We resolve actions in RPGs by making checks, right? I’m not actually a master swordsman, but I can use my attack bonus to slay dragons. And I’m not actually a master thief, but I can use my Pick Locks skill to open a door. So even though I’m not as smart as my wizard with Intelligence 20, I should be able to make an Intelligence check to solve a riddle, right?

But, if so, why does that feel so unsatisfying?

Broadly speaking, it’s for the same reason that we don’t “solve” crosswords where the answers have already been penciled in.

We can also think of this in terms of the Czege Principle:

When one person is the author of both the character’s adversity and its resolution, play isn’t fun.

In the case of a riddle or puzzle, the resolution is, of course, figuring out the answer. If the interaction at the table is:

GM: Like the sun in a snowstorm, I must be broken before I can be used. What am I? Give me an Intelligence check.

Player: 18.

GM: The answer is, “An egg.”

The player has been excluded from participating. (And this largely remains true even if we muddy up the middle step a bit by, for example, requiring the player to say, “I’ll make an Intelligence check.”)

In The Art of Rulings, I propose three thresholds for making a ruling:

1. Passive observation is automatically triggered.
2. Player expertise activates character expertise.
3. Player expertise can trump character expertise.

If you apply this metric to riddle-solving, you generally end up in a similar place: Player expertise activating character expertise means that “the characters don’t play themselves.” The players have to make some meaningful input in order to activate their character’s expertise (e.g. deciding to search a chest for traps in order to activate their character’s mechanical Search check), and in the case of a riddle or puzzle the only meaningful input is figuring out the solution. (Which, of course, obviates the need for the check.)

To put this a different way: The only meaningful part of solving a riddle is the LAST step. So if you reduce the solution to a mechanical check, you have taken all meaning away from the player.

Engage the players through their characters. If you’re ONLY engaging the characters, then the players are no longer playing the game.

BUT I WANT TO CHECK!

But let’s say that you (or your players) WANT to make the Intelligence check. This is generally due to one of two reasons:

First, the PCs are stuck and they need a solution to the riddle or puzzle in order to proceed.

Second, the players wants to play a character who is smarter than they are. Just like some players want to play a character who can win a heavyweight title bout (even though they absolutely cannot do that in real life), you’ll have players who want to solve riddles and puzzles that would be impossible for them in real life.

Fortunately, there are some techniques you can use without making riddles and puzzles meaningless.

NON-ESSENTIAL RIDDLES

The first thing you can do is make the riddle non-essential.

For example, consider the riddle of Moria’s door in The Fellowship of the Rings.

‘What does the writing say?’ asked Frodo, who was trying to decipher the inscription on the arch. ‘I thought I knew the elf-letters but I cannot read these.’

`The words are in the elven-tongue of the West of Middle-earth in the Elder Days,’ answered Gandalf. ‘But they do not say anything of importance to us. They say only: The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter. And underneath small and faint is written: I, Narvi, made them. Celebrimbor of Hollin drew these signs.’

`What does it mean by speak, friend, and enter?’ asked Merry.

‘That is plain enough,’ said Gimli. `If you are a friend, speak the password, and the doors will open, and you can enter.’

‘Yes,’ said Gandalf, ‘these doors are probably governed by words. Some dwarf-gates will open only at special times, or for particular persons; and some have locks and keys that are still needed when all necessary times and words are known. These doors have no key. In the days of Durin they were not secret. They usually stood open and doorwards sat here. But if they were shut, any who knew the opening word could speak it and pass in. At least so it is recorded, is it not, Gimli?’

‘It is,’ said the dwarf. `But what the word was is not remembered. Narvi and his craft and all his kindred have vanished from the earth.’

‘But do not you know the word, Gandalf?’ asked Boromir in surprise.

`No!’ said the wizard.

In order to open the door, they have to figure out the password! There’s only one solution!

… but that’s not the only way to open the door, is it? Particularly if it was a D&D group:

• They could break it down.
• They could trick the lake monster into breaking it for them.
• They could prepare and cast a knock spell.

It’s also not the only way into Moria. They could, for example, try to climb the mountain and enter through one of the windows or ventilation shafts.

Plus, they technically don’t need to get into Moria at all:

• They could go back and try to cross Caradhras again.
• They could go south through the Gap of Rohan.
• They could abandon their overland journey entirely, retreat to a western port, and sail to Gondor.

