Some people house rule that natural 20's auto succeed and 1's auto fail on other rolls, but I don't care for it myself.
Ryric has it right on the official answer.
Ryric has the right of it.
Personally I have houseruled that instead of autosuccess or failure a 1 imposes a -10 penalty and a 20 grants a +10 bonus (effecitve roll of 30). It usually has the same outcome as an autosuccess or failure, but it does mean that your 20th fighter doesn't automatically miss 1 attack every 5 rounds (4 attacks per round). Nor do the 20 1st level Kobolds attack him have any chance to hit his AC of 50. That is a world I believe in. A world that makes sense.
Still, just a personal position. RAW is RAW.
Don't forget that 1's are failures & 20's are successes when doing Combat Maneuvers (using the CMB) as well. Some people forget those.
In the group I'm and when I GM, I house-rule the 1 fails/20 succeeds to skills as well as I believe there is a 5% chance that anyone can do anything or screw up on anything, but RAW skill checks don't get them.
We play the 1 = fail on skill checks but I have never really liked it. Image a skill check so trivial that anyone (even unskilled) would normally succeed doing it on a 1. So in combat a party of 4 adventurers will on average fail this check every 5 rounds? This leads to some silly situations.
A bit off topic, but I have to fix your math here.
Actually if it was 1 in every 5 rounds that's a 20% chance of failure.
A mess up of 5% or a 1/20 is 1 time in every 20 rounds. Much more realistic.
Think of even professional athletes who are super specialized in what they do. No one is perfect EVERY time, there is always a chance they screw up, hence the 5% chance they mess up on that "1."
The same can be said for that little kid throwing the basketball at mid-court. He would miss that shot almost every time, but that one time he does it's awesome hence that 20 succeeds and that 5% comes to fruition.
These are the reasons that I house-rule those skills in my game, but I understand that others don't think the same way as I do.
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Except pro athletes don't screw up 5% or even 1% of the time. It's more like .01% if even that. How often does an olympic class swimmer fail to stay afloat in calm water? Heck, I'm nowhere near olympic class at swimming and the only situation I can conceive of where I would fail to saty afloat in calm water (DC10) is somehow all 4 of my limbs cramp at the same time...yeah not likely.
Do drivers in light traffic get in an accident every two minutes?
20 autosuccess is even worse. Perception checks never become truly impossible, they just get so high that you can't make the roll. But if a natural 20 succeeds, then you can listen to the BBEG explain his plan to his minions from miles away in a locked room.
5% chance for a couch potato to jump 60 feet. Or to the moon.
Science would be super easy. Just put 20 beginning students (1 rank) in a room and ask them to work on the hardest problems of your field. Bam! One of them gets the answer.
This house rule also breaks taking 20. Either taking 20 autosucceeds at literally any task, or it doesn't count as rolling a twenty, which defeats the entire point of the taking twenty rule. Take 20 exists to save time in a situation where a player could just roll over and over until they get a 20.
Sorry about the mini rant but autosuccess/failure on skill checks is just so patently absurd that it riles me up. Aunt May doesn't have a 5% chance to scale Mt Everest without gear or training, nor does she have a 5% chance to fail to cook a simple meal.
Yeah, but those are more 1% (or lower) chances, not 5%. 5% is too high for that sort of event.We play the 1 = fail on skill checks but I have never really liked it. Image a skill check so trivial that anyone (even unskilled) would normally succeed doing it on a 1. So in combat a party of 4 adventurers will on average fail this check every 5 rounds? This leads to some silly situations.A bit off topic, but I have to fix your math here.
Actually if it was 1 in every 5 rounds that's a 20% chance of failure.
A mess up of 5% or a 1/20 is 1 time in every 20 rounds. Much more realistic.
Think of even professional athletes who are super specialized in what they do. No one is perfect EVERY time, there is always a chance they screw up, hence the 5% chance they mess up on that "1."
The same can be said for that little kid throwing the basketball at mid-court. He would miss that shot almost every time, but that one time he does it's awesome hence that 20 succeeds and that 5% comes to fruition.
These are the reasons that I house-rule those skills in my game, but I understand that others don't think the same way as I do.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm not a statistician, but with the tools that we play with I feel personally that 5% good OR bad is a perfect way to handle those situations. Maybe I should use percentile dice instead, but I don't want to complicate matters and my group seems to be fine with however the outcomes. Anyhow, this is a home-brew rule not RAW as RAW doesn't allow for even a .000001% chance of missing if you roll a 1 and have 20 skill points in it and all it takes is a 15 to do.
