GM experience and understanding of odds makes a big difference.

So does an appreciation by the GM and/or by the rules, of the different kinds of situations, skills, and results. Naive rules and GMs may just take some standard mechanic like % skill and apply it everywhere, which gives silly/inappropriate results in many cases.

In each situation, for every level of ability, there are different answers to whether one or more rolls are called for are not, what the modifiers are, and what the results of each sort of roll are. I find my sense of this has steadily improved and refined itself over the decades of GM'ing and making simulation programs. At first, characters were dying because we didn't realize the rules were too severe in cases such as "roll climbing and if you fail once, you fall...".

Quote from: jhkim;853432I don't have any particular knowledge about real-life hand-to-hand fighting, so it's not something I would make claims about.

Truth is, nobody does know as much about hand-to-hand fighting as we know about other fields, those that we've been able to explore scientifically.
Fine, let's leave it aside.

QuoteThere are certainly some activities where randomness makes a bigger difference than others. If hand-to-hand fighting is one of those fields where an expert can be more regularly outdone by a beginner, this can be handled by restricting how high a skill number characters actually have. (This could be increased cost, level limits, or whatever depending on the rest of the system.)

No. At least that much I can tell you. The ease of overcoming someone in a field where you know more, is almost scary.
And still, freak incidents can and do happen:).

QuoteI do think it is true about the skills I cited. Seeing expert climbers, or expert breakdancers, there's no way that a beginner could do what they do - and they do it over and over again repeatedly. This goes equally for intellectual skills. There's just no way for a beginner to solve the issues that an expert in the field can. Note that an expert can guard against slipping - and indeed climbers in particular learn to be very careful about that.

Yes, but can they guard against all the freak accidents particular to their field? An expert climber can still fall due to a rope going bad without being noticed, I'd presume.

QuoteI haven't tried EABA, but I suspect since Greg Porter designed them both that they are similar.

Well, EABA is supposedly the more cinematic-oriented one...

Quote from: Eric Diaz;854577Yup.

One solution is simple: just DO NOT use the same system for throwing a punch and for climbing. For D&D, for example, use 1d20 for throwing a punch and some other method (1d6, 2d6, 3d6 roll under, dice pools, etc) for skills, comparison of abilities, etc.

I know most "modern" systems believe that using a single mechanic is the right thing to do, but it just doesn't work, unless the GM modifies the rule on the fly (okay, he is twice as strong as you, so you have no chance of beating him, don't roll).

I wrote extensively about it here, although my examples are all D&D.

TBH, I cannot think of an easy way to make this work with d%.

And I like d%.

That's one approach, yes.
Then again, Unknown Armies 2e manages to have three different kinds of rolls for different situations. And they all use the same d100 system and the same skill number;).

So different systems are one approach, but it's not the only approach. UA2's approach is more versatile, since it can be applied to fighting, for a less violent situation, or the high-stress rolls can be applied to cooking, if someone is making you cook with a gun next to your head...

Traveller5 is kinda using a mix between the two, by using the same numbers but rolling a different number of dice against them.

Quote from: AsenRG;854819That's one approach, yes.
Then again, Unknown Armies 2e manages to have three different kinds of rolls for different situations. And they all use the same d100 system and the same skill number;).

So different systems are one approach, but it's not the only approach. UA2's approach is more versatile, since it can be applied to fighting, for a less violent situation, or the high-stress rolls can be applied to cooking, if someone is making you cook with a gun next to your head...

Yeah, UA is great.

Quote from: AsenRG;854819Traveller5 is kinda using a mix between the two, by using the same numbers but rolling a different number of dice against them.

This works very well for D&D, too.

Say, in 5e, the chance of the level 20, STR 20, fighter against someone with STR 10 and no proficiency is about 92% IIRC. So, every time this "legendary hero" walks into a village of 15 people (assuming no proficiency, 3d6 in order), he can be pretty sure someone will be able to beat him in arm-wrestling.

If you use 3d6, the chance fall to less than 1%, which sounds about right to me.

But TBH I like 2d6 even better, as it makes the level 10 fighter beat the level 1 wizard in a STR match almost all of the time - like he would in a fight.

It is a matter of taste - I like my 20 level fighters with STR 20 to be strong almost all of the time, but IMMV.

Quote from: AsenRG;854819That's one approach, yes.
Then again, Unknown Armies 2e manages to have three different kinds of rolls for different situations. And they all use the same d100 system and the same skill number;).

WHAT IS THIS SORCERY?!

(Seriously though, how does that work?)

Quote from: Eric Diaz;854839This works very well for D&D, too.