This is similar to the Three Clue Rule: If there are multiple paths to the goal, then a puzzle the players can’t figure out rendering one of them inaccessible is not a critical problem. So if the only reason you were making the check was because you felt compelled to force an answer on the players, making sure that the riddle or puzzle isn’t a single point of failure for the scenario (and being open to player suggestions for how they might route around it) sidesteps the problem.

ROLLING FOR CLUES

Speaking of the Three Clue Rule, let’s put a spin on our earlier example of unsatisfying play and consider a different type of puzzle:

GM: Lord Arthur D’armount has been murdered! Give me an Intelligence check.

Player: 18

GM: Bob did it.

That’s clearly absurd, right?

But nevertheless, a murder investigation scenario will almost always feature players using their character’s skills to search for clues and identify the ash as coming from a Trichinopoly cigar in a moment of Holmesian brilliance. Why does that work?

The difference is that these checks (or other mechanics) are delivering clues. It’s still the players who use those clues and take the rewarding final step of figuring out what they mean.

And when someone playing a super-genius character like Sherlock Holmes or Reed Richards or Wile E. Coyote wants to make an IQ check to solve a riddle, we can do the same thing: Instead of giving them the solution, we give them a clue.

When we’re talking about a murder mystery, this distinction between clue and conclusion can feel fairly obvious. If we’re talking about Myst-like puzzles or Gollum-style riddle battles, on the other hand, it can be a little harder to figure out clues that aren’t just the solution.

This is often more art than science and will be heavily dependent on the specific riddle or puzzle, but a trick I frequently find useful is to break the riddle or puzzle apart conceptually and then give clues that only make one part of the riddle or puzzle more explicit. For example, let’s look at the simple riddle we used at the beginning of this essay:

Like the sun in a snowstorm, I must be broken before I can be used.

We could look at the first part of the riddle (“like a sun in a snowstorm”) and say, “You’re pretty sure the ‘sun’ and ‘snowstorm’ are referring to colors.”

Something else we can learn from mysteries is that you can also deliver clues to riddles or puzzles diegetically. Like Henry Jones, Sr.’s journal in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the PCs can piece together lore and rumor, and perhaps investigate the area around the puzzle, for hints to the puzzle’s solution. If there are a bunch of large stone pillars, each etched with a strange rune, for example:

• Researching the runes in a library might be useful in identifying which runes are related to each other.
• Searching around the pillars might discover scrape marks on the floor, indicating that they’ve been moved around.
• A giant-slayer’s journal might describe the relevant rules of Brobdingnagian chess.

And some of these, of course, might also be things that a successful Arcana or Giant Lore check would recall.

We’ve previously discussed how religion in D&D has long defaulted to “modern Christianity, but with a pagan god slotted in for Jesus.” This is, of course, because the religious experience of most people playing the game and writing for the game is limited to Christianity (with a smattering of Greek or Norse mythology).

What may be slightly less obvious is that basically the same thing is true for D&D nation-states.

“Wait a minute,” you say. “D&D has queens and dukes and stuff! That’s not modern!”

Sure. But much like you’ve got cruciform churches filled with priests and bishops worshipping Zeus or Crom, so, too, are the kings and duchesses of D&D often just a patina of medievalism draped across a nation-state which is fundamentally structured according to a modern, post-Treaty of Westphalia understanding of what a nation looks like and how it operates.

Here are a few things you might recognize in “medieval” D&D kingdoms:

• standing armies being large and common;
• a “city watch” that looks just like a modern police force;
• “feudalism” in which literally everyone is a free citizen;
• neatly drawn borders that precisely account for every scrap of land.

Now, to be clear, you can look back at history and find a variety of antecedents for each of these things. And D&D, of course, is not literally medieval Europe (with plenty of reasons why it logically shouldn’t be). So there’s nothing inherently “wrong” with this synthesis that not-so-coincidentally looks just like the modern polities you’re familiar with, and you could justify it in any number of ways.

But what IS true is that this synthesis is incredibly limiting, particularly if you’re just subconsciously defaulting into it as a straitjacket because it’s the only way you know the world to work.

