Bad common RPG design decision

The type/tone of game you are running probably makes a big difference.

I've had this happen too. And it was not "everyone is John". I wouldn't be complaining if it was. You're supposed to be insufferably incompetent in that game.

In the games we play, they're typically high action games where you're supposed to be good at the stuff you'e built to be good at, but then I get different GMs who give all sorts of whackjob DCs for everything.

Sadly, this "you never know if your skills will be worth anything because the difficulty of tasks within the world is so unpredictable" makes me want to play Pathfinder more than almost everything else these days, because then I don't have to ask the GM what the DC was anymore, I have the DCs for tasks on my sheet, and I tell the GM what my roll makes me capable of, before asking if I succeed (often I can basically tell the GM if I succeeded on the task I was attempting rather than ask, and just tell him what I do).

So if I'm tracking someone, instead of saying "I get a 21, what do I see", I'll tell him how good my tracking is, how old the tracks can be for me to follow them, and any modifiers to the roll that seem relevant. Since I've started doing that, I'm not suddenly made incompetent by the GM suddenly and inexplicably increasing the difficulties of things I'm supposed to be good at.

I'm actually starting to really like being able to tell the GM what I do, including if I succeeded, and just narrate out how the success goes.

Needless to say, I've been in some frustrating games in the past.

But those guidelines are useful when I'm GMing, too.

As someone who has recently just spent a ridiculous fucking amount of time doing just this for a game they were writing, I can tell you that the answer is simple and a purely practical issue.

Writing examples of shit takes forever. Writing examples is in some ways one of the most brain-draining, exhausting endeavors in the entire project simply because it requires you to come up with so much shit out of thin air.

Wedding mechanics and numbers to fictional events is at best a fuzzy logic process. Breaking every possible thing your character can do be broken into five or six tiers of difficulty is fucking mind numbing. What are six tiers of acrobatic difficulty? Go ahead, in your head right now, give six examples. Now black smithing. Now persuasion. Now athletics. Now guitar playing. Now willpower checks. Now intelligence checks. Now perception. Now tailoring. Now tracking.

It's something that takes a lot of mental resources to do, and in the end often isn't worth it. it takes man hours to create and takes up a huge amount of page real estate compared to just having a common DCs list somewhere. Not to mention that in play, stopping to look up DCs for stuff slows shut down anyway so most GMs will just guesstimate and run with it so those details will go to waste much of the time anyway.

>It's tedious and not fun to do.
>It's not worth it.
>GMs will ignore them anyways.

It's worth it for the players. If I (as the player) want to build an acrobat who pulls prince of persia maneuvers and assassins creed maneuvers all the time, from wall running to parkour to diving through a very narrow space into a large swimming pool below, I'm going to want to have some idea just how competent I am, and know what I can expect to be able to do with the skill I have.

Without concrete examples I can't say "Well running up a wall to do a flip over someone's head is harder than doing a standing backflip in place, but easier than wall-running 6 feet, which means the DC should be around XX." And that's important to me as a player, because I intend to do that regularly, and now I know I need a +Y to pull it off consistently. Now I know what having a +Y in acrobatics actually means. It means I can do A, B, C, D, and E, reliably, andy F & G if I'm lucky.

You're missing the thrust of the issue. There are people out there who want every possible thing spelled out in exhausting detail and want every possible situation covered by the rules. That's perfectly fine. There are also people who are fine with far looser guidelines and don't want to be bothered by that level of detail. That's also fine.

You can't cater to everyone's preferences simultaneously. The bigger issue is that it takes man hours and page space. If you are a commercial product, then both of those are big deals. The more shit you put in your book, the more it costs to produce and the longer it takes to get out the door. The profit margins on RPGs are already relatively tiny. At a certain point you have to say "we can only put X amount of man hours into this." "We can only have X amount of pages." "We have a deadline of X date." Exhaustive examples for every single task in the book is a huge time/money/page count sink. Would it be nice to have? Sure, but I can completely understand why it's not worth the trouble for the developer in some cases compared to broader simpler guidelines.

Also, we would not be able to get this guy to look up from his "Big Book of Difficulty Checks" long enough to come up with something pithy to say.

Tho he'd look up the difficulty of saying something "Pithy".

Huh.

On the one hand, I can see your argument.

On the other hand, There's been far too many times where those "simpler guidelines" result in such inconsistent rulings that it kills any fun in the campaign for me, and for the people who just thought everything was hard in the system, they weren't comfortable with attempting reasonable tasks until they had a ridiculous amount of dice.

