Very high skill checks

[jt]

One option for making sure mundane characters can keep up with their magical counterparts is to bake high-level appropriate (ie: impossible) abilities into your skill system. It's fairly easy to make sure that access to spells like Flight, Teleport, Scry, and Contact Other Plane come at the expense of fewer skill points. Make sure your magical options are better than skills but narrower and limited in uses per day, and we have something that can at least in principle be balanced.

Part of the fallout from this is that I'm pretty sure you need skill checks to increase by more than 1/level. Like 3-4. The guy who can jump so good that he can fly really aught to be a few levels from needing to take 20 to get into the air to being able to do it on demand.

Not every skill does a good job of conceptually scaling. Swim gets you to the bottom of the ocean and then stalls out. Climb probably can let you fly, but climbing midair makes you look like a dork. A lot of these scaling problems can be fixed by merging skills with ones that scale better. The Jump/Climb/Swim cluster can be Athletics and that's okay.

So, going by roughly 4E skill list, with the merged 3.5 skills listed in parenthesis:
[*] Arcana (Knowledge: Arcana, Knowledge: The Planes, Spellcraft, Use Magic Device) - This seems fine already.
[*] Athletics (Climb, Swim, Jump) - Jump midair followed by flight. Is that sufficient? Teleport at some point?
[*] Bluff / Sense Motive / Intimidate - These are all opposed skills so they scale naturally. (Not that Intimidate has ever had a proper opposition, but it should.)
[*] Diplomacy (Diplomacy) - I'm pretty sure this skill is just conceptually broken and should be replaced with rolling whatever skill makes a relevant personal connection.
[*] Dungeoneering (Knowledge: Dungeoneering, Knowledge: Architecture) - This is narrow and has a short shelf-life. Maybe split its bits up into nature and history?
[*] Endurance (Concentration?) - I don't know if any of this needs to exist.
[*] Gymnastics (Balance, Tumble, Escape Artist (especially the squeeze through tight spaces part)) - Balance midair followed by flight. Squeeze through tight places could scale into squeezing through walls.
[*] Heal (Heal) - Scales up to Raise Dead if you want it to.
[*] History (Knowledge: History, Knowledge: Nobility and Royalty, Knowledge: Geography, Decipher Script) - "Solve the plot" rolls like Contact Other Plane or Legend Lore. Know exact layout of a location, or maybe just last week's Scry.
[*] Nature (Knowledge: Nature, Survival, Ride, Handle Animal) - Survival scales until you're camping in Hell. Handle Animal can get you a mount with level-appropriate flight or teleport.
[*] Perception (Listen, Spot, Search) - Already scales well, but you could add seeing over the horizon, or scrying through a crystal ball as sufficiently high Spot DCs.
[*] Religion (Knowledge: Religion) - This seems useless, but also mandatory. I don't know what to do with this other than Contact Other Plane.
[*] Stealth (Hide, Move Silently) - Invisibility, teleport between shadows.
[*] Streetwise (Appraise, Gather Information, Knowledge: Local) - Seems necessary but shelflifey. It scales to "Don't get shanked in Dis or Sigil" but that sounds too much like 4E's "Climb a mountain in Hell" treadmill to me. Maybe merge with History somehow?
[*] Thievery (Disable Device, Disguise, Forgery, Open Lock, Sleight Of Hand) - Open Lock scales to opening deadbolts, bars across the door, doors that are sealed shut, doors that have been bricked over, and finally just plain old walls.

Are there core plot-solving/obstacle-bypassing abilities that a high level character should have that aren't covered by something here? More clever uses for high-level skills that seem like they should be included? Ways to shore up the skills that are still weak on the above list?

[owlassociate]

https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tome_of_Prowe ... rcebook%29
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=29292

[DenizenKane]

I don't think this really works. The problem is in the structure of the classes, not the skill system. The skill system is meant to simulate things that people do and not produce "level appropriate" abilities. If you want a class to have these abilities, they must be written into the class.

[Foxwarrior]

So one of the things that most skill systems are for is the thing where a player goes "I want to try to do <thing appropriate for some skill that isn't specifically covered under the rules>" and the DM goes "Sure, that'll be a DC <number I just made up> <skill name> check please". What do you want to have happen when someone goes "I want to try swimming through this dirt with my +40 in Athletics"?

[jt]

https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tome_of_Prowe ... rcebook%29
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=29292

For some reason I didn't think there was a Tome that went in this direction. Glancing through it, I don't think it goes far enough. But obviously it'll take me a while to read through all of this. Thanks for the resources!

