or a CON check if you got shot in the arm and the pain is making it hard to work, or something. The use of Streetwise or Science or whatever was simply to determine whether the PC has this knowledge/skill/ability at all. No matter how high my INT, if I never had any training or life experience that would teach me how to siphon gas, I shouldn’t be able to do it thanks to the whim of a high d20 roll—especially not where the PC with relevant training has already failed.
So what I’m pitching isn’t so much that skill uses should be baked into the system, but rather than skills are something you either have or you don’t, the GM should generally default to success, and rolls would be reserved for situations with unusual circumstances.