Doesn't need to be that exhaustive, but benchmarks for each skill make all the difference.

I don't need an exhaustive list of every potential task spelled out in exhaustive detail in order to know how competent a character is. That there is a big ol' strawman.

I just need to know a handful of progressively increasing difficulties to compare the task I want to attempt against.

I honestly think 4e handles it okay, at least compared to the other D&Ds.

Sure there aren't many examples given, but you either put something there with a purpose (so you know if it should be easy/medium/hard) or it's something the player improvs and you can slot it into one of those easily, or it's a contest with an enemy.

So, it's like 1d100 with degrees of success? I prefer that system myself, because you can shit out modifiers on top of it being easy/hard.

So for where he needs a different roll to hop the fence, I could just say that it's higher now because he's in a rush, or that he had a running start last time and can try that again or something.

Ultimately it's my secret railroad technique of "how reasonable do I think it is the player should be able to do this".

Except they're lucky fucking cuts so here I am shit posting instead of working out how "I roll to seduce the Orc captain while in combat" because I fell to my magical realm and used an Orc muscle girl pic for a recurring villain.

So yeah, maybe everything I know is wrong.

That sounds more reasonable, and something I could come up with myself as a DM.
In fact I might.

Tools: Cooks Utensils
DC Effect
5 Prepare something edible
10 Prepare something tasty
15 It will impress a commoner
20 It will impress refined tastes
25 It will win a contest/impress chef
30 Nation wide sensation/ Fame

>Higher target because different circumstances
This is fine. What's not fine is higher target same circumstances because you're inconsistent in your DC rulings.

Likewise, if I free climb a wall, and then another party member free climbs the same wall in the same place 5 minutes later and the weather hasn't changed, I'm going to expect it to have the same DC.
And if they free climb an objectively more difficult wall (say the same type of wall but taller, covered in oil, and while being shot at) I'm going to expect that to have a higher DC, not a lower one, because otherwise you're fucking me around, either deliberately or unintentionally, and being fucked around is not fun.

I would not give them the roll mid-combat. She's not going to be interested in what they have to say, she's trying to kill them.

Yeah, when you look at the actual point being made instead of a strawman it makes more sense. That's often the case.

It's tedious to do. I've done it for my own games, when I'm running a system with shitty vague guidelines. That may make things better when I'm GMing, but it's worthless when I'm not the GM. In that case, I have to file the system under "Can only play if I have a really good GM, a mediocre GM will make this game absolute garbage."

Yes. Just like that, in every system. There's cooking for 5e, done.

And this is easily adaptable to any of the tool based skills for example Performance
DC Effect
5 Tolerable background noise
10 An inkeeper will feed you/1 cheap drink
15 Ale as long as you play, and a stay
20 Hired to play a local noble wedding
25 Start a spontaneous street celebration
30 The King will hire you to teach your art

as the guy making these, I may do a set for 5e, the only edition that matters to me any more (I've played them all over 30ish years).

I'd be interested in seeing the list, if only to use it to improve my own such lists for other systems, or in case I ever run 5e again (I didn't much care for it overall).

As someone who's never loved Munchkin-type play, I really dig 5e, but then again I am comfortable homebrewing.

Smithing (or really any craft)
DC............Effect
5 Cheap and will break after a day
10 Common will get the job done
15 Quality Work, worth 50% more than list
20 Exceptional, can sell immediately for double list
25 Extraordinary work, bidders will drive it to 10x it's list price
30 Masterpiece. 50x list, nonmagical +1 or tool gives advantage on skill

Who have you been playing with?

The fuck have you been playing?

You can comeback after you have actually read any of those core rule books or when not playing with a gm that is a shit.

And really, looking at these 3, it wouldn't be that hard to create a basic template for all skills, which really are broken down to 4 or 5 classes of skill at the most.

I think mainly he's had shitty DMs.
It's a common condition.
Sadly it takes a player years to realize that they are largely mediocre to shit, by which time they've alienated some good ones by being self-indulgent asses.

They then don't know what a good one is like and will accept your meager performance and not offer any real feedback to improve on thus perpetuating the cycle.

Sounds more like you're dragging the game down for everyone else.

>I think shitty systems and dice pools are the only ones that make this hard.
How do dicepools make this hard?
More successes needed equals a harder roll, with higher and higher success numbers becoming less and less likely. Nothing more to it.