The skill system is meant to simulate things that people do and not produce "level appropriate" abilities.

Why not? There's a skill cap tied to your level. It's not what the people designing 3.5's skill system had in mind, but I don't see any reason why the structure of it can't be used this way.

So one of the things that most skill systems are for is the thing where a player goes "I want to try to do <thing appropriate for some skill that isn't specifically covered under the rules>" and the DM goes "Sure, that'll be a DC <number I just made up> <skill name> check please". What do you want to have happen when someone goes "I want to try swimming through this dirt with my +40 in Athletics"?

For actual "swim through dirt" - that sounds like a great thing to add to the standard skill guidelines. But I know that's not really what you were getting at.

For "swim through dirt as a metaphor for something the writers didn't expect" - there's a step in the middle of the process where the DM eyeballs the existing skill DCs, picks something that sounds roughly as difficult, and then uses that to make up a number. The DM sees this, decides it sounds a little easier than jumping midair, and gives you that DC minus 10. It happens to be the opposite of the ruling I'd like, but that's RPGs for you. Entire campaigns are going to be defined by unexpected rulings, no matter what you do.

I'd like to add the step of "after the game, ask the official forums what the DC for swim through dirt should be," have the developers see that and say "Oh wow, swim through dirt really should be on that list," and go update the book. Because there's no reason the "book" can't be a developer-editable wiki in this decade. Allowing this will gradually reduce how often this problem has to come up.

You could also have a general-purpose emergency skill DC list. Bypass overland travel DC 30, bypass traveling through a dungeon DC 45, bypass research DC 55. But I understand that this sort of phrasing breaks the internal fiction of the game for some people, so you'd need to put it in a side bar in the DM's guide, or just not do it.

[Ancient History]

One of the major issues with magic is that it isn't an either/or situation. Magic is additive. Whatever a "normal" human can do, a magician can do. Plus, they can do magic. That's usually where efforts at balance start to fall apart. Unless magicians have an actual disadvantage at some level compared to mundane characters...there's no drawback.

Which is, of course, why early D&D was rigorous about class restrictions on armor and weapons. The fact that your mage couldn't wear armor or wield a greatsword was supposed to in some way make up for their other abilities. Thought and effort went into trying to come up with some bullshit reason why a mage couldn't cast in armor, and it took a long time for the whole idea to be slowly, painfully, gradually killed.

[merxa]

Just give away abilities like climb or burrow at certain rank levels. Of course tying skills with an int bonus made wizards often compete with rogues in that mini game too.

[DenizenKane]

Nope, High DC things just give you a reason to try and game the modifiers on your skills, which can be broken to hell and back. Ideally they'd be designed to make some sense on the RNG, in which case you couldn't have +texas mods.

[Username17]

The d20 Skill system has a number of problems, and amongst those problems is that it doesn't work very well for stuff like this. The skill result outputs come from a flat RNG, which means even a 5% chance of getting a result that is defined as beyond mortal necessarily takes 5% of the RNG away from the mortal range. And so on. If you have any significant chance of succeeding at a task that is off the range for normal people, your skill roll doesn't give meaningful outputs when attempting tasks that normal people struggle with.

So if there's an Athletics result that allows you to hover, anyone who has any reasonable chance of succeeding at that task has no meaningful chance of failing to climb a wall. Which in turn means that it does not matter that this "hovering" ability nominally comes from adding bonuses to your "climb stuff" checks - your "climb stuff" rolls already maxed out and stopped mattering. The hovering ability is essentially a new ability granted by the new bonuses, and it's not game mechanically relevant that it comes from bonuses that would have applied to climbing if you were still tracking that kind of thing.

Another thing you could do is to have abilities that let you make Athletics checks to hover. But of course, things like that are not part of the skill even if you choose to write the rules into the skill itself. If you say "Characters with Cloud Climbing can hover in the air at the end of their movement with an Athletics check DC 15" that's still a property of the Cloud Climbing ability, even if you write it in the skill description of Athletics. Normal characters don't get to do that with the Athletics skill, so it's not meaningfully part of the skill's effects.

What you've really done at that point is re-invented the nWoD/AS model in which magical abilities use the normal skill list for their activation rolls. Where you use Larceny checks to make your Telepathy go and you make Subterfuge tests to turn into a mouse and so on. But I would argue that the flat RNG and the very large value of non-level based bonuses compared to level based bonuses make d20 skill checks a terrible basis for power activation.

