The answer to WHAT IF THE DM IS AN ASSHOLE has always been "I don't spend my one free night a week with an asshole."

Anyway...

If a skill check involves a full ten minutes of due diligence, it can't be rerolled. In my campaign, this includes searching an area for secret doors, searching a chest for a trap, attempting to disarm the trap, etc. If it is a fairly swift action, such as kicking a door in, it can be repeated up to any consequences from the first failure.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;962545How would you do a blow-by-blow account of a task like picking a lock?

You could but it seems like it would pretty dull barring other factors in the scene.

I'm curious about the complications for failure approach and it means exactly Running with the lockpicking example, what type of complications would stem from failure?

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;962054If the roll doesn't establish anything in the fiction, then there's nothing preventing the player from rolling until they succeed, or the GM having the player roll until they fail. This is why #LetItRide and the like became a thing. At the very least failure should inform the player as to why they failed, and what they heed to do to try again.

There's no such thing as "the fiction". That's a term invented by morons who were trying to turn RPGs into something they're not.

RPG settings are not a 'fiction'. They're a virtual world. In a virtual world, like our real world, there should be all kinds of times when you try to do something, and nothing happens.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;962056That's a reaction, but if it stops the game from going forward (the players end up frustrated, for example).

If a single failed roll means that the entire setting just freezes, then something is clearly wrong.

Or you're playing the wrong types of games, where players are being directed in a 'story' instead of players being free agents in a virtual world.  The latter is an RPG. The former is, at best, a shitty RPG run by someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Quote from: Baron Opal;962559In the Nine Plane campaign, anybody can pick a common lock in 10-20 minutes if they have the tools.

I'm pretty sure that if someone gave me a set of lockpicking tools and a locked door, I'd still be there 72 hours later (assuming I couldn't just kick the door down).

Quote from: RPGPundit;963185If a single failed roll means that the entire setting just freezes, then something is clearly wrong.

How many old adventures had a single door out of the room, which only had ONE chance to unlock (according to the blurb in the adventure) and if you failed, you had to BACK TRACK all the way, which meant more encounters, and potential wipe out, all because the dice wouldn't fall on 35% or less?

And that's assuming that the group survive the encounter chasing them.

Also, picking a lock is not a fast affair, a good locksmith can do it in about 10-20 minutes, simply because if you screw up, the door will never open again.

Quote from: RPGPundit;963185Or you're playing the wrong types of games, where players are being directed in a 'story' instead of players being free agents in a virtual world.  The latter is an RPG. The former is, at best, a shitty RPG run by someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Sorry, Mate, but nope.  Stories happen all the time, never had a military vet in the family ever tell you what happened at a posting?  Or watch the news and found out about shooting that happened earlier that day?  Those are STORIES of what happened.

Oh, lemme tell you of a session I ran of Sunless Citadel on Wednesday the 17th of May, 2017.  It's Story Time!

So I'm running a fresh crew down the AL Yawning Portal game, and we have a Fighter, Paladin, Rogue, Ranger, Cleric and Monk.  And after scaling down the side of the ravine, they see the landing, inspect the ash filled firepit, but don't find any clues on the previous adventurers that were commissioned to find.  They decide to continue down the switch back stairs to the lower level when giant, hungry rats attack!

What followed next was a comedy of errors, as the rats, although not having surprise (the monk did really well on the Survival check) they Rats of Unusual Size, got to attack first and one of them manages to bite through the leather armour of the party Thief is a very fleshy spot!  He went down! (Was a crit on the die, and max damage on 2d4+2)  The rest of the rats weren't as lucky, so the Monk spears one of the animals, which is the size of a rottweiler over the edge!  (actually, the hit insta-killed the rat, so the player wanted to throw it off the stairs, I figured, why not.)

And so it continues with the young, near-sighted Fighter missing most of his strikes, but manages to cleave one in twain.  The Cleric manages to bring back the Rogue, then brains the ROUS menacing him, the Ranger nails another.  Until finally, one last rat remains and it decides to bug out.  All its friends are dead, and it's hurting badly with an arrow sticking out of its left eye socket.  And the players wanting it dead, give one last hurrah.  And the rat manages to dodge the arrow, the Sacred Flame and dagger thrown at it, making good on its escape!

