25% chance?

33% chance?

50% chance?

66% chance?

75% chance?

Unskilled 1 in 4
Skilled 1 in 2
Proficient 2 in 3

If you are talking about riding a horse or jumping a rather small to normal distance, don't do a skill roll.  Way too many rolls once skills was introduced to be a bloody pain in the arse to the players.  Just keep that in mind when asking for a roll.

I remember something about actual research done, prolly by WotC, that concluded that a 70% hit rate was the most fun in combat.  That probably generalizes.

Probably 2 in 3, depending on the action. If failure leads to death and it's "level appropriate" then 80%+.

I think I saw a report somewhere that most people most of the time will not try things, at all, that they don't thing that can guarantee to succeed at 100% of the time. IE people do not try to climb a fence etc, unless they know that they can. In a normal situation, they get a ladder etc. Failure on most of these rolls should be you didn't try it as you thought you might get hurt.

Normal success should be concentrated in the 50% to 70% range.  60% average is a little low for expectations on the base math, but once players focus on what they do well, it will push it up right around the 2/3 chance that non-entitled players enjoy. 

You need to leave some room for the poor and excellent skills, too. Nothing wrong with people having poor to developing skills in the 20% to 50% range, or pushing excellent up to around 85%.  It gets dicey once you drop below 20% or go above 85% in any moderately complex system, because there are bound to be some edge cases that push the numbers further.

However, the big problem is "level-appropriate".  For skills, there should just be "appropriate", with some distinctions for a few difficulty categories.  Low level characters should typically start with poor to developing skills, with perhaps an option to be competent in 1 or 2 if they focus.  High level characters should have better skills.  But the nature of the difficulty stays the same.  A combat treadmill has some obvious utility, but a skill treadmill is frustrating for no good reason.

Quote from: zincmoat on August 07, 2024, 06:15:42 AMI think I saw a report somewhere that most people most of the time will not try things, at all, that they don't thing that can guarantee to succeed at 100% of the time. IE people do not try to climb a fence etc, unless they know that they can. In a normal situation, they get a ladder etc. Failure on most of these rolls should be you didn't try it as you thought you might get hurt.

Part of the reason I say: in most cases, you do not have to make a roll to do something, you just have to make a roll to do it quickly or well. "I look for a ladder," means the person has chosen not to do it quickly, for example.

Doing something poorly and slowly doesn't require a roll.

We always roll for combat because in combat, you always want to do it both well and quickly.

Quote from: zincmoat on August 07, 2024, 06:15:42 AMI think I saw a report somewhere that most people most of the time will not try things, at all, that they don't thing that can guarantee to succeed at 100% of the time. IE people do not try to climb a fence etc, unless they know that they can. In a normal situation, they get a ladder etc. Failure on most of these rolls should be you didn't try it as you thought you might get hurt.

It is always annoying when your character inexplicably fails to do something they're supposed to be good at, for no reason other than dice luck.

This bothers me particularly with things like jumping and climbing. Most people, especially athletes, can eyeball how far they can jump or what they can climb with a high degree of reliability. It's one of the reasons I like the attribute test system from Dragon Warriors. If the difficulty rating for the task is beneath your relevant attribute score, you don't roll. Having to roll represents a task which is right on the edges of your capability.

In a system that doesn't have that automatic success rule, I'd say somewhere around 70-80% success rate for a task which should be within your character's competence. Go much higher and you're in "shouldn't bother with the roll" territory, but any lower makes the characters look incompetent.

Combat shouldn't work this way, though. A combat check is in principle always an opposed roll, even if that's not how the system works mechanically. The best boxer in the world doesn't have an 80% hit rate against another great boxer. I prefer combat systems where it's much more difficult to hit and wound an opponent, but wounds are more devastating.

I've read several people recommend succeeding on a 8+ (d20). So, 65%. Sounds about right.

Not all skills are the same difficulty.  Some are so easy that the unskilled will succeed like fishing, first aid, swimming, shield.  Others are very hard like surgery, alchemy, nuclear physics where the unskilled have near zero chance of success.

66% to 75%, is where I have ended up.  Sometimes even a higher percent chance of success; or else just making the roll with advantage. 

Notice this is very abstract; in D&D, part of the idea (well, at least for thieves), is that your chances get better as you level up.

I have the (4e-ish) idea that DCs rise with your level, so the chances are always the same, but now you're disabling more "advanced" locks.