There is a reason that every single "skill test based" spellcasting system that anyone has ever made for 3rd edition has been hot garbage. Whether we're talking shit like the Truenamer from Tome of Magic or the Arcanist from Iron Heroes or even classes that use skills in a second order way like the Artificer. It's all crap. And it's always going to be crap because fundamentally d20 skill check results aren't tied to level as much as you want and need the fantastical abilities of d20 characters to be.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Expert is an NPC class. Skills do not need to compete with real class features, and it's fine if getting a bunch of them is a neat bonus rather than a decisive reason to pick one class over another. It's fine if some classes are skill monkeys and others are not, but if you want the skill monkey classes to have more real class features, then give it to their class, not the skill system.

[jt]

Just give away abilities like climb or burrow at certain rank levels.

That's an entirely valid way to do it!

A different rabbit-hole I've went down had a problem that's solvable by boosting skill advancement to +3 or +4 per level. If you've already done that, I think tying these abilities to DCs is more elegant. But without having already done sped up skill progression, ranks might be a more elegant solution.

Of course tying skills with an int bonus made wizards often compete with rogues in that mini game too.

Yeah, people with useful utility magic need to actually have fewer skill points than people without if this is going to work. And that does mean that int bonus to skills has to go.

Nope, High DC things just give you a reason to try and game the modifiers on your skills, which can be broken to hell and back. Ideally they'd be designed to make some sense on the RNG, in which case you couldn't have +texas mods.

You're right that doing this would make bonus stacking an even bigger failure mode than it is already. I don't think it's that hard of a problem to avoid, though, assuming you're making a new system.

If there's an Athletics result that allows you to hover [...] your "climb stuff" rolls already maxed out and stopped mattering. The hovering ability is essentially a new ability granted by the new bonuses, and it's not game mechanically relevant that it comes from bonuses that would have applied to climbing if you were still tracking that kind of thing.

It's not relevant if you create characters at a high level, but it's very relevant when upgrading a character that their features in the past affect their features in the future. By the time you're casting level 5 spells you'll rarely actually use your level 1 spells, but that doesn't mean those need to be different systems, class features, or spell progressions.

Also, being able to hover completely obsoletes the need to climb, regardless of where the ability to hover came from. I find making them come from the same source to be rather elegant. But this elegance does not apply to all the suggested abilities, such as swimming through dirt.

If you have any significant chance of succeeding at a task that is off the range for normal people, your skill roll doesn't give meaningful outputs when attempting tasks that normal people struggle with.

I think this is okay. I don't really mind the idea that a level 10 character can jump further than the Olympic long jump record on a natural 1, or that the Rogue stops caring whether doors are locked. Or even that combined with what I suggested in this post that the Rogue can unlock a door to reduce damage from a dragon tail-slapping him into said door.

Pushing certain problems off the RNG (in either direction) can be the solution to a problem just as well as it can be a problem.

[Foxwarrior]

The thing that perhaps bothers me the most about using DCs as your limitation is that every ability will come in at a 5-20% chance to succeed. So at the level when you get Hover, you can't actually use it for anything other than either: taking 20, or last ditch attempts where not hovering is a straight up waste of a turn so even a 10% chance to succeed is still better than nothing. Maybe that fits certain "learning new powers" tropes but it might get old after a while.

[Pedantic]

The thing that perhaps bothers me the most about using DCs as your limitation is that every ability will come in at a 5-20% chance to succeed. So at the level when you get Hover, you can't actually use it for anything other than either: taking 20, or last ditch attempts where not hovering is a straight up waste of a turn so even a 10% chance to succeed is still better than nothing. Maybe that fits certain "learning new powers" tropes but it might get old after a while.

I don't know that this is the problem, so much as the costs of failure might be the problem. If all skill usage is "risk an action" than yeah, it's rarely going to be worth taking that percentage risk of failure on board, and when you do fail it's going to be a memorably bad experience for the player.

Thing is, we do already use this model for skills. At low levels, you can risk trying to activate the "Ignore AoEs" ability on Tumble, and that seems like a reasonable risk because the failure state (take some damage) isn't nearly as bad as "lose your turn."

