The D&D thread

Hoss said:

Is proficient the same as having the skill? Or are you saying that we have all of the skills on the sheet and get to use the stat modifier automatically, and those proficiency just adds more?

I actually played my first couple games like that, but I could have sworn in the last game the DM told me if I didn't have the skill selected on the sheet, i didn't get to roll it. For instance a perception or investigation check.

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Generally speaking, yes, being proficient means having the skill. However, you can attempt to do things without being proficient, but you're not going to be as 'good' as someone with proficiency. Furthermore, the DM can outright deny you the option to roll in situations where possessing a skill, versus not, makes a huge difference.

Let me give you some context. A wizard, with proficiency in History, rolls to make sense of some ancient writing on the wall of an ancient crypt and fails. The bicep-on-a-stick Barbarian announces he's going to attempt the same roll without proficiency. The dice gods shine on his ass and he rolls a 20..success! Or is it really?

In situations like that I don't even allow rolls without proficiency because it prevents situations where the expert fails, but someone with absolutely no experience is able to succeed. It creates stupid gonzo situations where the DM has to create some ridiculous excuse why the highly-experienced character failed while the complete novice didn't. It just feels bad for everyone.

The only situations where I allow non-proficient rolls are checks that basically any average person could have a reasonable chance of knowing/being able to perform.

Perception/Investigation are difficult skills to adjudicate in skilled vs. unskilled situations and really depends on the details.

Grabbit Allworth said:

If it wasn't following the narrative he could have easily filled one of the other male roles, but they specifically placed him in the most feminine, goofy, non-threatening role in the 'party.'

Make no mistake. The role to race/sex relationship was carefully considered.

The non-binary/trans is the Druid (not pictured). I got the PoC part wrong, it's a tiny white girl that looks like a 12 year-old boy.

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the druid IS pictured... she's the redhead.

like i said, i don't disagree with you but it seems like your own anger is blinding you. go visit a zen garden or something, it'll be good for you

Grabbit Allworth said:

In situations like that I don't even allow rolls without proficiency because it prevents situations where the expert fails, but someone with absolutely no experience is able to succeed. It creates stupid gonzo situations where the DM has to create some ridiculous excuse why the highly-experienced character failed while the complete novice didn't. It just feels bad for everyone.

The only situations where I allow non-proficient rolls are checks that basically any average person could have a reasonable chance of knowing/being able to perform.

Perception/Investigation are difficult skills to adjudicate in skilled vs. unskilled situations and really depends on the details.

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i know a lot of DM's do the same, but i don't really agree. though i do understand that it forces the DM to adlib on the spot and come up with a reason for how that scenario happened, and i understand that that skill isn't in everyone's wheelhouse. that being said, there are plenty of times when a person who is skilled in something can fail while a person who isn't skilled can succeed.

i've mentioned this scenario previously, but in one of my home games, we were all playing a guild of dwarven crafters who ended up becoming adventurers. the very first roll of our campaign, the dm said we arrived at a town and we spent the day setting up our tents and wares for the next day's fair. he asked us to roll just to see how long it took us to do that and i rolled a nat 1. i was one of the older dwarves (we were a clan and basically all cousins) and had the most experience but the newbie in the group, the youngest, least experienced dwarf rolled a nat 20. the DM explained it that him being the newbie, had convinced me to help him. guide him and watch him throughout the day to make sure he knew all the tricks of setting up a stall. how best to place things to get people's attention, stuff like that. but because i got roped into helping him, i had to stay late and finish my tent while the rest of them went out drinking and celebrating.

it was a simple thing, and he completely came up with it on the fly, but it was a defining moment of development for a character i didn't quite understand yet. he'd absolutely suffer for any one of his clansmen to succeed. he was the older brother of the group that bent over backwards to make sure his family won the day. i rolled a 1, in an area that i was skilled at, but it didn't feel like a failure. it felt like the obvious choice my character would make. the other guy rolled a nat 20 in an area that he was not skilled in, but it wasn't something that he just auto-completed by some miracle. he did what his character would have done and asked for help from the character that was the most experienced.

i suppose you could argue that that's not what happened "mechanically" in that i didn't perform the "help" action and allow him to roll at advantage, he wasn't skilled in that area so he wouldn't have been able to "accept" the help anyway. but in a real world scenario, the new guy on the job asked the veteran for help and he got it.