Say, in 5e, the chance of the level 20, STR 20, fighter against someone with STR 10 and no proficiency is about 92% IIRC. So, every time this "legendary hero" walks into a village of 15 people (assuming no proficiency, 3d6 in order), he can be pretty sure someone will be able to beat him in arm-wrestling.

You are right that repeated rolling where there is a chance of failure means eventually the strong guy fails. Personally, if the 15 villagers are all STR 10, I wouldn't bother rolling. I'd just decide Mighty Fighty the PC beats everyone in the village of Tinholm.

If the 15 villagers are presumed to have a range of possible Strengths rather than all STR 10, I'd do one of two things.

1) Figure out who is the strongest person in the village and what their strength is. Assume Mighty Fighty beats all the weaker villagers and roll out the contest between Mighty and the strongest person in Tinholm village.

2) Roll against a representative sample of villagers (because rolling for all 15 is boring as well as doomed to eventual failure) as if they each had a STR=10. If a villager wins, decide how strong the villager was after the fact so that Mighty is beaten by one of the strongest people in Tinholm village, not by some puny 140 pound weakling.

Quote from: Bren;854855You are right that repeated rolling where there is a chance of failure means eventually the strong guy fails. Personally, if the 15 villagers are all STR 10, I wouldn't bother rolling. I'd just decide Mighty Fighty the PC beats everyone in the village of Tinholm.

If the 15 villagers are presumed to have a range of possible Strengths rather than all STR 10, I'd do one of two things.

1) Figure out who is the strongest person in the village and what their strength is. Assume Mighty Fighty beats all the weaker villagers and roll out the contest between Mighty and the strongest person in Tinholm village.

2) Roll against a representative sample of villagers (because rolling for all 15 is boring as well as doomed to eventual failure) as if they each had a STR=10. If a villager wins, decide how strong the villager was after the fact so that Mighty is beaten by one of the strongest people in Tinholm village, not by some puny 140 pound weakling.

Yes, that works too. It all comes down to personal taste. I actually LIKE that weak guy being able to win every once in a while. Even champions may have a bad day. Sometimes rolling when the chances are less than 1% is cool, IMMV, etc.

Besides, "not rolling" is a good solution to extreme cases, but not to less extreme situations... say, a STR 16 guy vs a STR 10 guy. I feel the STR 16 guy should lose less than 10% of the time (around 5% would be near ideal I guess, which is what we get using 2d6, ties go to highest score), not 30% or 0%.

Again, your group might feel differently, preferring, say, 10-20% (3d6, 2d10, etc), or just let the stronger guy always win - which is reasonable too.

Specially, for the STR 20 level 20 guy I would expect 100% chance of success against STR 10, so I agree with you there.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;854639In 5E I don't think there's that much divergence classes, actually. Characters pick up many of their skills from background (and sometimes one or two from race); all classes have the same base to-hit chance; a proficiency bonus is only a +2 (1st level) to +6 (at 17th), though occasionally a character may have Expertise and double that, or have some other ability that grants Advantage (roll twice and take the best).
So I can't answer the second part of your question for 5E specifically, but in general I think its best if all characters can contribute in some fashion toward achieving a majority of challenges

It seems like you're talking only about skill rolls, but I'm talking instead about abilities more generally. There are a lot of specific things that a wizard can do without a roll that the fighter has 0% chance of succeeding at.

Now, this might be obvious. "Of course a fighter has a 0% chance to cast fly or invisibility. Duh."

But if it's OK for the wizard to be able to be able to do things the fighter has 0% chance to do, why isn't it OK for, say, a bard to be able to do a musical performance that the fighter has a 0% chance to manage?

Personally, I think that all characters should be able to participate in the main activities of the party - like combat in most games, or intrigue if that is a main activity, etc.  However, that doesn't mean that some characters can't do *specific* things that the others can't. For example, they're negotiating with a dragon, and only one character speaks the Draconic language. It's not important that other characters be able to have a chance to communicate.

I handle this partly by requirements for PCs.  If this is a starship combat game, I don't allow untrained people to have a chance to successfully fly starfighters. Instead, I make piloting skill a requirement for all PCs.

Quote from: Eric Diaz;854896Besides, "not rolling" is a good solution to extreme cases, but not to less extreme situations... say, a STR 16 guy vs a STR 10 guy. I feel the STR 16 guy should lose less than 10% of the time (around 5% would be near ideal I guess, which is what we get using 2d6, ties go to highest score), not 30% or 0%.

Again, your group might feel differently, preferring, say, 10-20% (3d6, 2d10, etc), or just let the stronger guy always win - which is reasonable too.

Specially, for the STR 20 level 20 guy I would expect 100% chance of success against STR 10, so I agree with you there.

For stats in the D&D/BRP range I'd use the Resistance table from Runequest.