In some videogames (and 5e D&D, probably 3e-4e too), that happens when random encounters are adjusted to your level.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 07, 2024, 01:11:44 PMNotice this is very abstract; in D&D, part of the idea (well, at least for thieves), is that your chances get better as you level up.

I have the (4e-ish) idea that DCs rise with your level, so the chances are always the same, but now you're disabling more "advanced" locks.

In some videogames (and 5e D&D, probably 3e-4e too), that happens when random encounters are adjusted to your level.

The way I explain the old school style of skills with escalating success chance is by reference to "Schroedinger's Lock". Basically, the number on your character sheet represents the percentage of all the locks in the world which you have the ability to pick. When you roll a check, you aren't determining how good your attempt in that moment is. You're rolling to see whether the lock is one you have the skill to pick. Not perfect, but I think it's the most coherent interpretation of the system.

I never considered this before, but if that's the logic, then certain skills should be able to be rolled before the actual attempt is being made. Say a thief is walking around the Duke's palace to case the establishment the day before he intends to break in. As he walks past the south wall, he could pause to examine it, roll his climb check, and when he comes back the next night he now knows whether he can climb the south wall.

Quote from: zincmoat on August 07, 2024, 06:15:42 AMI think I saw a report somewhere that most people most of the time will not try things, at all, that they don't thing that can guarantee to succeed at 100% of the time. IE people do not try to climb a fence etc, unless they know that they can. In a normal situation, they get a ladder etc. Failure on most of these rolls should be you didn't try it as you thought you might get hurt.

Sadly true, yet a rather serendipitous insight for me as my current design resolves this by presenting problems the player can choose to address, but if they don't the Pool of Peril (which is a GM facing metacurrency) increases by one. So not taking risks still leads to increasing tension and eventually consequences they can't avoid.

Quote from: ForgottenF on August 07, 2024, 09:29:19 AMMost people, especially athletes, can eyeball how far they can jump or what they can climb with a high degree of reliability.

Athletes are working in good light and in good weather on a track or in a sandpit, with a mat on the other side, wearing shoes especially designed for that task - seriously, there are shoes to sprint with, shoes to run 5km with, shoes to do marathon with, jumping shoes, throwing shoes, etc etc - and everything's set up ideally for them.

This is rather different to taking that same athlete and having them (for example) wearing jeans, t-shirt, hoodie and $10 runners from KMart which should have been thrown out three years ago, run from police along a street with smashed-out streetlights and down a dark alley strewn with rubbish and try to leap over a fence which might have bits of broken glass stuck in the concrete on top of it, or barbed wire, or might be a rickety old fence that might break under them, maybe there's an angry dog on the other side, also it's night and there's shouting, etc.

So we do not care about rolling dice for the competive athlete, we care about rolling dice for him when he's a cop chasing a criminal, or a criminal fleeing the cops. We care about adventure activities.

Quote from: DocJones on August 07, 2024, 12:12:02 PMSome are so easy that the unskilled will succeed like fishing, first aid, swimming, shield. 

If you watch Alone you'll find that most people find fishing quite hard. They quite literally lose 0.5-1kg a day, and the winners go an average of 74 days - it's essentially a starvation challenge. And these people are all trained in survival.

First aid for minor wounds and burns is trivial, I agree. But if you find yourself in or around a car crash, house fire, the aftermath of a violent brawl, etc, you'll see that most people do nothing at all. Well, nowadays they film it on their mobile phones, but there you go.

As for swimming, tragically it's not as easy as you imagine. In this story, two men drowned  trying to save (successfully) a toddler who'd slipped and fallen into a rooftop hotel swimming pool. Not a raging river or sea with rips, but a not particularly deep hotel swimming pool.

Now, I would argue the base level of these sorts of skills would have been higher for people in the middle ages, just as it'd be higher for rural people today. The flipside of that is that with modern people as characters we can assume that just about every adult is literate, can drive a car in good conditions following the road rules, etc.

This is why in game rules I've written I've distinguished between general and specialist skills. General skills are those which everyone has at some basic default level; specialist are those which if you haven't studied them specifically, you can't do them at all. General skills are also just the skill, while specialist skills have specialties within them, like piloting different kinds of aircraft. In each case, which are general and which are specialist depend on the era and culture. If you're a 13th century Mongol, even 3 year olds can ride a horse - but none could fire one of the primitive muskets to be found here and there; if you're a 21st century guy from Virginia, the reverse is true.