Manhours are important, so they should be put into important sections. I'd argue elaboration on one of the central methods of player agency is important enough to be prioritized higher than, taking Vampire: the Requiem as an example, really fucking retarded and ill-written fluff sections that make you puke at how inane and tedious they are

This. My time as DM is already a management game of plans, back-up plans, encounters, plot threads, images, music, organisation for pre and post game, making food, research and many other items that I can't be bothered to rattle off. A list of sample DCs is a more rewarding use of my time than some fluff for some obscure bullshit.

I've read a fuck tons of RPGs and have never seen a single one that didn't include the tedious obligatory challenge rating example chat.

Honestly I've seen it more then the 'what is an RPG' introduction blurb.

Not every dice pool RPG uses the nice simple Shadowrun/world of darkness 'success' based system.

There's some really Kray Kray shit like Culthultech's 'pokerdice'.

Hell the older world of darkness/shadow run's maths is all over the place. Still is to be honest.

>roll to climb a fence or drive two blocks away in regular traffic

Unless you´re playing as some sort of crippled or retard, you shouldn´t even be rolling for those. The problem probably lies in your GM, or in whatever system you´re using.

>six tiers of acrobatic difficulty
-Highschool gymnastics
-Advanced highschool gymnastics, girls who go training after school tier
-Long time hobbyist, someone who´s been training for years and can do things unthinkable for the average person. Could make an extra buck doing street shows
-Advanced acrobatics. You could win tournaments, jumping great lengths/heights and being able to balance yourself on a toe on a small ball
-Athletic tier. The same, but you´re one of the world´s best, nearing the peak of human capabilities
-You´re naturally gifted to do that plus a lifetime of training, or you´re not purely human. In any case, you´re pretty much a legend

>blacksimithng
-you can fix or make a small iron knife
-you can make more delicate utensils like a simple fork
-you can work several metals and make a nice elegant spoon
-you can make a quality and durable item, like a sword
-you can make a whole set of armor
-you can make anything you think of and have it be a masterwork

>persuasion
-you can sell lemonade on a hot Summer day
-you can sell lemonade on a normal Spring day
-you can convince a stubborn father that a puppy would greatly help her daughter´s development
-you can convince your grandmother to try the internet
-you can get people to agree with you and maybe even change their views, at least a little, on a bar discussion about politics
-you can sell chicken nuggets to a vegan

Dunno, I don´t think it´s that bad at all. Personally, I´ve always found it easy and fun to come up with examples for things. I can´t be the only one in the world.

Granted these aren´t the best in the world, but for something written in five minutes and not intended to be forever on a book sold or distributed to as many people as possible... I could probably do better, I guess.

My "What is an RPG" in my dev-helled homebrew is "You know what a fucking RPG is."

I thing you want to be a GM user

I think the difficulty lies in the fact that, say, forging a small knife is harder than convincing your grandma to try the Internet, yet you put the first one into way easier category than the latter one. If smithing and persuasion skills cost the same amount, then you get way more bang for your buck out of smithing than persuasion in this example - and herein lies the problem. How to make sure that the DCs make sense yet keep the skills roughly equally useful at the same time?

Thing here is, you´ve been practicing persuasion all your life, while maybe you´ve never made a knife.

Whithin its field, making a knife is not hard at all. In fact, if you learn smithing, making a knife is the very first thing you´ll learn. And if your instructor isn´t much of a theory guy, chances are you´ll make your first knife the very first day you go learn smithing. It´s extremelly easy to make.

The difficulties are roughly the same for all those things. Relatively speaking and saving that I´ve made it up in five minutes with no real regard for quality. The only problem it has is that, that while the average person has smithing 0, the average person has many points into persuasion by the time they reach adulthood.

Guess it´d be more a matter of not handling persuasion, which is a "daily" skill, with smithing, which is something that has to be specifically learnt.

Or maybe we could treat persuasion as the extra length that someone might go above and beyond the average person´s persuasion skill, in which case the examples would rather be stuff like "you can get someone to lie for you in something important", "you can get an armed, cornered kidnapper to release some hostages", "you can get someone to feel like a close friend and tell you a deep secret within minutes of knowing them" or "you can mobilize the masses and get massive support for your cause, be it killing the Tsar or turning Germany into a war machine" for higher levels.

Realistically speaking the concept of trying to have DC's "fit" every scenerio is never ever ever going to work. Think about it. You're a GM. Are you seriously going to stop and think about every single wall the PC wants to climb? If it's smooth or bumpy? If there are any easy handholds or edges to grab?