DRAW FROM HISTORY

Obviously the first thing you can do here is broaden your palette. You won’t be trapped in the structure of the modern nation-state if you learn about a lot of alternatives. Here’s a completely arbitrary list I’ve personally found useful:

• Roman Hegemony. Republic, Imperial, or Byzantine. Going with all three will also give you the benefit of seeing how structures of political power can shift over time.
• Renaissance Italy. In many ways, of course, this is just an extension of Roman government along a different branch. But looking in detail at the myriad ways in which the Italian city-states experimented with government form and function (including the Vatican) is a great way to really understand how mutable government can be, even within societies which are otherwise broadly similar (in terms of culture and technology).
• Feudal Japan. Also known as the shogunate. For me, personally, this was the historical deep-dive that taught me a lot about feudalism by looking at how a different-but-similar system worked. (But you need to find a source that won’t just draw direct, vapid parallels with European feudalism, which can be a common trap here.)
• Incan Empire. And, if you’re willing to dig a little deeper, the pre-Incan civilizations that initiated the use of khipu (knotted cords) for the recording of debts and transactions. Spanish colonizers crushed this civilization, but it’s a fascinating window into a very different way or organizing and thinking about society.
• Ancient Greece. Somewhat similar to Renaissance Italy, in that its city-states provide a bunch of directly juxtaposed examples. While you’re mucking about in this era, you might also want to take a peek at the Persian Empire as another alternative to the Roman-style of hegemony.

For this to be effective, though, you’ll need to really dig deep into the actual political structures of these societies. Probably deeper than many general histories will provide. (Although something like a Cambridge History will probably get the job done.) And there’s no clever shortcut here: You just have to do the research.

FANTASTICAL STATES

The other limitation here, of course, is that this historical sampling — whatever form it takes for you — will only be looking at governments and nations as they exist in the real world. There’s nothing wrong with copy-pasting from history, but it can certainly be a lot of fun to embrace the fantastical nature of a setting and invent societies that have never and perhaps could never exist in the real world.

Some questions to think about:

• What happens when your political leaders can live for centuries or even millennia?
• If the gods can literally speak to you (or even walk among you), what effect does that have on temporal political institutions?
• What does “monster power” look like? In other words, what effect does it have for a dragon or lich to rule a nation? Perhaps even more interesting would be to ask what it looks like for multiple dragons or liches to do so.
• How does the underground nature of a dwarven nation affect their understanding of political power?
• On a similar note, in the real world the territory of a nation has been assumed to be not only the surface of the land, but everything beneath it. How do the many layers of the Underdark affect the perception of the nation-state and the application of political power? What are the conflicts that result when there are different opinions about this?
• What affect do magic and/or fantastical technologies have on the organization and application of power in a nation-state? For example, could readily available teleportation lend itself to a proliferation of non-contiguous states?

And so forth. Once you really start digging in here, you can find all kinds of marvelous ideas that will makes your setting utterly unique and special.

THREE FORMS OF DOMINATION

When playing around with ideas like this, it can be useful to have some sort of theory or framework that can organize your thoughts and maybe give you some dials and levers you can experiment with. For this purpose, let me quote at length from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity:

Does that mean that property, like political power, ultimately derives (as Chairman Mao so delicately put it) “from the barrel of a gun” — or, at best, from the ability to command the loyalties of those trained to use them.

No. Or not exactly.

To illustrate why not, and continue our thought experiment, let’s take a different sort of property. Consider a diamond necklace. If Kim Kardashian walks down the street in Paris wearing a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars, she is not only showing off her wealth, she is also flaunting her power over violence, since everyone assumes she would not be able to do so without the existence (…) of an armed security detail.

But let us imagine, for a moment, what would happen if everyone on earth were suddenly to become physically invulnerable. (…) Could Kim Kardashian still maintain exclusive rights over her jewellery?

Well, perhaps not if she showed it off regularly, since someone would presumably snatch it; but she certainly could if she normally kept it hidden in a safe, the combination of which she alone knew and only revealed to trusted audiences at events which were not announced in advance. So there is a second way of ensuring that one has access to rights others do not have: the control of information. (…)

Let us take this experiment one step further and imagine everyone on earth drank another potion which rendered them all incapable of keeping a secret, but still unable to harm one another physically as well. Access to information, as well as force, has now been equalized. Can Kim still keep her diamonds? Possibly. But only if she manages to convince absolutely everyone that, being Kim Kardashian, she is such a unique and extraordinary human being that she actually deserves to have things no one else can.

We would like to suggest that these three principles — call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well find hierarchies based on knowledge. It doesn’t even particularly matter what the knowledge is about: maybe some sort of technical know-how (say, of smelting copper, or using herbal medicines); or maybe something we consider total mumbo jumbo (the names of the twenty-seven hells and thirty-nine heavens).