That was the first hour of yesterday's session.  And that is a STORY that happened in D&D.  Something that could easily be written in to a small short story if you really want to.

The disconnect, I think we're having is that your main complaint about systems like Cortex, or FATE, or 2D20, is that those systems have a mechanical layer that abstracts the player from the character.  A system that allows players to wrest control of the world from the DM so they can change things.  Or there's a mechanic that tries to tell players HOW their supposed to react to a certain situation, like WoD's Humanity tract, or Call of Cthulu's Sanity metric.

Personally, I think all of them are flawed, in that players on one hand, lose agency to their characters, and doesn't allow for them to decide how they react, the Humanity track was infamous for that around here (which I fully admit is ANECDOTAL and non-reflective of the experience of anyone else.)

I dislike Cortex Marvel as a player.  I DON'T want to change the GM's vision of events outside of what I say my character does and what the dice tell me happen (success, failure or degrees of either.)

But stories?  Stories HAPPEN, and happen NATURALLY as we play our favourite games of Make Believe is Polyhedrons (unless you're playing Amber, and it's Make Believe with Mother May I), so I disagree there.

If a skill check stops the players, and makes them lose interest in what is happening at the table, then you, the DM has failed.  It doesn't matter if you allow one or a hundred and one rolls for success, you the GM need to gauge the mood at the table decide if the failure requires backtracking, or if it means it LOOKS like a success, but there's a complication that happens sooner or later.

If players are frustrated, then the game stops.  All that work means nothing if they're not engaged.

SO let me repeat myself, I believe that all you need is ONE skill check and it's up to the DM/GM to decide what happens next.  Like every single D&D game I've ever run or played in.

And the You I'm using is the General You, not you specifically Pundit.  If I'm referring to a person, then it's personal (As in I'm talking to the poster directly.)

Quote from: Christopher Brady;963202Also, picking a lock is not a fast affair, a good locksmith can do it in about 10-20 minutes, simply because if you screw up, the door will never open again.

Depends on the type of lock and tool, as well as the torque you need.  Most locks you can pick all day.  You make the internals too fragile someone's going to break them through normal use.  A standard door-handle lock or padlock, take a good thief or locksmith less than a minute.  Deadbolts and special security locks are something different.  But a lot of door locks can be bumped faster than picked.

Quote from: RPGPundit;963185If a single failed roll means that the entire setting just freezes, then something is clearly wrong.

Or you're playing the wrong types of games, where players are being directed in a 'story' instead of players being free agents in a virtual world.  The latter is an RPG. The former is, at best, a shitty RPG run by someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Even if you're doing a railroad-style story-adventure, having a pass/fail skill check that blocks progress is fundamentally bad design.

Quote from: CRKrueger;963248Depends on the type of lock and tool, as well as the torque you need.  Most locks you can pick all day.  You make the internals too fragile someone's going to break them through normal use.  A standard door-handle lock or padlock, take a good thief or locksmith less than a minute.  Deadbolts and special security locks are something different.  But a lot of door locks can be bumped faster than picked.

I've uh...  Managed to jam a basic house lock by breaking the pick in it...  It's um, a special...  Talent, yeah, that's what we'll call it.

Bumping works because of all the moving parts in most modern locks, the older ones are much...  I hesitate to use the word sturdy, but they have thicker bits, which makes picking them a bit of a strength based affair.  Still, it's not a fast job by any means of the word.

Characters get one try on knowledge-based checks--they either know a thing, or they don't.

When it comes to other skills, I let them have as many tries as they want, but each try takes a certain amount of time (and may possibly produce noise or draw attention).

At the very least, there should be the possibility of something happening on a failure.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;962545How would you do a blow-by-blow account of a task like picking a lock?

That depends on whether picking a lock is more akin to a single roll to hit, or several rolls to kill a monster. And how often does lock picking include avoiding traps and the like?

Quote from: RPGPundit;963183There's no such thing as "the fiction".

Yeah. That's why it's called #Fiction.

Quote from: RPGPundit;963183RPG settings are not a 'fiction'. They're a virtual world.

A virtual world is fictional.

Quote from: RPGPundit;963183In a virtual world, like our real world, there should be all kinds of times when you try to do something, and nothing happens.

