I regularly play in groups with eight player characters, Kolkani. Do you want me to check all eight of their sheets and all their abilities that could possibly modify their scores or just ask them to make a Blah (Foo) check check and see what the result is? It’s gonna be way faster for everyone to just ask them to roll.

Having that 1 player being stalked by a horny dragon for the rest of the game, just in case.

How do you create fair encounters without knowing your player’s character’s stats? 🤨

Think of it from their point of view though. They want to try and do something. For me to just flat out tell them “no, there’s no possible way” is discouraging and robs them of autonomy. Obviously for crazy extreme circumstances I won’t let them, like “let me convince the king to abdicate to me!” type things. But if I think the DC should be 25 or something I’m not gonna bother wasting my time calculating what the theoretical maximum could be for the roll because I genuinely cannot know. The player can always do things I don’t expect or use other players’ things to help. For reasonable but implausible things I’ll allow rolls even if a nat 20 wouldn’t work because I’m not calculating what a nat 20 could theoretically be.

Plus, I often give people little flavor benefits for nat 20s even if they don’t have mechanical success.

Throwing whatever you please at them. It’s fair because they’re informed of the risks and given opportunities to adjust their plans.

20 peasants stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and attempt to jump across. On average, should one succeed?

I agree. In casual play you can rely on veteran players to know their stats. If they’re the type to lie intentionally then they can leave the table. If they’re making mistakes then maybe something goes a little too easily, oh well. The best DMs i had didn’t give a shit and focused on rewarding players for learning.

This. You only need dice if the odds are dicey.

Hello fellow Pathfinder!

On page 242 of the Dungeon Master Guide 2014, it describes crit successes and fails as an optional rule.

As optional as multiclassing and feats.

Dating back to 3rd critical skill checks in D&D suck because a lot of skills are written as pass/fail.

Example: picking a lock. If we want to add criticals, a 1 breaks the lock; mostly okay, with the long acknowledged fringe problem of experts being incompetent 5% of the time. What does a natural 20 get? I adore opportunities to be creative, but there’s not a lot better than, “You did it perfectly.” A regular success earns that according to the rules, I don’t want to take it away. A speech about how cool and ninja the PC is can come off pretty cringey to me. The correct mechanical answer would be to let the 20 roll over to the next check because the PC’s in the zone or whatever. Not awful, but it doesn’t directly reward the player right when they rolled the 20, which is the occurrence we want to feel good. We’re also rewriting several rules at this point.

Meanwhile, PF2e baked degrees of success into everything. On a crit fail they break the lock, on a fail they leave traces of their fruitless efforts, on a success they get one success toward opening the lock while scuffing it up a little, and on a crit success they get two successes and leave the lock looking pristine. The players don’t feel cheated when they get a normal success and scuff up the lock. The 20 has some reward for most characters. The 1 has a setback, even a reasonable setback for an expert with a +25 trying to open the DC 10 lock on Grandma’s rickety shed.

I actually don’t mind pass/fail skill rolls in D&D or other games. Rolling a 20 is inherently satisfying to me. But I adore the DC+10 critical threshold for making a good build feel like it was time well spent, in or out of game. And since the natural 20/1 and critical rules are connected at the hip, I’ll gladly take them both.

While no individual peasant ought make it across, im pretty sure on average, one in twenty people can jump the Grand Canyon

Many of them can be re-rolled later once you get more skill points.

It calls these white checks. Specifically they’ll unlock again (supposing you failed them) once you level up the skill or stat they’re associated to.

You can also find or buy dice that’ll unlock some of them.

Others are one and done unless you reload or start a new game.

It calls these red checks. And they’re often much more fun than white checks, especially when you fail them.

You can also find or buy dice that’ll unlock some of them.

Those actually do something?

don’t let the country bumpkin make Arcana checks about monsters he’s never seen

Why not? It could be fun! Of course non-critical rolls would be useless, but on a critical failure they could convince the whole party that dragons can’t see movement, and on a critical success they could buy mere chance figure out where its voonerables are (it’s a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!)…

or let the stick figure try to punch down a wall

Again, why not? All rolls, they take a bit of damage; critical failure, they break their arm or hand, and manage to dislodge a brick which starts a comically unlikely and extremely noisy Rube Goldberg chain reaction which ends up waking up and alerting all the guards; critical success, they hit the hidden button that opens the secret door (in another wall), starting a whole new subquest.

They do! Each one reopens a different set of white checks, and reduces their difficulty!

Yep, those are all great responses. I learned a lot.

Funwise, it seems like a good solution would be “failure… but!” approach.

So the player have at least some reward for doing the best they can even if it’s not enought to clear the chalange completely.

It has the same mouthfeel as a crit, I want my wildest dreams to come true every time I see that two zero

The problem with DND¹ is that it’s a wargame cosplaying as a role playing game.

We’re not recreating historical battles. Let the players (and the DM) have fun.

1.— It boggles the mind that one of the early failed experiments at making role playing games (by slightly modifying the rules of pre-existing wargames) is still somehow the standard.

Sure, it was one of the main inspirations for the genre… but there’s a good reason we’re not still driving Ford Model Ts.

Once in a blue moon, an impossible check can impress a scale of difficulty on the players.

D&D example: a player with a high bonus attempts an Arcana check to figure out an enchantment and rolls well, up to a natural 20. I let the players have their moment of joy. Then I make a big deal of telling them they don’t have any idea what’s up with this enchantment. I really talk up how weird/complicated/confusing/impenetrable the enchantment is.

I’d be trying to prompt emotions I want the players and PC to share. Frustration, inadequacy. The players would viscerally know they need to try a different approach.

And because I gave the check a decent chunk of game time, it has more narrative weight. An interactive skill check is more substantial in the player’s mind than a monologue on the task being impossible, particularly if it stands out because they fail that check despite a super high result.

It’s a niche scenario, I admit. Most of the time just don’t ask for the check.