(…)

In terms of the specific theory we’ve been developing here (…) the three elementary forms of domination — control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power — can each crystallize into its own institutional form (sovereignty, administration, and heroic politics). Almost all these “early states” could be more accurately described as “second-order” regimes of domination. First-order regimes like the Olmec, Chavin, or Natchez each developed only one part of the triad. But in the typically far more violent arrangements of second-order regimes, two of the three principles of domination were brought together in some spectacular, unprecedented way. Which two it was seems to have varied from case to case. Egypt’s early rulers combined sovereignty and administration; Mesopotamian kings mixed administration and heroic politics; Classic Maya ajaws fused heroic politics with sovereignty.

We should emphasize that it’s not as if any of these principles, in their elementary forms, were entirely absent in any one case: in fact, what seems to have happened is that two of them crystallized into institutional forms — fusing in such a way as to reinforce one another as the basis of government — while the third form of domination was largely pushed out of the realm of human affairs altogether and displaced on to the non-human cosmos (as with divine sovereignty in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, or the cosmic bureaucracy of the Classic Maya).

And, in case it’s not clear, the thesis here is that the modern nation-state generally finds a way to institutionalize all three forms of domination.

(I do recommend grabbing a copy of The Dawn of Everything and reading the whole thing. It’s an excellent book.)

What’s particularly useful here are the three pillars:

• Violence / Sovereignty
• Information / Administration
• Charisma / Heroic Politics

To create a new nation, all you need to do is broadly explain how it asserts control over one or more of these pillars. With the broad outline established, you can then drill down into the details at your leisure. This makes it very easy to craft bespoke societies. Fantastical societies, of course, simply flow from the expedient of making one or more institution based on the magical elements of your world:

• The vampire princess who monopolizes violence through her slavish spawn. (What are the formal ranks of the spawn and how are they determined?)
• The magocracy whose bureaucracy is built around the nine arcane colleges. (Over which spheres of temporal life do each college wield control?)
• The wyrmling warlords who feud and compete for the loyalty of dragonborn clans. (By what feats is the greatness of the wyrmlings judged?)

The possibilities, of course, are limitless, and even moreso as you begin combining pillars in different combinations.

The really great thing? You can use these three pillars as a cheat code for creating novel societies even if you’re only passingly familiar with historical nation-states. All that research we talked about? It will still be invaluable if you do it. (Knowing more stuff never hurt anyone when they set out to create new stuff.) But the three pillars of domination are a functional shortcut for worldbuilding.

One final thing to note is that describing a first-order society is not to say that the other elements are completely absent from society: Charismatic military leaders are likely common in a sovereign state of military clans. Heroic wyrm-kings will have scribes. What we’re looking at, however, is when those forms of power become institutions.

A BRIEF DIGRESSION ON HEROIC POLITICS

Of the three pillars of domination, the first-order societies which seems to be most alien to modern Westerners (i.e., almost everyone reading this), is heroic politics. So let’s take a moment to clarify what those look like.

Useful touchstones here might be Beowulf and the Iliad. These are “primitive” societies which crystallize around charismatic leaders who prove their “worth” through deeds – venturing forth on profitable raids, hunting mighty beasts, boasting and drinking, engaging in formal duels, competing in games, offering sacrifices, etc. (This sort of thing seems particularly relevant to pulp adventure games like D&D, where this is just the sort of thing PCs are frequently doing.)

The “selection process” by which these leaders are chosen can range from the informal (e.g., Robin Hood drawing merry men into Sherwood) to the extremely formal (e.g., democratic elections carried out in accordance with a formal constitution). Similarly, the traits which are seen as “desirable” will vary by society and circumstance.

THE INTERACTION OF SOCIETIES

Your world will likely see a mixture of first-, second-, and third-order societies. For example, there might be a hub of well-established civilization filled with third-order societies (institutionalizing violence, administration, and charisma), but as you journey out into the frontiers you’re likely to see less formal first- and second-order societies.

Historically speaking, you may also see a third order society (e.g., the Roman Empire) collapse or contract, leaving first- and second-order societies in its wake (e.g., King Arthur emerging through heroic politics as Roman sovereignty in the British Isles breaks down).

These first- and second-order societies may be referred to as “barbarians” by the writers of “civilization,” but they’re probably doing the same thing to other third-order societies, too. Your tribe is always doing things in the best way possible; the other person’s is a bunch of superstitious, unenlightened bumpkins. (The reality, of course, is more complicated than that.