Except pro athletes don't screw up 5% or even 1% of the time. It's more like .01% if even that. How often does an olympic class swimmer fail to stay afloat in calm water? Heck, I'm nowhere near olympic class at swimming and the only situation I can conceive of where I would fail to saty afloat in calm water (DC10) is somehow all 4 of my limbs cramp at the same time...yeah not likely.
Do drivers in light traffic get in an accident every two minutes?
20 autosuccess is even worse. Perception checks never become truly impossible, they just get so high that you can't make the roll. But if a natural 20 succeeds, then you can listen to the BBEG explain his plan to his minions from miles away in a locked room.
5% chance for a couch potato to jump 60 feet. Or to the moon.
Science would be super easy. Just put 20 beginning students (1 rank) in a room and ask them to work on the hardest problems of your field. Bam! One of them gets the answer.
This house rule also breaks taking 20. Either taking 20 autosucceeds at literally any task, or it doesn't count as rolling a twenty, which defeats the entire point of the taking twenty rule. Take 20 exists to save time in a situation where a player could just roll over and over until they get a 20.
Sorry about the mini rant but autosuccess/failure on skill checks is just so patently absurd that it riles me up. Aunt May doesn't have a 5% chance to scale Mt Everest without gear or training, nor does she have a 5% chance to fail to cook a simple meal.
Not going to argue the merits of a house-rule in the Rules section, I know what RAW is. Suffice to say that my group has agreed to do this and I like it, that's how my table plays it. No offense, but that's the end of the discussion for this particular house-rule as I'm not changing my mind and you aren't in my group.
Not going to argue the merits of a house-rule in the Rules section, I know what RAW is. Suffice to say that my group has agreed to do this and I like it, that's how my table plays it. No offense, but that's the end of the discussion for this particular house-rule as I'm not changing my mind and you aren't in my group.Except pro athletes don't screw up 5% or even 1% of the time. It's more like .01% if even that. How often does an olympic class swimmer fail to stay afloat in calm water? Heck, I'm nowhere near olympic class at swimming and the only situation I can conceive of where I would fail to saty afloat in calm water (DC10) is somehow all 4 of my limbs cramp at the same time...yeah not likely.
Do drivers in light traffic get in an accident every two minutes?
20 autosuccess is even worse. Perception checks never become truly impossible, they just get so high that you can't make the roll. But if a natural 20 succeeds, then you can listen to the BBEG explain his plan to his minions from miles away in a locked room.
5% chance for a couch potato to jump 60 feet. Or to the moon.
Science would be super easy. Just put 20 beginning students (1 rank) in a room and ask them to work on the hardest problems of your field. Bam! One of them gets the answer.
This house rule also breaks taking 20. Either taking 20 autosucceeds at literally any task, or it doesn't count as rolling a twenty, which defeats the entire point of the taking twenty rule. Take 20 exists to save time in a situation where a player could just roll over and over until they get a 20.
Sorry about the mini rant but autosuccess/failure on skill checks is just so patently absurd that it riles me up. Aunt May doesn't have a 5% chance to scale Mt Everest without gear or training, nor does she have a 5% chance to fail to cook a simple meal.
Thats what's awesome about houserules. Everyone doesn't hafta like 'em, just your group!
two kids are walking along.. one keeps giving a little hop.
"what're you doing?" one of them says
"trying to get to the moon" says the other.
"thats just silly, you can't jump to the moon!" is the given reply.
"Thats what you thi.." as he rockets into the sky.
d20 autosuccess! WOOT! lol :)
So in combat a party of 4 adventurers will on average fail this check every 5 rounds? This leads to some silly situations.A bit off topic, but I have to fix your math here.
Actually if it was 1 in every 5 rounds that's a 20% chance of failure.
He was correct. One of a group of 4 adventures will fail their "balance on flat ground DC -10" check every 5 rounds if they didn't take 10 and a natural 1 failed automatically.
Edit: ^5 DesolateHarmony!
A natural 20 is an auto success for stabilization rolls.
Good one.
A natural 1 is an auto failure on the Wisdom check to prevent a mishap after failing to successfully make the caster level check on a scroll.
|
We play the 1 = fail on skill checks but I have never really liked it. Image a skill check so trivial that anyone (even unskilled) would normally succeed doing it on a 1. So in combat a party of 4 adventurers will on average fail this check every 5 rounds? This leads to some silly situations.A bit off topic, but I have to fix your math here.
Actually if it was 1 in every 5 rounds that's a 20% chance of failure.
A mess up of 5% or a 1/20 is 1 time in every 20 rounds. Much more realistic.
...
Math was good. 4 characters trying a skill check each for 5 rounds is 20 attempts.
Rolls so trivial as to succeed even on a nat 1 shouldn't be rolls in the first place imo, as rolls so tough that a nat 20 can't succeed. If you do want them to have have SOME chance for failure/success, use percentiles or roll d20 more than once for increments of less than 5%.