How about a stealth scenerio. Sure okay castles have guards and there's places to hide but are you going to be able to think about how well trained these guards are? How MANY hiding places there are? Are there any close to the treasury? What if stealth is an option the PC's bring in randomly that you just roll with? You're a GM and you have enough on your shoulders already without having to try and be "realistic" about this.

At the end of the day no matter what: the GM is going to aim for a difficulty that's "fair". Or at least feels "fair" to him. If a guy has a stealth of +6 you give him a DC of 13-16. If a person has a climb skill of +1 you'll give him a DC of 9-11.

Because at the end of the day unless GM's are explicitly trying to dissuage players from doing something (usually by having a DC be something crazy high like 25 or 30) they'll aim for that sweet spot of an action being risky but possible.

>Who with
The last 5-10 GM's I've gamed with, different groups.
>What Games Have you played
lots. 3.5, PF, 4e, oWoD, nWoD, M&M, Savage Worlds, Deadlands, Rolemaster, MRQII, AFMBE, Buffy/Angel, Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, FFG Star Wars, d20 Modern, Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia

The issue has cropped up (not always with the same GM), in any of the ones without specific benchmarks, or explicit capabilities I could point to in the book and say "this is what I am capable of with this roll, the task I'm attempting looks to be about X difficulty based on what I know I can do, do I succeed at this task I'm attempting?"

Tried saying nothing/Not pointing it out. That just makes it worse.

These days I mostly just GM, because it seems impossible to find a GM who's even remotely consistent with the difficulty of tasks in his world.

I've played in nWoD system games set in regular earth, and I go to shoot a target, GM wants 4 successes. Someone goes to hack into the bank to steal 100k, they only need 3 successes.

It seems to be a series of fucking awful GMs, who don't respond to friendly communication, and the only solution that seems to get me anywhere is when I have a list of benchmarks I can quickly spit out the most relevant ones whenever I make a roll.

I GM a lot, actually. I largely just want a game I can be a player in where the GM isn't shit, and a lot of it seems to stem from them having no idea how to set the damn difficulties for things, not taking any feedback or listening when you go to talk to them about it, and the book being too vague for me to point them to a list to make them better at it.

that is literally what the OP is complaining about

>Are you seriously going to stop and think about every single wall the PC wants to climb? If it's smooth or bumpy? If there are any easy handholds or edges to grab?
Sure. I may not think about it for long, but yes, it will get at least half a second of thought.

>At the end of the day no matter what: the GM is going to aim for a difficulty that's "fair".
Okay. Fair would be the goal, yes.

>If a guy has a stealth of +6 you give him a DC of 13-16.
Woah. Wait up. No.
>If a person has a climb skill of +1 you'll give him a DC of 9-11.
What the fuck. Jesus christ, no.

You think "Fair" means all tasks become harder but only for the person who tried to specialize in them? How the fuck is that fair?

Why fucking specialize in anything then? Why have a character sheet for that matter?

>Unless GM's are explicitly trying to dissuage players from doing something (usually by having a DC be something crazy high like 25 or 30) they'll aim for that sweet spot of an action being risky but possible.
>All actions are risky but possible, regardless of how good you are at the relevant skill, unless the GM arbitrarily wants to discourage you from attempting something, then he jacks the numbers up.
Goddamn, that's fucking terrible GMing.

I've been assuming ineptness was the cause, but I hadn't considered they were being deliberately terrible like this. Fuck, that's hot garbage right there.

That, (and crap like that being responsible for GMs who don't know how to set DCs), but apparently also GMs like this crazy here , invalidating all player decisions and removing the player agency from his games in favor of just arbitrarily deciding what PCs succeed at what task and when based on his own suddenly shifting whims.

what do you guys think in rolling once for some scenarios like, there is a war you roll once and that roll defines how good you did on that war

I think it depends on the system.

For one, I happen to think that Percentile-based RPGs really don't need detailed DC example lists. You really do need at least basic Algebra skills to play most RPGs so the idea that you are "60%" likely to succeed at something is pretty easy to understand.

Likewise, it's fairly easy to determine what might constitute a -10 on that test vs a -30.

If you like systems with really detailed examples of DC for skill use, check out Shadowrun 4th edition 20th Anniversary. That has loads of excellent examples of what the difficulty should be to use a given skill.

The less rolls involved in broad subjects like "a war", the more wildly unpredictabl the outcome becomes.

If you had actually played through it, there would be many rolls, and the more rolls you make, the closer the results tend to average out.

You abstract that to a saingle roll of the same type, and suddenly the odds of one side totally obliterating the other while escaping completely unscathed skyrockets.

