I like critical failure.
Skilled people can sometimes choke under pressure.
Under pressure, sure. But a perpetual 5% chance of colossal failure seems absolutely insane when it applies to restful situations as well.
Yeah. That’s what the magic is for. But I refuse to believe that a wizard who can conjure and drop a meteor on a city has a 5% chance of not recognizing the light spell.
Edit: I forgot the word chance.
In epic scaled games, I work around this with a “reroll at -20”. So the rogue in this case would have had about a 25% chance to recover on a DC10 check.
I also always include an in-game explanation. In this case, I would have made it a huge flashy “boon of insight” from the Paladin’s deity.
Then it’s all the more fun if the rogue actually manages the re-roll. “Dude, I even tricked your god!”
I would also RP right into it. “A voice from on high intones ‘I dunno, seems legit, to me.’”
Similarly if the rogue actually fails:
“A voice from on high intones ‘Seriously, you need to stop falling for this crap. I’m going to send you an amulet of insight or something. What’s your next stop?’”
I listened to one video which suggested rolling 3 d6 instead. Crits on 3 and 18. Turns that 5% into 0.46%.
…yes, but that also has the trade-off of moving your rolls from a flat distribution where every value between 1-20 have equal weight, to a bell curve that peaks at 10.5.
Many of your rolls are gonna end up right around that 10-11 mark as a result. Which can be fine! #alldicearebeautiful
But it’s not gonna be a great drop in replacement for D&D. D&D’s skill checks are built around beating numbers that you’re not going to reach as easily with 3d6 vs a flat d20.
Basically, more dice = more predictability and fewer wild swings of fortune. That is a more accurate model of reality… But arguably less fun in a game.
Imagine the difference in dramatic tension in a game where the boss has 50 HP. In one scenario, you deal a consistent 5.5 HP each round. In the other, you deal 1d10 damage each round.
In the long run, you’ll deal the same amount of damage in either system. But the randomness of a 1d10 creates more dramatic tension and excitement! When you roll a 1, it’s a crushing setback. A 10? Instant jubilation.
Critical skill failure is relative to the situation, you don’t chop your arm off everytime you critically miss in combat. Although if it makes sense for the specific situation, chopping your arm off might be on the table sometimes for a critical miss in combat. Same sort of thing works for skills. It would only be the worst reasonable result that comes to mind. Not that all of a sudden the worst possible thing ever happens completely out of the blue.
This is why my house rule is nat 20 or 1 gets a second roll to determine the degree of the crit. A 1 followed by another 1 is your true fall on your face odds.
Which, as said elsewhere, is still a 1-in-400 chance. A commercial pilot lands a plane thousands of times in his life. 1d20 with a 1d20 confirm would mean no pilot ever survived to retirement.
And one could argue a commercial pilot has a fairly average skill level, the equivalent of a level 0 character with a ~4 points of proficiency (D&D3 mindset, I know I’m old). Someone who is 5 or 6 times that should have no meaningful risk of crashing a plane (and the plane should have no meaningful risk of dangerously malfunctioning 0.25% of the time)
I like the idea of a critical role needing another roll to see just how critical it was. That way something crazy can always happen, but it doesn’t need to be a certain doom either.
I’ve been trying to include failure techniques from DungeonWorld’s suddenly ogres in my game. It proposes a few neat ideas for consequences of failure that are broadly applicable to many RPG systems.
Eg, in the example above, maybe the Rogue (truthfully or not) blabs that their source was [ancient evil tome forbidden by the paladin’s order]. Now the complication is not that the Paladin disbelieves the rogue’s claim, but that they might question the rogue’s true intentions.
Edit: Or in the example given about landing a plane. An experienced pilot won’t crash 1/20 times, but what if Air Traffic Control did a bad job managing things today? It will take 1h for the plane to be assigned to a gate, but you need to catch the train to Borovia in 1h15.
An award winning surgeon rolls a 1 while giving a routine lecture? The presentation is so fucking boring that half the students fall asleep. Now the surgeon has to deal with the extra office hours of students who don’t understand this part of the curriculum.
I’ve had players have this exchange, and then the Paladin decided to ignore the rogue’s critical miss, and just roll with it.
Paladin to the rest of the party “I forget what they said exactly, but it was a very convincing argument!”
Critical success and failure has never applied to skills. It was only ever in the rules for attack rolls and (in 5e) death saving throws. Critical success and failure in skill checks is probably an example of the Mandela Effect. Anyway, for the above reasons I don’t use them as such. However, on nat 20s I might provide a “path for success” where one may not otherwise have been possible. But it’s never a given. More of an opportunity for roleplay.
It’s not in the rules, but it makes sense. It also does have rules about taking an automatic 10 for low DC stuff, which you usually only do if even a roll of 1 would succeed so it gives a good trade off having nat 1s be a failure even in skill checks when the player opts to roll instead of taking a 10.
It’s not the mandela effect, it’s a common house rule that people express their opinions on.
Yeah, everyone is very aware it’s not in the official rulebook, other than in the section of the official rulebook where it says not to treat it as an official rulebook and only something to fall back on if you can’t think of something better.
And for anyone that for any small moment of time may not have temporarily been aware that skill crits isn’t in the official rulebook, that problem is solved very quickly the second they meet any other player online.