The problem with that is that different people have different skills. I'm sure there are things that you personally would consider "too trivial" that I would have substantial difficulty with, precisely because you have a dozen ranks in Profession (origami folder) and I don't. So the whole point of a DC 5 check is that someone with minimal training and aptitude shouldn't have difficulty, but someone untrained might. There are some times you want to make sure that the party has the rogue along -- the DC 0 disable device lock on the door is a good way of making sure the fighter isn't in over his head.....
|
Not going to argue the merits of a house-rule in the Rules section, I know what RAW is. Suffice to say that my group has agreed to do this and I like it, that's how my table plays it. No offense, but that's the end of the discussion for this particular house-rule as I'm not changing my mind and you aren't in my group.Except pro athletes don't screw up 5% or even 1% of the time. It's more like .01% if even that. How often does an olympic class swimmer fail to stay afloat in calm water? Heck, I'm nowhere near olympic class at swimming and the only situation I can conceive of where I would fail to saty afloat in calm water (DC10) is somehow all 4 of my limbs cramp at the same time...yeah not likely.
Do drivers in light traffic get in an accident every two minutes?
20 autosuccess is even worse. Perception checks never become truly impossible, they just get so high that you can't make the roll. But if a natural 20 succeeds, then you can listen to the BBEG explain his plan to his minions from miles away in a locked room.
5% chance for a couch potato to jump 60 feet. Or to the moon.
Science would be super easy. Just put 20 beginning students (1 rank) in a room and ask them to work on the hardest problems of your field. Bam! One of them gets the answer.
This house rule also breaks taking 20. Either taking 20 autosucceeds at literally any task, or it doesn't count as rolling a twenty, which defeats the entire point of the taking twenty rule. Take 20 exists to save time in a situation where a player could just roll over and over until they get a 20.
Sorry about the mini rant but autosuccess/failure on skill checks is just so patently absurd that it riles me up. Aunt May doesn't have a 5% chance to scale Mt Everest without gear or training, nor does she have a 5% chance to fail to cook a simple meal.
I respect that your group does agree to this but I do want to express why I could never agree to this houserule.
Tree climbing and swimming would kill off a huge percentage of the childhood population if this rule was in effect."Yep, ol' Billy was gettin' gud at climbin' trees...then he fell out 20' up and died. His sister died when she went swimmin' in the lake...she was out there for a cupla minutes an' jus' couldn't stay afloat. 43rd kid this year in our village who died from those 2 things...I ain't even goin' into how many died hiking up on ol' Rocky Crag..."
I would probably be able to accept a second reconfirmation roll if a nat 1 occurred, perhaps a DC 5-10 check or it is a fail or maybe a related saving throw DC 10 or so....1 in 20 just seems too easy but a 1 in 100 or something even higher would sit better with me.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
In everyday life, we don't roll the dice all that often. We most often take 10.
For instance, most of the time when kids try to climb a tree they are not particularly likely to fall to serious damage. The average "climbable" tree (i.e., one with a climb DC of 15) can be automatically climbed by most children with a single rank in Climb, which happens to be a commonly taken class skill for the Kid class. In fact, not only is this a class skill for Kids, but they should probably get a size bonus of +2, making up for their relatively low Strength scores. Furthermore, many times they'll either be climbing the same tree they've climbed before, getting a circumstantial competence bonus, or will be climbing a new tree after watching another kid do it first, getting the aid another circumstance bonus. True, they will still fall from time to time. Some kids are low Wisdom enough to climb more difficult trees; balance checks using Acrobatics (no size bonus) won't always succeed on a 1; branches sometimes unexpectedly break, and it can happen while getting that first rank in the skill (usually acquired climbing on really easy trees). But after that point it won't be 5% of the time. Kids aren't actually that reckless. They just look as if they are to Adults, who have no size or class bonuses and who have usually retrained any skill point(s) they once had in Climb away into other things like Drive or Knowledge: Local (both class skills for Adults).
|
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
|
In everyday life, we don't roll the dice all that often. We most often take 10.
True, which is why I use Olympic swimmers as my counterexample. No one is taking 10 in a world class race, yet they all manage to stay afloat the entire time, through multiple races. By natural 1=autofail logic, if there were 50 races/heats with 8 swimmers each, we would expect to see 20 of them fail to stay afloat for each 6 seconds that elapse in the race. No matter how good you were, the chance of a swimmer in one heat + one race, each taking approximately one minute, sinking like a newbie swimmer is 64%. Each. Bleh.
An ambulance driver is generally in a stressful situation (no taking 10) but they don't get into an accident 5% of the time they go out.
