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As written in the rule book, with Athletic, you can chose a distance you want to jump. Success, you jump to the desired distance, and a fail, you jump 10 feet (or 15 feet).
Why you have to chose a distance in the first place? This remove the possibility to say I want to jump as far as I can, and I will see what append. It will be not simpler to put a base DC to 15 (or DC 20 for speed of 30 and higher), and your roll is your max jump length.
As written in the rule book, with Athletic, you can chose a distance you want to jump. Success, you jump to the desired distance, and a fail, you jump 10 feet (or 15 feet).
Why you have to chose a distance in the first place? This remove the possibility to say I want to jump as far as I can, and I will see what append. It will be not simpler to put a base DC to 15 (or DC 20 for speed of 30 and higher), and your roll is your max jump length.
One simple reason is the failure entries. If you try to jump 40' when you can only make it 20' on a roll of 10, then you are likely to fail and do a normal 10' Leap even if you get a total of 28.
Whether this makes sense to you is a different matter. Might be able to think of it as if you try to jump so far beyond your capabilities you're more likely to fumble your footing than even jump as far as you could have if you'd been aiming for something closer.
This remove the possibility to say I want to jump as far as I can, and I will see what append.
I think that is the purpose. And it is because of the Failure effect of Long Jump.
Failure You Leap normally.
Leap normally is based on your movement speed.
So if your base speed is 25 feet, you can Leap 10 feet. If you want to Long Jump 35 feet, then you need to make a DC 35 check. And if you fail then you only Leap 10 feet instead. But if you only want to jump 25 feet, you only need to make a DC 25 check. You still only Leap 10 feet if you fail though.
I have to assume that this is intended. You pick how far you want to jump in order to set the DC. Don't try to overjump things.
You still have the possibility to fail with a fix DC. Sure with a train (or more) high level character, you will fail or critically fail only on a Natural 1, but I found this way to jump more logic.
Maybe add circumstance malus with terrain or wind condition. Jump on icy terrain, or with front wind will be harder.
Circumstance bonuses or penalties for different conditions certainly makes sense.
But as for choosing the distance and DC first before rolling the check, all I can do is explain what the rule says and how it works.
You and your friends can certainly change the rule for your own table. What you are proposing would probably work fine. But that isn't going to be universal across all gaming tables.
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I understand that the jump is limited by your speed.
But with some built, the max jump speed may be a bit hard to achieve. As my last character in my previous campaign, with my desert ratfolk monk, with crane stance, the possibility was 55-60 long jump distance
Now that I think to create a campaign, I’m thinking.
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I have bad experience with Game Master that change the rules that break the game. I want to have opinion and see what I will do. On a starfinder game, his rule change have scrap a character built. And I don’t want to do change that may cause this problem.
In practice, this isn't going to come up very often. If you are trying to use Long Jump there is already a distance that you need to jump over. But you don't need to jump farther than that. And failing by 5 feet will have the same effect as failing by only jumping 10 feet.
I can only think of one case where there would be a difference between trying to jump the full 25 foot distance and instead only jumping 10 feet, and trying to jump 20 feet of the 25 foot distance that you need to and succeeding. That scenario is trying to bypass difficult terrain by jumping over it. There isn't any severe penalty for failing the jump - just a farther distance to walk through the difficult terrain in.
It’s maybe a scenario problem. When it have started to bug me, it was in a map with many bridge, and a miss will have been a 150 feet’s fall, at level 10…
Still time to decide what I will do, read all the rule to find all the change and error that my previous GM have made, and write the start of the campaign.
Personally, I allow my players to announce in advance whether they try and jump as far as they can into a prone position in a straight line (Long Jump is an actual Track&Field event, you know), or to a certain square.
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That's an interesting proposition, and one I'll probably use as a houserule going forward.
If they want to jump to a specific square or cross a chasm of X width, RAW covers it.
If they want to jump "as far as they can" I'll have them pick a trajectory and let them roll. They move the distance rolled (limited by speed as normal), and they cannot end the jump shorter than the amount rolled.