In fact, “incomplete” first- or second-order societies are often balanced by another society in the region based on another of the three pillars. To quote, again, from Dawn of Everything:

Throughout much of history, grain states [second-order sovereign administration states] and barbarians [clan-kings; i.e. first-order heroic politics] remained “dark twins,” locked together in an unresolvable tension, since neither could break out of their ecological niches. When the states had the upper hand, slaves and mercenaries flowed in one direction; when the barbarians were dominant, tribute flowed to appease the most dangerous warlord; or, alternatively, some overlord would manage to organize an effective coalition, sweep in on the cities and either lay waste to them, or more typically, attempt to rule them and inevitably find himself and his retinue absorbed as a new governing class. As the Mongolian adage went, “One can conquer on horseback; to rule one must dismount.”

Often these choices of society are deliberate — simultaneously an embrace of your own way of life and a rejection of the other way of life. (“Lowlanders are all soft! When the shadows return, they will be plucked just like the ripe fruit of their orchards!”)

In addition to regional proximity, these societal forms can also oscillate through time. For example, when sovereignty would break down in Ancient Egypt, the political organization would swing towards the heroic politics of local warlords who would continue overseeing the complex administration of society.

These kind of frontier societies and/or periods of societal breakdown are, of course, the perfect environment for the points-of-light/pulp adventure of a typical D&D campaign.

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-5^th Edition versions of D&D, and that under the design principles of 5^th 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 5^th 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 3^rd Edition. The concept was to extend play past 20^th 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 20^th 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 4^th Edition, but that’s a tale for another time).

On that note, fast forward to 4^th 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 4^th 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 5^th Edition: The 4^th Edition of the game had burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp, and 5^th 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 4^th Edition hated about 4^th Edition, so it had go.

Bounded accuracy was the solution. Importantly, bounded accuracy was about two things:

1. Controlling AC & DC so that the target numbers never become impossible for some of the PCs.
2. 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 3^rd Edition (and which metastasized in the Epic Level Handbook), you can see how this solves the problem. It also avoids the 4^th 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 1^st 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 3^rd Edition or 4^th 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 5^th 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 5^th Edition is treated as if it were the same as low-level 3^rd Edition, including by the designers and the advice in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. But this isn’t the case. A skilled 3^rd-level character in 3^rd Edition likely has a +8 or +9 in the skill; the same character in 5^th Edition has +4 or +5.

Note: The elimination of the Take 10 mechanic in 5^th 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 5^th 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 5^th 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 1^st 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 1^st 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 1^st 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 15^th-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 20^th level as it was at 1^st.”

This creates a really weird dynamic where at 1^st level your characters are struggling with dire wolves, casting dancing lights, and being challenged by the lock on the back door of the tavern. And at 20^th 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 5^th 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 5^th Edition could hypothetically achieve it by having no skill system at all and just having characters be directly proficient in ability scores.

The 5^th 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 5^th 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, 5^th Edition still ends up with overlapped skills (e.g., Athletics and Acrobatics).

But okay, let’s lay my personal preferences completely aside: 5^th 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 5^th 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 5^th 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 5^th 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

These creatures exist somewhere between parasitism and symbiosis. A writhing mass of thick tentacles, capable of great, undulating speed when independent, but vastly preferring to attach itself to the back of another creature.

Writhing Partners. Once attached to another creature, the tentacular demands compliance through the simple expedience of strangling its host if attempts to remove or threaten the tentacular in any way. The tentacular draws it sustenance from the blood of its host (and is otherwise incapable of feeding), but will also aid its host by defending it and helping it to gather food (usually through butchery and murder on a grand scale). Elves speak in hushed whispers of deer with blood-stained maws and squirming black masses on their backs.

Corpse Riders. If the host of a tentacular dies, some of its tentacles will vanish into the corpse and puppeteer. This state of affairs can last for several days until the rotten meat can no longer by forced into a facsimile of life. Such horrific creatures are often mistaken for undead.

Spawning Tentaculum. A tentacular reproduces by abruptly sprouting a multitude of small tentacles in a process known to scholars as “budding.” After tripling or quadrupling its number of tentacles, the tentacular will abruptly fission, “shedding” individual tentacles until it has split apart entirely. The individual tentacles seek new hosts, at which point the tentacles will sprout additional tentacles as it grows into an adult tentacular.