That all being said, I agree that skill systems are kind of a dead end for giving characters level appropriate abilities, especially if you're going to break the RNG with extra bonuses. You end up breaking down skills' utility as the default resolution system, because you're muddying the waters of what "standard human capability" can do. If you put an ability in the skill system, you're saying that all sufficiently talented people can do it, which warps your setting even more quickly than spells or other specific techniques.

[erik]

I feel like skills should let you describe what your character is capable of vs. not. If using dice pools where you can buy successes to meet a DC then you know with certainty that a character can accomplish tasks of a certain level of difficulty, or if using d20 you know you can take 10 to always succeed on various tasks.

Second role of skills should be to resolve competition.
Especially:
Stealth vs. Notice
Evasion vs. Pursuit

In d20 having super high skill ranks still works with goal #1 of having defined tasks that can be accomplished via skills, but it totally fucks up competition when two people are separated by more than the RNG.

[souran]

It feels like we have been trying to solve this for 20 fucking years.

d20+mod is really good because its linear and simple. It works well at low levels and mid levels with limited modifiers. It falls to shit at higher levels. It's also swingy and requires a secondary roll to really provide a good idea of if a success was marginal/average/critical. When you try and push that onto a single die roll it just enhances the negative ends of the curve.

The obvious alternative is to then make the central mechanic Xd6 and bell curve the rolls. This is slower than rolling a single d20 and adding a flat modifier. While this can fix the swingyness issue it doesn't do anything to resolve concerns with modifier growth and in fact can exacerbate them because flat modifiers are worth even more in a bell curved rng.

So if you want to fix the issue with flat modifiers you use a dice pools/count hits system. Dice pool games have their own problems that this board has dissected in detail.

All of this I would posit as basically axiomatic. Instead of trying to fix "high level play" I am basically starting to think that the E6/E8/E12 guys had it right. The d20 RNG is just not big enough to handle high level modifiers. The divergence of characters gets silly. High level spells are mostly problematic. There are no "classic" adventures that take place in the 15+ level range.

All of this seems to be evidence that d20+modifiers games should maybe look at being 10 levels long instead of 20. 5 spell levels is probably plenty or even excessive. It might also be good if the game offered some minimal form of advancement (similar to the E6 model) at the games level cap so that players feel like their is reason to keep playing those characters.

However, nobody can write compelling high level D&D shit anyway so maybe lets stop pretending that high level D&D shit is worth pandering to or trying to save or make balanced? The biggest issue with the game now is that adult dragons and big ass demons are given CRs such that they are too tough for level 11 or 12 heroes to kill. Just lower the ceiling on the whole thing and stop pretending like there are solutions that don't involve or require a new dice mechanic to make high level D&D balanced.

[MGuy]

Most people seem to want to play pretty low/mid level games even when high level goodies are given to them. All over the interwebs there seems to be an overwhelming majority of people not looking to do anything too incredible in game. Superheroes punching super villains is the typical ceiling even the super human living crowd stops at. The Super adventures even there come off as just iterations of go to place and super punch bad guys/find mcguffin/defend point.

I think that is a separate matter from using skill checks at high levels. More and more I've been questioning the usefulness of having a lot of rolls even at low levels. I don't think that getting abilities dished out over time through skills is a problem. I have been questioning the wisdom of how much rolling needs to be done at all as far as skills are concerned.

Essentially there are levels where you might want people to just flat out have access to certain abilities. Jump turning into jump good to jump unlimited probably should just be a thing that happens at certain tiers/levels instead of using a target number which can be pretty wonky.

[jt]

At the level when you get Hover, you can't actually use it for anything other than either: taking 20, or last ditch attempts where not hovering is a straight up waste of a turn so even a 10% chance to succeed is still better than nothing. Maybe that fits certain "learning new powers" tropes but it might get old after a while.

I think this is a real problem, and entirely inherent to the proposal. You could "fix" it by bolting awkward workarounds on it, like once you've flown it's -10 easier. Less awkwardly but still compromising, I think it's possible to design the abilities you get so that taking 20 often makes sense. For example, you take 20 to start flying, then get to spend the day flying unless someone shoves you into the ground.

If you put an ability in the skill system, you're saying that all sufficiently talented people can do it, which warps your setting even more quickly than spells or other specific techniques.

I think such a setting needs to assume that a 10th level fighter is just as rare as a 10th level wizard. Practicing jumping your whole life probably never gets you to the point where you can fly if you never go on an adventure.

It totally fucks up competition when two people are separated by more than the RNG.

Should those people be able to meaningfully compete? If you've got +20 more of a skill than someone you just win.

