I. Skill Rolls: Automatic Failures and Automatic SuccessesThese need to go. In
any worthwhile progression-style game, there are challenges that are either too hard for a character to currently complete, or so trivial that an advanced-enough character should automatically succeed. D&D 5e recognizes this. In 5e, there are only two times that a roll can be a guaranteed success or failure:
- Attack Rolls
- Save vs Death to avoid dying
That's it. And that's ok.
Plenty of worthwhile RPG systems have critical misses and critical successes. A lot of systems care about consistency of what rolling specific number means in all cases. 5e cares only for those two specific things you mentioned. But why? They never offered an explanation AFAIK, why that specific distinction was made. Why is lock-picking failing 5% of the times different from an attack failing at the same rate? How can a lvl 20 Fighter miss when trying to cut a piece of paper?
Seems arbitrary to me.
Consider a character with dexterity 8 and no slight-of-hand proficiency who is trying to lockpick a DC 25 door. Why should they automatically succeed on a natural 20? This character should either try to bash the door down, or they should find another character with the skillset required. At the same time, consider a character with 20 dex, guidance, and slight-of-hand proficiency wearing the smuggler's ring. Then they should never, ever fail the DC 5 lock picking check. They are too good. The roll is beneath them. It is extremely frustrating to see a failure when it neither mirrors the 5e rules nor what people experience in real life.
A character that has just 5% chance to succeed at task shouldn't attempt it, especially if he can do it only once. And you are right he should try a different approach. If they suceeded, doesn't mean that they were right to try. And a character that has 95% chance to succeed at task given is the right guy for that job. But sometimes even the right choices might not result in success, both in DnD and in real life. I
Would the
Lockpicking Lawyer ever fail to open a consumer-grade masterlock padlock? No, he wouldn't. It's beneath his skill. As a player who raises a champion to be explicitly good at a specific task, it is extremely frustrating to see my <whatever>-skill-focused champion fail at a menial task. It is not fun. It makes me wish I had save scummed beforehand for the explicit purpose of bypassing this unavoidable failure. And make no mistake: A 1-in-20 chance, also known as 5%, is a
huge auto-failure/success chance.
Humans are fallible, there are plenty of examples of skilled specialists failing when under pressure to do a thing they should never fail at. Sometimes people forget details or words that they should definitely remember. Sometimes a tool might break or a hand suddenly cramp. The 1 in 20 might be too high but because of the nature of d20 it is the only way to represent it. And for roleplaying reasons it's better to have this mechanic, either at the table or in video game.
Most importantly, it completely removes agency from player decisions.
It does not. If a task, that you are trying to accomplish is important and crucial enough to warrant a worry about failing it 5% of the time, there are some ways to give yourself advantage reducing that risk to 0.25%. Or on a failed roll you may decide to use your inspiration pool. It does nothing to remove agency, it actually enhances it. And as a player you can even enable weighted dice, so that 1 in 400 failure does not happen.