TENTACULAR
Small aberration, neutral evil

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Armor Class 15

Hit Points 75 (20d6)

Speed 30 ft.

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STR 12 (+1), DEX 15 (+2), CON 11 (+0), INT 3 (-4), WIS 10 (+0), CHA 5 (-3)

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Skills Stealth +5

Senses passive Perception 10

Challenge 5 (1,800 XP)

Proficiency Bonus +3

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Parasite. If not attached to a host, the tentacular must succeed at a DC 10 Constitution saving throw once per day or suffer one level of exhaustion, which cannot be removed until it attaches to a host. When the tentacular is attached to a host, the host must succeed on a DC 13 Constitution saving throw once per day or suffer one level of exhaustion, which cannot be removed as long the tentacular remains attached.

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ACTIONS.

Multiattack. The tentacular makes four tentacle attacks.

Tentacles. Melee Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (2d6+1) bludgeoning damage. If the target is a creature, it is grappled (escape DC 15). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the tentacular can’t use its tentacles on another target.

Strangle. The tentacular forces a creature it is grappling to make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or begin choking. Once a creature is choking, it can survive a number of rounds equal to its Constitution modifier (minimum 1 round). At the start of its next turn, it drops to 0 hit points and is dying, and it can’t regain hit points or be stabilized until it can breathe again. The creature can attempt the save again each round on its turn, with a success indicating that it has managed to get some air (and is no longer choking).

Attach. Melee Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 5 ft., one grappled target. Hit: 8 (2d6+1) necrotic damage and the tentacular attaches to the target. While attached, the tentacular can’t make Attach attacks. The tentacular can detach itself by spending 5 feet of its movement. As an action, a creature within reach of the tentacular can try to detach it, doing so with a successful DC 17 Strength check. (The attached victim has disadvantage on this check.)

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Go to Table of Contents

In Phase 2 of Storm King’s Thunder, the PCs travel to one of three cities: Bryn Shander, Goldenfields, or Triboar. Each of these cities will be attacked by giants shortly after the PCs arrive, and in each of these cities there are six “Special NPCs” that the DM is supposed to give to the players to play during the attack:

In this chapter, each player runs not only a player character but also an NPC who has ties to the settlement that the characters are defending. Once you’ve determined where the adventure begins, make photocopies of the six NPCs corresponding to the location you’ve chosen.

(…)

Each NPC comes with a brief description, personality traits (a bond, an ideal, and a flaw), and a stat block. When the giant attack begins, give one NPC to each player and tell the player where the NPC is at the start of the encounter, as noted in the encounter description.

The structural concept here is that each Special NPC who survives the giant attack will deliver a Special Quest. The DM is supposed to spell this out to the players, by reading the following boxed text aloud:

In addition to your character, each of you has received a special nonplayer character with ties to the location where the adventure begins. Take a moment to review your NPC’s personality traits and statistics. One of your goals in this part of the adventure is to keep your special NPC alive. For each of these NPCs that survives, your party will receive a special quest that yields a reward upon its successful completion. The details of these special quests won’t be revealed until the end of this part of the adventure.

These Special Quests are the scenario hooks that propel the PCs from Phase 2 into Phase 3 of the campaign. The point, obviously, is for the PCs to exit Phase 2 of the campaign with a fistful of scenario hooks pointing in a whole bunch of different directions. In Bryn Shander, for example, you can get hooks pointing to:

• Ironmaster
• Waterdeep (x2)
• Hundelstone
• Neverwinter
• deeper into Icewind Dale

Looking at this section of the campaign, I really like the Special NPC dossiers and the gimmick of taking on these additional roles during the giant attack can be quite effective in lending an epic scope to these events.

What I DON’T like is that “explicitly explain the structural conceit” thing. It pierces the veil in a way that makes the game world feel less like a real place by popping a yellow exclamation mark over the NPCs’ heads. It’s also a little awkward to hand the players brand new characters to play just as a major combat is breaking out, because the pace of events will get bogged down in the procedural aspects of passing out the dossiers, explaining what they’re doing, figuring out the stat blocks, etc.

RUNNING THE PROXIES

Instead of waiting for the giant attack, give the Special NPCs to the players as they’re approaching the city limits. For example:

You see Bryn Shander on a hill rising from the wind-swept tundra. The sun is lowering in the sky and the chill of the wind is taking on a vicious edge. Ahead you can see two 30-foot-tall cylindrical towers flanking the gate.