I just got back from the bouldering gym. I've never seen someone who can do a V4 struggle with a V1, and almost never with a V2, and that sort of gap applies up and down the scale. Trying to fit that to d20, the V-scale is apparently about +10 DC per V. The scale goes up to V17, or eight entire RNGs. And that's just the skill gap between real-world humans. Hercules and Sun Wukong aren't going to have a problem climbing any boulder.

However, nobody can write compelling high level D&D shit anyway so maybe lets stop pretending that high level D&D shit is worth pandering to or trying to save or make balanced? The biggest issue with the game now is that adult dragons and big ass demons are given CRs such that they are too tough for level 11 or 12 heroes to kill. Just lower the ceiling on the whole thing and stop pretending like there are solutions that don't involve or require a new dice mechanic to make high level D&D balanced.

Reducing the maximum power level is a valid way to construct a system, and I think you've correctly identified CR bloat of iconic monsters that people want to fight as one of the biggest problems. Obviously reducing the maximum power level so dungeons are always relevant and fixing scaling expectations so that everyone gets equal access to mythic-level capabilities are incompatible solutions. Hopefully it should be obvious that both are possible in separate systems.

I don't think that reducing the maximum power level is enough by itself though. People still expect wizards to fly.

[erik]

It totally fucks up competition when two people are separated by more than the RNG.

Should those people be able to meaningfully compete? If you've got +20 more of a skill than someone you just win.

Yes you do want people in the same level tier to compete if skills are at all combat relevant. So in those cases you don’t want elective bonuses bigger than the RNG. But you also don’t want every level 11+ person awesome at everything. Presumably.

So long as combat and non-combatant skills are treated the same then you have the quandary that you want to have a wider range on some skills to demonstrate sufficiently advanced expertise and not others to keep combat balanced.

[deaddmwalking]

[But you also don’t want every level 11+ person awesome at everything. Presumably.

I don't think there is a problem with every 12th level person being better than any 1st level person at EVERYTHING. If you're a 12th level wizard and you can run a marathon better than a 1st level Warrior, that's fine by me.

Relative ability matters most with your peer group. If the 12th level warrior is significantly better at marathons than the 12th level wizard, the wizard is still going to struggle with that when it comes up without being completely useless.

This definitely matters in things like Stealth - high level martials should be good at stealth relative to low-level opponents; high level rogues should be good at stealth relative to high-level opponents - but that means sometimes you can stealth the whole party.

[Whatever]

high level martials should be good at stealth relative to low-level opponents; high level rogues should be good at stealth relative to high-level opponents

This right here is why the game shouldn't have rogues in it.

[Foxwarrior]

I don't think there is a problem with every 12th level person being better than any 1st level person at EVERYTHING. If you're a 12th level wizard and you can run a marathon better than a 1st level Warrior, that's fine by me.

Well, I do, but not for problem-solving reasons. The 12th level wizard can probably just teleport the marathon, or turn into a pronghorn giraffoid that can run the marathon, so not being able to run a marathon isn't much of a balance concern. But the aesthetic of playing a crotchety old person who can't even walk properly and yet still takes on armies of dragons alone is pretty valuable for a fantasy world.

[Username17]

I don't think there is a problem with every 12th level person being better than any 1st level person at EVERYTHING. If you're a 12th level wizard and you can run a marathon better than a 1st level Warrior, that's fine by me.

But we still have the 1st level Wizard setting things on fire with his mind better than the 12th level Warrior, right?

-Username17

[Pariah Dog]

This right here is why the game shouldn't have rogues in it.

Replace stealth with any relevant skill check and the issue still exists.

But we still have the 1st level Wizard setting things on fire with his mind better than the 12th level Warrior, right?

-Username17

Settings things on fire with his mind is the Wizard's shtick. Stabbing things in the face with the warrior's.

[Whatever]

This right here is why the game shouldn't have rogues in it.

Replace stealth with any relevant skill check and the issue still exists.

Correct. That's why "good at mundane skills" should not be a protected role in the game. And since that's what the rogue is, it's gotta go.

[DenizenKane]

The rogue isn't just good at mundane skills, they're above average sneaky, and they know how to use their subtlety to their advantage. Granted, the concept expires around "level 5", that wouldn't be a problem if your system made them change to a class with more phlebotinum at level 6. Like a shadowdancer or arcane trickster or something.

Getting rid of the rogue is not something you want to do, you want to support as many classes as possible.