this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Part of the excellent case why you shouldn’t roll for the routine. Take “town downtime activities”.
If a character is a lifetime street urchin, they should be able to find a few “safe marks” versus rolling to snag some risky but lucrative pickpockets. A talented musician doesn’t flub every 20th note, but you can certainly reward bigger rolls with bigger tips.
I feel like this doesn't take two things into account.
First is what the group wants. While that work for a bunch, and does for my Tuesday game, it wouldn't for the games that I've run in the past and personally doesn't work for me either. A lot of people actually like rolling for stuff like that. It adds some element of flavor on how good or bad it can go. While you succeeding might be all but guaranteed, the numbers can impact a lot. That and some of us just like using the clicky math rocks we've spent a disgusting amount of money on.
The other thing is that it still ignores the core problem of a 5% chance of failure of something that you are proficient or an expert in. An expert having a 5% chance of not just failure but critical failure isn't something that I really jive with. Can you imagine if those margins were acceptable in our reality? Can you imagine if there was a 5% chance that during a lecture on something that they've been studying all their life, a medical doctor gives genuinely dangerous advice to his students? Sure. Accidents happen. That has happened in the past but if that happened 5% of the time with every expert on the planet... well things would look very different. The entire term expert would probably have a different definition as that perpetual 5% chance would really change your opinion on how much you trust someone when they have the same chance of catastrophic failure as Joe from the market.
Critical failure doesn't have to mean the worst outcome imaginable, though.
Rolling a 1 on a routine skill check that you've done a thousand times as an expert should reflect the circumstances.
Landing a familiar model plane at your home airport on a sunny day with no wind? Rolling a 1 means it's as bad as it can be under those circumstances. Let's say, a bird flies into the windshield and obscures your view. New problem to solve! New roleplaying opportunity! Doesn't mean the plane insta-crashes. You might just deal with the failure creatively and carry on like nothing happened. Scary moment, but fun to play out.
Now let's say you're the same experienced pilot, but you're landing an unfamiliar, stolen plane that your rogue hot wired, and you're trying to land on a beach littered with tourists and rocks.
Rolling a 1 for a critical failure is a much different scenario this time.
It's more that it's just more work for the DM in this case. Every time a skill check is called or considered, the DM has to reconsider if the character considers this a routine or trivial task. You can see this in the stats: if the character's modifier is 5 or less than the DC, it's trivial. But you also must consider even without a high mod vs DC, is this a task the character has performed hundreds of times before? I try not to come up with solutions, or utilize WOTC solutions that make a lot more work for the DM. Especially if there's already a rule or slight tweak that makes sense and prevents this work: in this case, no crits for skill checks.
I suppose if the DM is running the game through a rigid preformed structure then yeah, having things make stuff more unpredictable is gonna be hard on the DM, but if they are already choosing to fly by the seat of their pants and roll with the incoming suggestions from the dice, it's totally fine.
There are lots of different types of people that like to DM games. Something isn't automatically worse for all DMs.