• So STR 16 vs STR 10 would have odds of 80-20 or 4x the chance for the STR 16 guy to win.

• STR 20 vs STR 10 is either 95% chance of success (if we assume a minimum 5% chance of failure no matter what) or 100% chance of success. Unless the outcome was important, I'd use the 100% chance for success.

Quote from: jhkim;854905It seems like you're talking only about skill rolls, but I'm talking instead about abilities more generally. There are a lot of specific things that a wizard can do without a roll that the fighter has 0% chance of succeeding at.

Now, this might be obvious. "Of course a fighter has a 0% chance to cast fly or invisibility. Duh."

But if it's OK for the wizard to be able to be able to do things the fighter has 0% chance to do, why isn't it OK for, say, a bard to be able to do a musical performance that the fighter has a 0% chance to manage?

Personally, I think that all characters should be able to participate in the main activities of the party - like combat in most games, or intrigue if that is a main activity, etc.  However, that doesn't mean that some characters can't do *specific* things that the others can't. For example, they're negotiating with a dragon, and only one character speaks the Draconic language. It's not important that other characters be able to have a chance to communicate.

I handle this partly by requirements for PCs.  If this is a starship combat game, I don't allow untrained people to have a chance to successfully fly starfighters. Instead, I make piloting skill a requirement for all PCs.

I don't think a character without the appropriate tool proficiency can play a musical instrument in 5E (though I might be wrong, as I don't have a lot of experience with bards). For characters who have invested resources into it, they should probably be able to do at least a decent proportion of what a bard can do... Which is basically what happens due to all skills using the level-based proficiency bonus.
I'm not sure if it still applies in 5E, but certainly 3E had bard spells or features which keyed off actual check result (e.g. Understong in Spell Compendium letting you use your Perform check result as a Concentration check result). These sort of abilities can be written most easily if you do have a unified mechanic describing what's a good, poor, etc results. Otherwise, I don't really care about musical challenges that much since it takes some contortion by the DM to make these a 'challenge' of the kind I would actually care about.

Spells are another question. If its a party utility, or duplicateable by an item, its less problematic. Invisibility is a wizard's way of doing Stealth and damage-dealing spells are often (asside from AoE) generally something that can be replicated with normal fighting or shooting, for instance.

In my view the question of what skill system should accomplish is beginning and end of it. Naturally they are going to be different as people do want different things out of them.

For instance:
A) Character with skill has better chance of being successful than non-skilled.
B) Character with higher skill has better chance of being successful than low skilled character.

First real decision point:
Should there be tasks that are a challenge to low skilled character but automatically successful to highly skilled character? This is surprisingly common occurrence in heroic fiction. Furthermore, if you have automatic successes, do you need to have skill tasks that low skilled person will never ever succeed?

Some of what's being discussed here, is what I'd call "having actual good (simulationist) rules for different activities", as opposed to the seeming "hey, we've got stats and a die-roll mechanic - we can tell GM's to apply it to everything and let them make up what it means" approach that I've seen to one degree or another in almost every RPG, but which seems to be more common in more recent games.

I might also call it "abandoning the GM", "hand-wavy", and/or "not really providing rules for much".

I even find my preferred RPG systems (mainly TFT & GURPS) somewhat lacking in some of these areas, but at least there are some well-defined areas (mainly combat) to compare to. It seems to me that one at least needs to have seen some examples of actual good detailed rules for things, to have much if any hope to be able to just "use GM discretion" to represent situations without good rules well.

Quote from: Eric Diaz;854839Yeah, UA is great.

I'm probably the last one to dispute that:).

QuoteThis works very well for D&D, too.

Sure it does. I'm mentioning Traveller5 because it's the core mechanic of T5, as opposed to D&D, where it's at best an additional one;).

QuoteSay, in 5e, the chance of the level 20, STR 20, fighter against someone with STR 10 and no proficiency is about 92% IIRC. So, every time this "legendary hero" walks into a village of 15 people (assuming no proficiency, 3d6 in order), he can be pretty sure someone will be able to beat him in arm-wrestling.

If you use 3d6, the chance fall to less than 1%, which sounds about right to me.

Not sure how you got those numbers, but yes, rolling for every single thing is, perhaps counterintuitively, not the most realistic approach;).

QuoteBut TBH I like 2d6 even better, as it makes the level 10 fighter beat the level 1 wizard in a STR match almost all of the time - like he would in a fight.

Well, a fight is more than strength. That said, the wizard would actually have less chances in arm-wrestling, where either the fighter has pulled a muscle, or he just wins. There simply aren't any variables if you set it properly;).

QuoteIt is a matter of taste - I like my 20 level fighters with STR 20 to be strong almost all of the time, but IMMV.

