How would you balance an RPG where every action by a PC is assumed successful until deterred?

How would you balance an RPG where every action by a PC is assumed successful until deterred?
As opposed to most systems, D20 especially, wherein every PC action is assumed a failure until the player beats the DC.

>every PC action is assumed a failure until the player beats the DC.

In most d20 systems, every PC action is assumed a success unless the GM has a reason to believe there is a chance for failure, hence asking for a roll against a DC. A GM shouldn't ask for rolls for every action, especially easy tasks or ones where there's no real penalty for failure.

Tell this to every GM I've ever had. Fucking
>i pick the lock
>roll
>what? is this lock special?
>no
>then why am i rolling? i've been doing this for years, am i still not able to do it consistently?

inform your GM that you're taking 20 and that your base bonus is enough that you open any lock that's not unusual.
Keep doing this every time a stupid roll is asked for until it sinks in.

>Tell this to every GM I've ever had.

Alright.

Dear every GM he's ever had.
You shouldn't ask for a roll for every action.

PS. When you ask for a roll, make it interesting. If you're just waiting for the Player to roll high enough and there's no repercussions, you're just wasting everyone's time.

Yup. This is what lots of DMs seem to miss.

>playing fantasy age with a first-time-dm who's never played any rpgs at all
>"I look around for a branch or something"
>we're in a forest
>"roll"
>I roll somewhat low but not minimum or anything
>"You don't find a single stick in the whole forest hahaha"
>this sarcastic reply is only 'funny' because it's so ridiculous that he just made that happen

GMs that pretend like their decisions are just happening without their control are the worst. Like oh, well of course you died when you fell, the tree was 150 feet tall! Yea nigga who made it that tall I wonder.

the best method I've encountered works like this:
Don't roll dice if what should happen is obvious or trivial. Most of the time 'your plan makes sense' or 'you've got time to work methodically' or 'you're competent individuals' or whatever is enough to allow PCs to succeed. Meanwhile, if what they're doing is stupid, just tell them they fail. Again, no need for rolls. Adjudicate according to common sense, and let the in-world fiction play out in ways that make sense.
You only need to roll dice when one of the following is true:
>The GM cannot make an easy judgement call.
>The PCs safety is immediately at stake if they fuck up.
You bring mechanics in when judgement calls become hard to make impartially or fairly. For example, combat (due to the high risk of character death, the emotional stakes ooc and the complexity of the situation) is difficult to adjudicate in a fair and unbiased fashion. On top of this, handling every combat maneuvre through naration and judgement will slow things down horrifically and tax the creativity of the GM. So, we can use dice mechanics as an abstraction to handle this. It's kept 'fair' because the dice are random, and everybody involved agrees to go along with the dice results.
Other game mechanics exist for similar reasons. Hit Points and Saving Throws are there so dying feels 'fair' (since impartial game mechanics did it, rather than the GM). Spellcasting mechanics are there because spells aren't real so judging how they'd work without mechanics will take far more study and creative effort than most GMs will be able to put in: game mechanics here provide easy guides for what magic can do and how it's performed.

TL:DR - Rules exist to support roleplaying at those times when the back-and-forth of 'player's stating their intent and actions, and GM responds with the results' is difficult to do fairly. THey're a supplement to the activity of roleplaying, not the driving engine of it.

>...most systems... failure until the player beats the DC

The problem with the "have you tried not playing D&D" is that people use it more often than not when playing a different system wouldn't solve anything.

Few problems discussed on this board can be solved just by switching systems, largely because at the end of the day, the system is actually only a small component to the game that's being run, and that switching systems just leads to a new veneer on the same old problems.

"Try X system" is not always bad advice, but it's not particularly helpful in a thread about problem players, or about story issues, or even alignment arguments, because even in the last case it's just a name (or a different name) for things you'll find in find in almost every other game. Even games "without" alignments still have degrees of morality to them or factions with codes of conduct, and most alignment arguments typically revolve around these two features of alignment.

Does D&D have flaws? Certainly, but most of these are remedied in far less time than it takes to learn a new system, and the idea that you should abandon a system just because something didn't work out is why we find a lot of people hopping through multiple systems hoping that a change of game will solve their problems.

Most of the whole problem with system discussion is that it's actually political in nature. Play X game or play Y game is a tactic to try to garner support for one game or dissuade people from playing another, and is largely dishonest in its lack of transparency. D&D becomes a target not because it's a bad game by any measure, but because it's popularity means people are less inclined to play other games.

As a person who has played his share of everything under the sun and now plays homebrews almost exclusively, I've really gotten tired of people claiming system superiority or inferiority when they're all just talking about the same inferior games just under different disguises.

If only they knew how amazing Duck in the Circle was.

too long; did not read