Not to mention, you're completely removing any tactical considerations.

>What about BRP & the Warhammer RPGs! You know you have a 60% in your skill!

In RQ/Warhammer, the difficulties are not your %, they are the modifiers.

In most RQ/BRP Editions for example, you multiply your skill by something based on the difficulty of the task, and there are several difficulty rankings.
How hard is a given task - at least for hte editions I have played - That's entirely up to the GM, with minimal guidelines.

In Warhammer, it's +/-, though I don't recall much of the difficulties. I do recall thoroughly detailed modifiers for shooting people, but I don't recall how they handled other stuff. Not a big fan of the warhammer 40k setting, and the mechanics were pretty strongly tied to that.

I love simple difficultly like this. The more examples, exceptions and rules on setting difficulty makes it worse in my opinion. I don't know why OP has a problem with it.

>I don't know what OP's problem with weak guidelines is
You would if you read the thread. The problems have been spelled out very clearly by myself (the OP) and a few other people.
The people on the other side of the fence were either:
>Complaining about how good game design takes effort, and takes away page count from background fluff.
or
>Saying they can't be bothered, and that good GMing involves removing player agency to instead just arbitrarily assign a chance of success based on what the GM wants to happen in his story instead of based on the situation and characters.

I'm not any of those anons, but if you can't come up with a DC based on the guidelines as seen in then I don't think you're intelligent enough to be a GM. If a lock is in poor shape or extremely simple, you assign a low DC. If a lock is extremely complicated, you assign a high DC. If you pick that lock multiple times, it's the same DC. This shit isn't rocket science, dude.

If a player absolutely, positively needs guidelines for cool skill stunts they want to do on a regular basis, they should talk to the GM about what a general DC for that stunt would be.

"Hey Bob, I wanna be able to run across walls like in Prince of Persia sometimes. What kind of DC could I expect?"
"Alright George, I'll let you try but that's a pretty crazy stunt so I'm gonna say that it's at least Hard, so a minimum DC of 20."
"Awesome, thanks."

Not doing detailed guidelines for the difficulty of each and every skill lessens the burden on the designers and it helps weaken the grip with which rules lawyers can strangle your game.

You can't expect every GM to not be an idiot when you're a player, and having clearer rules that the players can refer to helps when the GM does happen to be unfit.

Maybe you shouldn't play with idiot GMs.

How are you supposed to know before you play with them?

I like how Stars Without Number breaks them down.

Cute/funny, but limited use for any other skills.

>I always fudged it and made the characters succeed or fail based on how it would advance the story

literally worse than hitler

I'd certainly say it's better than nothing. And I think it gives a better idea of what they have in mind than just "easy, not easy, difficult, very hard, almost impossible, unimaginable" or whatever adjectives you care to substitute.

>ITT we want to play a video game

>All GM's are inconsistent, incompetent or malicious, sloppy assholes deliberately removing any player agency from their games. If you want any kind of consistency you will have to go play videogames instead.

That's a pretty grim worldview you have there.

Ah yes the classic escalation DC gag.

Yeah it does give you an idea of what 'very hard' really means.

Yeah even in two d20 based systerm like say DND5e and pathfinder there is a massive difference between a DC of 15 in one and the other. So a reference chart is a good one.

On the other hand, bounded accuracy is shit for allowing stupid bullshit like a feeble Wizard out-armwrestling an ogre. You'd think they would have learned from how bad 3.5's stat checks were.

Yeah but the idea is that spell saves and Armour class don't become so insanely high it renders combat pointless.

If the PC try something that clearly isn't reasonable you shouldn't really let them roll to begin with.

Difficulty class is shit anyway. Go for roll under with modifiers instead.

Modifies are a difficulty class.

Except it doesn't do that in any game unless your GM is a complete idiot.

Bounded accuracy is a fancy way of saying "we're going to limit the whole game to these levels and nothing more will ever happen after." Thenthey can sell you more books that go beyond bounded acuracy, because anything that is actually inside the bounded accuracy rules is going to be so samey and unchanging people will get bored with it.

5e is enjoying it's temporary glory, but before long, it's going to stagnate, just like 4e did because there isn't anywhere to go with it.

The idea is to avoid having to constant scale to provide a consistent threat level

Fourth edition gave your flat +1 one to defences every other level. Nice for providing progress but meant a difference in a few levels would render characters ridiculously outclassed.

In 5e the differences between levels isn't big. A group of goblin at high-level isnt much of a threat, but it's still a threat.