the same KIND of thing could be used to explain most times a skilled person fails while an unskilled person succeeds. i know a lot of people don't allow nat 20's to auto succeed for the very same reason, but i don't really like that either. you have to respect the nat 20. but again i understand why people don't. it puts the DM on the spot. but if a skilled person and an unskilled person both got a nat 20, i'd give them different answers. people stumble onto the right answer ALL the time. i don't remember which comedian it was... maybe jim gaffigan? whoever it was had a joke about who wants to be a millionaire and how people monologue their thought processes. his joke was monologuing completely wrong information but ending up at the right answer in almost complete defiance of reason.

i know it's not for everyone, but it feels awful rolling a nat 20 and the DM saying, oh, unfortunately with your bonus of a +1, you miss the dc of 22. sorry, you get nothing.

j00t said:

Stuff

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I was thinking about my post after I put it up and I knew someone was going to make the same type of counter-argument you're making.

I'd much rather the rule be no skill check roll unless you're proficient and leave the door open for exceptions, than let everyone roll on every check, but stop people from rolling because of an exception.

In the earlier example I gave with the wizard, barbarian, and the ancient text, I'd be inclined to allow the barbarian to roll if the player presented some reasonable argument as to why they should be able to. Maybe along the lines of "My character grew up less than 20 miles from here, there's a real possibility I may know something about this place."

Your argument is basically even a broken clock is right twice a day and it just doesn't work for me. There's already so little difference in results between proficient and non-proficient that the only real way to reward skill selection is to simply stop people from attempting things that have a minimum level of skill, knowledge, and/or experience.

Furthermore, your dwarven example isn't a skill check in the true sense. However, some kind of roll there probably made sense and the disparity in the results could have easily been explained-away as the DM did, but being a little quicker to set up camp isn't really that high a bar. For me, that scenario falls under type of roll that I would let everyone roll because the differences can be easily justified.

So, in your mind, you believe that characters without proficiency in Blacksmithing tools should be able to roll to create a set suite of chainmail because they might get lucky and figure it out? Or a character without proficiency in Nature can roll to identify an extremely rare plant? The answer should be....no...unless there is an exception that makes sense.

Lastly, the ONLY time a natural 20 is an auto-success is an attack roll. It's always been that way. Only the playtest for One D&D allowed that and the feedback was terrible so it was quickly removed. Not even players want auto-success on natural 20s.

j00t said:

the druid IS pictured... she's the redhead.

like i said, i don't disagree with you but it seems like your own anger is blinding you. go visit a zen garden or something, it'll be good for you

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My bad, you're correct about the druid. However, just because I was slightly off in my description doesn't make the obvious 'agenda' any less infuriating. And, frankly, I don't want to be any less angry about it. A huge part of the reason that culture and entertainment is getting buttfucked with a barbed wire dildo is because too many people are too polite. Most people will only say something after things have gone too far and then it's too late.

Grabbit Allworth said:

I was thinking about my post after I put it up and I knew someone was going to make the same type of counter-argument you're making.

I'd much rather the rule be no skill check roll unless you're proficient and leave the door open for exceptions, than let everyone roll on every check, but stop people from rolling because of an exception.

In the earlier example I gave with the wizard, barbarian, and the ancient text, I'd be inclined to allow the barbarian to roll if the player presented some reasonable argument as to why they should be able to. Maybe along the lines of "My character grew up less than 20 miles from here, there's a real possibility I may know something about this place."

Your argument is basically even a broken clock is right twice a day and it just doesn't work for me. There's already so little difference in results between proficient and non-proficient that the only real way to reward skill selection is to simply stop people from attempting things that have a minimum level of skill, knowledge, and/or experience.

Furthermore, your dwarven example isn't a skill check in the true sense. However, some kind of roll there probably made sense and the disparity in the results could have easily been explained-away as the DM did, but being a little quicker to set up camp isn't really that high a bar. For me, that scenario falls under type of roll that I would let everyone roll because the differences can be easily justified.

So, in your mind, you believe that characters without proficiency in Blacksmithing tools should be able to roll to create a set suite of chainmail because they might get lucky and figure it out? Or a character without proficiency in Nature can roll to identify an extremely rare plant? The answer should be....no...unless there is an exception that makes sense.

Lastly, the ONLY time a natural 20 is an auto-success is an attack roll. It's always been that way. Only the playtest for One D&D allowed that and the feedback was terrible so it was quickly removed. Not even players want auto-success on natural 20s.