I don't see why the strong should not be strong some of the time. Sure, there is psychology, but in arm-wrestling it would only matter among opponents that are at least roughly matched.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;854849WHAT IS THIS SORCERY?!

(Seriously though, how does that work?)

You have Minor, Significant and Major Skill Checks.
Minor Skill Checks are a relaxed situations where you have plenty of time and are not at risk. Mostly it comes down to having the applicable skill, or if you do, how well.
Significant Skill Checks are situations where there is uncertainty but little actual risk, and you mostly succeed if have a suitable skill, the question is how well. Even untrained people stand a relatively decent chance.
Major Skill Checks are for tense situations where time is important and/or you are at risk, such as in combat. You can fail with an applicable skill, and without it you're hoping on odds that might well be below 3%, so you'd better have the skill.
Of course, this is the least of the things UA does for skills. Accounting for your passions, check. Accounting for difficulty, as opposed to for trying something that's harder than the default, check and check. And so on and so forth, I'm yet to see a better model for mental stability, though the Four Pillars in GUMSHOE systems tend to be close.
Impressive for a game where the actual rules-text could fit in 20 pages or so, isn't it:D?

Quote from: Bren;854855You are right that repeated rolling where there is a chance of failure means eventually the strong guy fails. Personally, if the 15 villagers are all STR 10, I wouldn't bother rolling. I'd just decide Mighty Fighty the PC beats everyone in the village of Tinholm.

If the 15 villagers are presumed to have a range of possible Strengths rather than all STR 10, I'd do one of two things.

1) Figure out who is the strongest person in the village and what their strength is. Assume Mighty Fighty beats all the weaker villagers and roll out the contest between Mighty and the strongest person in Tinholm village.

So, Let It Ride?
(I keep repeating that Let It Ride is actually a simulationist rule, even if it wasn't intended as such. For some reason, people are dismayed).

Quote from: Skarg;855055Some of what's being discussed here, is what I'd call "having actual good (simulationist) rules for different activities",

Isn't this the whole purpose of the thread?

Quote from: AsenRG;855083You have Minor, Significant and Major Skill Checks.
Minor Skill Checks are a relaxed situations where you have plenty of time and are not at risk. Mostly it comes down to having the applicable skill, or if you do, how well.
Significant Skill Checks are situations where there is uncertainty but little actual risk, and you mostly succeed if have a suitable skill, the question is how well. Even untrained people stand a relatively decent chance.
Major Skill Checks are for tense situations where time is important and/or you are at risk, such as in combat. You can fail with an applicable skill, and without it you're hoping on odds that might well be below 3%, so you'd better have the skill.
Of course, this is the least of the things UA does for skills. Accounting for your passions, check. Accounting for difficulty, as opposed to for trying something that's harder than the default, check and check. And so on and so forth, I'm yet to see a better model for mental stability, though the Four Pillars in GUMSHOE systems tend to be close.
Impressive for a game where the actual rules-text could fit in 20 pages or so, isn't it:D?

Thanks for clarifying. I'm still not quite sure how that works at the exact numbers level. I also don't quite yet the distinction between 'accounting for difficulty vs. 'trying for something that's harder than the default' - as in tasks where you'll still succeed as often but with a separate chance of a secondary effect?
Maybe I'll have to investigate further.

Quote from: AsenRG;855083Not sure how you got those numbers, but yes, rolling for every single thing is, perhaps counterintuitively, not the most realistic approach;).

Yes, I agree. But when I feel like rolling, I want to have a system that I trust to rely on. For me, this is 2d6 (in 5e), but for others might be 1d20, 2d10, or just let the GM decide.

BTW, about the numbers, just used anydice and the standard 5e modifiers (output 1d20+11-1d20 ,
output 3d6+11-3d6).

Quote from: AsenRG;855083Well, a fight is more than strength. That said, the wizard would actually have less chances in arm-wrestling, where either the fighter has pulled a muscle, or he just wins. There simply aren't any variables if you set it properly;).

Yes, exactly this! I don't know if I expressed myself clearly, I meant in the game, not in "real" life. Like, if you run a RAW combat in D&D, the 1st level wizard has NO chance in a melee against the STR 20 5th fighter. But if you compared their STR mods using 1d20, the wizard would win quite often.

Which is exactly the opposite of I would expect, I guess. I would give the wizard say, 5% chance of stabbing the fighter in the heart by surprise, but less than 1% when arm-wrestling.

So, in this circumstances, either use some alternative to the d20, or just say "the fighter wins the match because he is stronger".

Quote from: AsenRG;855083So, Let It Ride?
(I keep repeating that Let It Ride is actually a simulationist rule, even if it wasn't intended as such. For some reason, people are dismayed).

I don't think that has the same effect.