People whose jobs are stressful or dangerous just don't have a 5% failure rate. The d20 isn't granular enough to have any sort of reasonable auto-fail. Basically, if you can make the skill check on a 1, the task has become routine/automatic and you should no longer have to roll.
Not going to argue the merits of a house-rule in the Rules section, I know what RAW is. Suffice to say that my group has agreed to do this and I like it, that's how my table plays it. No offense, but that's the end of the discussion for this particular house-rule as I'm not changing my mind and you aren't in my group.Except pro athletes don't screw up 5% or even 1% of the time. It's more like .01% if even that. How often does an olympic class swimmer fail to stay afloat in calm water? Heck, I'm nowhere near olympic class at swimming and the only situation I can conceive of where I would fail to saty afloat in calm water (DC10) is somehow all 4 of my limbs cramp at the same time...yeah not likely.
Do drivers in light traffic get in an accident every two minutes?
20 autosuccess is even worse. Perception checks never become truly impossible, they just get so high that you can't make the roll. But if a natural 20 succeeds, then you can listen to the BBEG explain his plan to his minions from miles away in a locked room.
5% chance for a couch potato to jump 60 feet. Or to the moon.
Science would be super easy. Just put 20 beginning students (1 rank) in a room and ask them to work on the hardest problems of your field. Bam! One of them gets the answer.
This house rule also breaks taking 20. Either taking 20 autosucceeds at literally any task, or it doesn't count as rolling a twenty, which defeats the entire point of the taking twenty rule. Take 20 exists to save time in a situation where a player could just roll over and over until they get a 20.
Sorry about the mini rant but autosuccess/failure on skill checks is just so patently absurd that it riles me up. Aunt May doesn't have a 5% chance to scale Mt Everest without gear or training, nor does she have a 5% chance to fail to cook a simple meal.
I respect that your group does agree to this but I do want to express why I could never agree to this houserule.
Tree climbing and swimming would kill off a huge percentage of the childhood population if this rule was in effect.
"Yep, ol' Billy was gettin' gud at climbin' trees...then he fell out 20' up and died. His sister died when she went swimmin' in the lake...she was out there for a cupla minutes an' jus' couldn't stay afloat. 43rd kid this year in our village who died from those 2 things...I ain't even goin' into how many died hiking up on ol' Rocky Crag..."I would probably be able to accept a second reconfirmation roll if a nat 1 occurred, perhaps a DC 5-10 check or it is a fail or maybe a related saving throw DC 10 or so....1 in 20 just seems too easy but a 1 in 100 or something even higher would sit better with me.
That's fine, but you are derailing the thread when talking about my specific house-rule and that's why I told you that I wasn't going to debate it anymore. You aren't in my group so all debate of it goes out the window especially in a RAW thread where I'm not trying to tell others how to play it as a house-rule only. Let's please get back to the original topic as I won't respond back to anymore stuff debating the merits of what me and my group do at my table.
People whose jobs are stressful or dangerous just don't have a 5% failure rate. The d20 isn't granular enough to have any sort of reasonable auto-fail. Basically, if you can make the skill check on a 1, the task has become routine/automatic and you should no longer have to roll.
Oh, I agree. I use the standard rules in my own game. No autofail, no autosucceed. I just don't think there are that many occasions in which people engage in dangerous activities in which they are actually "rolling the dice". Human beings reckless enough to accept a 5% chance (or greater) of failure on activities they recognize as life-threatening tend not to survive. Where we more often fail is recognizing when something IS life-threatening.
In my opinion, GMs who think "there should always be a chance of failure" and thus a 1 should always be a guaranteed failure, regardless of the skill involved or the number of PC skill ranks invested (and I play under one of these myself), fail to recognize that Pathfinder and its predecessors model heroic fantasy, in which player characters are not remotely equivalent to people we know in everyday life. The idea that a 14th level barbarian with maxed ranks in Climb and a Strength of 24 should automatically fail to climb a tree (DC 15) or a natural rock wall (DC 25) on a roll of 1 (resulting in a total Climb check of 25), is ridiculous. Not that autofails and autosuccesses are the only ways GMs sometimes change the skill rules as written. Or even the most objectionable. The other thing some GMs very often do is to raise the DC of skill check arbitrarily high, something I see most often on Knowledge skill checks, but sometimes also on non-opposed Perception checks. Epic difficulty is understandable for high level play, but when knowledge checks are called for and the result is somewhere up in the mid 40s and still not high enough, the GMs should probably have just disallowed any check in the first place, as it is fairly clear they have no intention of divulging any information.
It may have been mentioned:
Scroll mishaps: a natural 1 always results in a failure.
However; I'm not sure if that's on the caster level check or the wisdom check.