[jdmichal]

One of my biggest complaints about the games I play is the level of dice rolling for even tasks that your character should be perfectly competent in. To me, it breaks the immersion of, say, heroic-level skills in sneakiness when some random untrained person always has a chance of noticing you. I think some of the later versions of D&D "fixed" this with mechanisms like taking 10 and such, but as long as 20 is always an automatic success, that's a 5% chance of failure all the time.

Is this something that FATE fixes? If so, I'll have to look into it!

[mhink]

5e addresses this by assigning much more responsibility to the DM. According to the rules as written, the DM should only call for a skill check when there's _possibility_ and _consequences_ for success/failure.

On top of that, the way they rebalanced skill checks and AC ("bounded accuracy") makes the game feel a lot better. This [1] is a fantastic article specifically addressing those changes, if you're interested.

1: http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Understanding_Bounded_Accuracy_...

[aidenn0]

That's a rule annoyance for me as well that has been mostly fixed by 5e, and doesn't exist in most other systems I've played.

Examples:

FantasyCraft: D20 based, but drops the automatic success/failure rules, so at heroic levels you can have guaranteed success.

Shadowrun 3E: The maximum skill rank a starting character can have in any skill is 6, which translates to over 99.99% chance of success on "easy" difficulty checks and over 98% chance of success on "average" difficulty checks.

Earthdawn: Every 5 or 6 steps of a skill adds one more difficulty level that you can succeed automatically (starting at step 3, where you auto succeed at difficulty 1)

[aeling]

It's worth noting that technically 20 is only an auto-success on attacks and saves. The way you describe is a very common house rule, but it seems to frequently be an accidental house rule (more of a misreading).

[jdmichal]

Has it changed over time? It looks like what you say is true in 5E, though only for death savings throws. But I played 3.5E. My memory isn't good enough to know whether that makes a difference.

[aidenn0]

I looked it up in the various books I have on my shelf:

D&D Redbox:

No skill checks, Attacks succeed if the modified value is 20 or higher. So a level 1 Str 9 character can never hit AC -1. A level 1 Str 18 character needs only a 17 to hit any AC. These rules are different in later rulebooks when the THAC0 is introduced.

[edit] Checked my Expert rulebook, and found that the modified 20 always hits is just due to very low ACs not being represented in the Basic charts (In OD&D lower AC is harder to hit). The target number to hit goes up as AC goes down, but "sticks" at 20 for 5 points of AC. There is no special rule for auto hitting or missing with a natural 20 in OD&D. Note that monsters are quite good at hitting with the weakest monsters hitting about as well as a mid-level fighter with mundane equipment.

D&D 3E: Only attacks succeed/fail on a natural 20/1.

D&D 3.5E and Pathfinder: Attacks and saves succeed on natural 20/1

I don't own any AD&D rulebooks.

[aidenn0]

Too late to edit, but thiefs do have skills, and these are d% and always fail on a 100, which is a 1% failure no matter how good. Also, I forgot how bad pickpocketing is; if the opponent has HD equal to your level you have less than a 20% chance of success throughout the intermediate levels.

[kuang_eleven]

It is something that FATE fixes, albeit by handwaving for the most part! FATE is a much more story-focused rather than mechanics focuses game, and one of the core concepts is to only play through dramatically interesting conflicts with actual consequences for success and failure. In such a case, a routine skill check in D&D would just be explained as flavor in FATE; if you are breaking into a common shop as a master thief, just describe how you do it; now when you come across the merchant and the necromancer conspiring in the back, then the dice come out!