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i pointed out several times that i know exactly why dm's do that and i'm absolutely fine with dm's running their table however they want to. i'm just saying that as a player, rolling a nat 20 and not succeeding feels bad. and at the end of the day the entire purpose of dnd is to have a good time. obviously the dm needs to have a good time as well, and oftentimes that idea gets neglected. if you run your game like that and everyone has a good time, mission accomplished. the other thing that makes dnd such a great game is that it's designed to be houseruled. it's designed for every table to run a little different. so play your game how you want and have a good time. but calm down on the righteous indignation about how other tables play, cool?

for what it's worth, our table has sort of a sliding scale for skill checks. the scale varies on the difficulty, but for something basic it would look like this. 5 and below is an outright fail, 6-10 is partial failure, 11-15 is a partial success and 16-20 is straight success. for the partial failure it would be like, you ultimately fail but you do gain SOME information, for a partial success you obviously succeed but don't get the huge lore drop, or whatever. obviously if it's something difficult that would normally have like a 25 dc the scale would move up quite a bit.

we also tried something out our last campaign that we've stuck with. we don't have auto successes, but if we get a nat 20, we roll a d10 and add it to the score. in MOST cases a nat 20 is going to succeed but with the high difficulty checks there's a chance, even with an extra d10 that we won't get it. but then we also roll a d10 for nat 1's and subtract it from the total because sometimes in higher level play you might roll a nat 1 and still get like a 14 total.

again, obviously that's not for everyone and rules as written an "impossible" dc is 35, which really isn't that impossible at higher level play. this is our 4th campaign and all of them have gone to 20.

j00t said:

i pointed out several times that i know exactly why dm's do that and i'm absolutely fine with dm's running their table however they want to. i'm just saying that as a player, rolling a nat 20 and not succeeding feels bad. and at the end of the day the entire purpose of dnd is to have a good time. obviously the dm needs to have a good time as well, and oftentimes that idea gets neglected. if you run your game like that and everyone has a good time, mission accomplished. the other thing that makes dnd such a great game is that it's designed to be houseruled. it's designed for every table to run a little different. so play your game how you want and have a good time. but calm down on the righteous indignation about how other tables play, cool?

for what it's worth, our table has sort of a sliding scale for skill checks. the scale varies on the difficulty, but for something basic it would look like this. 5 and below is an outright fail, 6-10 is partial failure, 11-15 is a partial success and 16-20 is straight success. for the partial failure it would be like, you ultimately fail but you do gain SOME information, for a partial success you obviously succeed but don't get the huge lore drop, or whatever. obviously if it's something difficult that would normally have like a 25 dc the scale would move up quite a bit.

we also tried something out our last campaign that we've stuck with. we don't have auto successes, but if we get a nat 20, we roll a d10 and add it to the score. in MOST cases a nat 20 is going to succeed but with the high difficulty checks there's a chance, even with an extra d10 that we won't get it. but then we also roll a d10 for nat 1's and subtract it from the total because sometimes in higher level play you might roll a nat 1 and still get like a 14 total.

again, obviously that's not for everyone and rules as written an "impossible" dc is 35, which really isn't that impossible at higher level play. this is our 4th campaign and all of them have gone to 20.

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I can see how my post could have come off as a bit "righteously indignant," but it wasn't meant to be and I certainly wasn't attempting to influence the way you play. I was providing evidence as to why I do the things the way I do.

Still, I started to soften my tone a bit by saying exactly what you did in that the point of D&D is to have fun and literally every table does things differently, but I didn't because I feel that element of the game is self-evident.

Anyway, what you guys are doing obviously works for you and that's great.

"D&D has never been more popular, and we have really great fans and engagement," Williams told investors. "But the brand is really under-monetized." Williams pointed to market data from the recently acquired D&D Beyond that showed that Dungeon Masters made the vast majority of purchases related to Dungeons & Dragons, despite making up only 20% of the game's user base. Williams also noted that D&D Beyond would be a critical part of Dungeons & Dragons' future, with the digital toolset powering the next iteration of Dungeons & Dragons. Williams also spoke about D&D Beyond being utilized to "unlock" recurrent purchases similar to add-ons in digital games. We'll note that D&D Beyond has long sold aesthetics and digital accessories, such as digital dice and avatars, and an upcoming Dungeons & Dragons virtual tabletop is expected to bring more ways to sell digital add-ons. "

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I did kinda wonder when people would notice it's the GM that buys everything and therefore most people playing TTRPGs are 'untapped'

Qhue said:

I did kinda wonder when people would notice it's the GM that buys everything and therefore most people playing TTRPGs are 'untapped'

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Spot on dude. Me and my friends were talking about that the other day. Weve been playing our xharacters for over 12yrs and 2 of 7 of my players have a players handbook for their class. Meanwhile I have all but 5 of the editions books. And I don't know how many minis I've bought over the years lol

If the year was 2000, I would probably have some level of excitement for what WotC is cooking up, but I have absolutely zero faith in their "monetization" plans.