Nothing never happens in the real world, let alone a virtual one. Every action has an 'equal and opposite' reaction.

Achieving one's intent on the other hand...

Quote from: The Scythian;963751Characters get one try on knowledge-based checks--they either know a thing, or they don't.

Or they just can't recall it at the moment, like what happens when one forgets where they left their keys or the name of that famous actor.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;963776Nothing never happens in the real world, let alone a virtual one.

Counterexample: My attempts to ask girls out in high school.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;963202How many old adventures had a single door out of the room, which only had ONE chance to unlock (according to the blurb in the adventure) and if you failed, you had to BACK TRACK all the way, which meant more encounters, and potential wipe out, all because the dice wouldn't fall on 35% or less?

I don't know. How many? Offhand I can't think of any. There might be a couple, but I sure can't name them. Can you? Or did you just pull this imagined scenario out of your ass?

QuoteSorry, Mate, but nope.  Stories happen all the time, never had a military vet in the family ever tell you what happened at a posting?  Or watch the news and found out about shooting that happened earlier that day?  Those are STORIES of what happened.

Stories are formed as an incidental side-effect of life. In a proper RPG, stories may or may not be told of what happened the way stories can be told about your fishing trip or golf game or vacation to Aruba.
But life itself is not a story. People sometimes get locked in a closet and just die there.  Dudes who look like they're on the heroes' journey for a little bit get killed by a stray bullet in a meaningless battle, or fall off a ladder.
In real life, if you get locked out of a room, the door doesn't open because you are 'meant to' get through it. Nor will someone magically arrive to aid you because you failed to open the door yourself.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;963202How many old adventures had a single door out of the room, which only had ONE chance to unlock (according to the blurb in the adventure) and if you failed, you had to BACK TRACK all the way, which meant more encounters, and potential wipe out, all because the dice wouldn't fall on 35% or less?

Old school doors have hit points.

Quote from: RPGPundit;958738How do you handle this sort of thing? If a character fails at their detect traps check (assuming that doesn't itself trigger a trap), or at some kind of knowledge check, or at searching, or opening a lock, or whatever else: when do you let them try again, if ever? How do you decide that a failure means they just can't figure it out ever, and/or how do you let them try again?

On a related note, how would you justify someone trying a skill check again once without having to allow them to just keep trying until they succeed?

This is all assuming skill checks that have no particular consequence for failure other than not getting what they wanted; i.e., no monsters attack, no traps go off, no external time limit to figure things out, etc.

This is why I actually liked the take 10/20 skill thing from 3rd Edition D&D: I might be mis-remembering some things, but you could take 10 on most skill checks if you weren't bring rushed or threatened, and you could take 20 on a skill check that didn't have consequences for failure (and I recall that in 3rd Edition Revised they actually mentioned which skills you could take 10/20 on). Don't know if knowledge/lore skills were among the take 10 group, but I don't think so.

So, if the players wanted to get up a wall, so long as they weren't being rushed or threatened they could just all take 10, and if anyone still couldn't pull it off you could just lower a rope for them.

If you wanted to search a room up and down for hidden passages, you could take 20 for each area, effectively taking 20 times as long but acting like you eventually got a 20 + all your other mods. Since take 20 required that there couldn't be consequences for failure, you couldn't take 20 while climbing (you might fall) or disabling a trap (you might trip it), but you could do it when picking a lock since by default there weren't any penalties for failure (though if there was a trap set to go off if anyone tampered with the lock you'd trip it).

Take 20 makes it clear to the player whether or not the lock is beyond their skill, and that as far as they can tell there aren't any traps or hidden doors about. Maybe. DC could just be a point higher than all your mods + 20. It also avoids the notion that there either must be some sort or consequence OR you just let them through. Sometimes you just can't pick the lock: why not try bashing it open, tunneling around, or finding/hiring someone more skilled than you to give it a shot?

For knowledge skills I just interpret the roll as they know this thing or they don't (and if it's something I think they should know I just give it to them). I might allow a re-roll if I think information comes to light that might give them an "Ah-ha!" moment, but they might also just figure it out on their own or get the answer more directly, such as by reading a book or talking to an NPC.