CUT TO: Six people living in Bryn Shander.

At this point, distribute the NPC dossiers to the players and give them a minute to look things over. Put a copy of the Bryn Shander map on the table for the players to reference. Then prompt each player to frame a simple scene:

• What is something Augrek does every day?
• Where is Sirac right now?
• Markham is in Rendaril’s Emporium. What is he looking for?
• Duvessa Shane is having an argument. Who is she arguing with?
• Beldora is following someone. Who?
• Sir Baric, give me a Perception check to see if you catch the pickpocket taking your purse.

Briefly play through these scenes. Then cut back to the PCs entering the town.

Your goal here is to very quickly make the town come to life and get the players invested in it. When the giants attack later, the players now have a reason to really care about the community AND they’re already oriented to the Special NPCs and their lives, so they can jump straight in.

BEFORE THE GIANT ATTACK

The PCs will now go about their business. (Shopping, finding lodging, following up on whatever scenario hooks brought them to this city in the first place.) As they’re doing this, reincorporate the NPCs whenever you can:

• The PCs meet Sirac when they look for someone to give them directions.
• Markham is, conveniently, who they’re looking for.
• Duvessa comes in while they’re talking to Markham. She wants to talk to him about the argument she just had.
• As they head to the general store for supplies, they run into Sir Baric who is just finishing that pickpocketing scene.
• At the store, they meet Beldora.

And so forth. Whatever feels right for your group, based on how those first scenes played out.

The PCs don’t need to coincidentally meet every Special NPC. (No reason to force it.) But if that happens naturally… great!

Then, suddenly, in the middle of one of these scenes: GIANTS ATTACK!

AFTER THE GIANT ATTACK

In addition to the NPC dossiers, you’ll also want to have prepped a short handout for each scenario hook they can offer to the PCs. After the giant attack is complete, hand these to the appropriate players and let them frame up the scenes where they give the hooks to the PCs.

(You can give these out over time instead of all at once if that feels more appropriate. The pacing here is more art than science.)

The text from Storm King’s Thunder can serve as a good base for these briefing sheets, but you may want to tweak them a bit. For example, Beldora’s reads:

Beldora urges the characters to head southwest and take Ten Trail through the mountains to the mining settlement of Hundelstone. She suggests they make contact with a gnome named Thwip Ironbottom, who lives there year-round. If one or more of the party members are Harpers, she tells them that Thwip serves as the organization’s eyes and ears in Hundelstone. Beldora uses her sending stone to inform Thwip that the characters are coming.

This is very scripted and will likely feel awkward to the player. Shift the phrasing to give the player more leeway in playing the scene:

Beldora is impressed by the actions of the party and would like to recruit them as Harpers. If they’re interested, she’ll direct them to make contact with Thwip Ironbottom in the mining settlement of Hundelstone (which lies to the southwest and can be reached by following the Ten Trail through the mountains).

It’s a small shift, but hopefully the effect is fairly clear.

EXTENDING THE GIMMICK

In the Storm King’s Remix, you’ll repeat this same structure three times. This is good: Each time you do it, the players will feel more comfortable with what they’re expected to do, and the results will grow stronger as a result. You might worry that it will become repetitive, but in practice this won’t happen because the NPCs are unique and the circumstances distinct. The result will play out very differently each time.

Having done so, you might think about how this gimmick could be extended. (Particularly if it seems to be well-received by the players.) There are several ways to do this:

• When the PCs return to one of the three cities, take the time to once again frame up day-in-the-life scenes with the Special NPCs.
• Even if the PCs don’t return to one of the cities, perhaps one or more of the Special NPCs could be encountered elsewhere. (Beldora, for example, might be reassigned by the Harpers.)
• If the players seem really attached to their Special NPCs, you might use some light bluebooking to allow them to stay connected to the characters and follow up on what’s happening with them. (You could also use this as a vector for establishing the scope of the crisis affecting Faerûn; you might even have these NPCs maintain some form of correspondence with the PCs, allowing them to be conduits for additional information or scenario hooks as the campaign continues.)

You might also consider keeping an eye out for opportunities to use a similar technique in other locations during the campaign. (You would, of course, have to write up the appropriate NPC dossiers.) For example, what if the players took on the roles of various giants in Maelstrom when visiting the storm giant court for the first time?

Go to Storm King’s Remix