That's so true. They seems to really out to drive away thr bulk of players from the past 45yrs

bigmark268 said:

That's so true. They seems to really out to drive away thr bulk of players from the past 45yrs

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It's a good opportunity for other RPG systems to get some traction. Paizo did well publishing Dragon and Dungeon magazines during 3rd with the Open Game License, then gained traction once WoTC went silent on their plans on 4th edition, forcing Paizo to make Pathfinder.

5E players feel so different from players in yesteryear. My old group rotated DM's, and everyone did their part, from scheduling to prep (if we ordered delivery, the DM didn't pay for dinner most of the time. We had 7 of us so one meal split 6 ways was easy). With my new generation of 5E players, I not only have to plan the game, but I initiate the texts constantly to nail down a day to play. They all seem terrified of DM'ing.

Makes it easy with all the 5E stuff being shallow. I can pretty much say, "Next game is using X ruleset. The rules are free online. If you want to play 5E, someone else can step up and run it, because I'm not."

Qhue said:

I did kinda wonder when people would notice it's the GM that buys everything and therefore most people playing TTRPGs are 'untapped'

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The suggested retail price of a 5th edition players handbook back when it came out in 2014 was 49.95. Shit's crazy. If they want everyone at the table to buy one than they need to make the math less retarded.

Urlithani said:

It's a good opportunity for other RPG systems to get some traction. Paizo did well publishing Dragon and Dungeon magazines during 3rd with the Open Game License, then gained traction once WoTC went silent on their plans on 4th edition, forcing Paizo to make Pathfinder.

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3rd party publishing for 5e is massive and there are a lot of fantastic products, but there is also a ton of shit that isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

I have just over 400 hardback D&D books and roughly half of them are from 3rd party publishers. I'm a collector so I buy a ton of shit that I probably won't ever use, but I do keep a curated stack of ~60 books that help me expand/improve the elements of 5e that are sorely lacking (or don't exist at all).

Urlithani said:

It's a good opportunity for other RPG systems to get some traction. Paizo did well publishing Dragon and Dungeon magazines during 3rd with the Open Game License, then gained traction once WoTC went silent on their plans on 4th edition, forcing Paizo to make Pathfinder.

5E players feel so different from players in yesteryear. My old group rotated DM's, and everyone did their part, from scheduling to prep (if we ordered delivery, the DM didn't pay for dinner most of the time. We had 7 of us so one meal split 6 ways was easy). With my new generation of 5E players, I not only have to plan the game, but I initiate the texts constantly to nail down a day to play. They all seem terrified of DM'ing.

Makes it easy with all the 5E stuff being shallow. I can pretty much say, "Next game is using X ruleset. The rules are free online. If you want to play 5E, someone else can step up and run it, because I'm not."

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I do agree with a lot of that. Me and my friends still play 4e. I've been the dm the whole time we are still all playing our original characters.

One of my friends has a 5e game he plays with coworkers. Thiw is the 1st time they have played dnd, except for him. And he says the way they play compared to our group is just night and day.

But as for being DM. I've always been the one to initiate the texts and plan the date. When we were in our 20s we played weekly. Now at almost 40, every 6 weeks or so.

They have had ideas before about how to monetize players -- the 'Complete Guide to X', the spell/ability cards as a player aid, etc. None of it has really worked out well. Their biggest money making from players has always been the ancillary stuff like CRPGs, books, clothing etc.

So I was watching this video. And the dude goes on to say how wizards thinks DMs are only 20% of their dnd sales for the tabletop portion. And I'm like no way. Try maybe 90 or even 95%. My players don't shit lol. What dot ou guys think of that?

depends on the table, i'd wager. some of them definitely just let the dm foot the bill and call it a day. some of them let the dm buy the books, while the others buy the snacks or whatever. and some of them let the dm OFFICIALLY buy the books while the others split the cost. we do the latter.

but i don't like the idea that they are trying to monetize the entire party. it's like thinking that you are losing money by only selling ONE person a box of monopoly instead of the 2-6 players at the table.

That is the best example possible dude /salute