You’re right, it’s not. But in this case it was specifically the “lucky” feature that came into play. Getting the better result through sheer dumb luck is exactly what was supposed to happen.

Also, I strongly disagree with your barbarian hitting a machine example. Rolling a nat 20 attack roll against a machine damages or outright destroys it. I’m not rewarding players for choosing literally the opposite course of action from one that might resolve the problem, no matter what they roll.

If the barbarian wants to try a hail Mary tool proficiency check with their lack of proficiency and -1 intelligence penalty and lucks into a nat 20 for a result of 19 on a DC 17 check then I’ll happily flavour it as “percussive maintenance”, but an attack roll just destroys the machine because that’s what attacks do.

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The problem is it isn’t that rare. If you reward it very much at all it encourages doing stupid shit (that won’t hurt you) because you’ll succeed 5% of the time. Maybe they get to do a particularly cool action while trying it on a 20, but it still shouldn’t always succeed. You might just look slightly better while failing.

But that also means that you would fail 95% of the time? I’m not sure why that seems unfair.

Sorry, I don’t really play but I like hearing and reading the stories.

If it isn’t dangerous, it just encourages doing stuff your character wouldn’t do. Your barbarian shouldn’t be going around picking locks. Having a 1/20 chance to randomly succeed encourages then to though. Yeah, they’ll usually fail, but there’s no harm in most skill checks, so why not take them?

Skill checks don’t succeed on a natural 20 in the rule book. It’s a house rule thing, that got passed to a lot of players. It’s not a good way of handling it. Pathfinder 2e has a good system for it if you’re interested. It has degrees of success falling above/below the DC by 10 is a critical. Also, a natural 1/20 decreases/increases the degree of success by 1. That means if you really don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily critical fail and have negative consequences. If you’re really skilled you may critically succeed even without a nat 20.

A nat 20 is the best outcome that the character could manage in that situation, if they have no chance of succeeding then the DM should not be letting them roll. If the barbarian suggests mauling a delicate machine with their mace it’s down to anyone else in the party (or the DM if they’re so inclined) to remind them that actions have consequences.

Then I’d know you aren’t playing Pathfinder.

I disagree that the DM shouldn’t let them try. For a lockpicking example, there are plenty of people who think they could pick a lock who have no shot of actually doing it. The DM shouldn’t be telling them no if their character might think they could do it. They should just roll and tell them they failed. Let them try. They don’t have to know they didn’t stand a chance —unless they get a nat 20, because obviously then they’ll know it was always going to fail.

Yeah, obviously mailing it shouldn’t do anything. They should roll to attack and then roll for damage, because that’s what they’re doing, not a skill check. And yeah, it’s going to destroy something. For something like a lockpick, they could roll and break the lock. Pathfinder handles this better with degrees of success.

For some reason embedding didn’t work for me, and your attempt didn’t work either. Maybe it’s my lemmy client (Thunder)

Huh, you’re right. The embed works in Summit but not Thunder…

Or as many have experienced in Skyrim: the arrow flies past the enemy, but the slow-mo kill cam still happens and follows the arrow for hundreds of meters, right into the ass of an unexpecting goat.

Works in Voyager.