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Feb 4, 2012 -- 12:57PM, thatqueerpoet wrote:

Feb 4, 2012 -- 11:01AM, Stuu wrote:

More than ever your character is going to be defined by his attributes and nothing else. The default right now is rolling attributes and not rolling on DCs. So basically you’ve played a quarter of the game when you made your character.
Can you bash through that door? Well you rolled a high strength so yes, or no, your wizard has an 8 strength so the interior door will lock him in this room for eternity. The randomness was decided when the character was made. The barbarian never hits the door at a bad angle and the wizard can slam into it over and over with no hope of success.
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I don't think it's going to work like this. having a high ability score will give you the option of avoiding a roll. So the barbarian with 18 strength is going to be able to bust down that door, every time. That doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. The wizard with 8 strength will have to roll for it, so he might have a chance of getting through the door. When you're super strong, it makes perfect sense that every normal door you come across will bust open, when you ram into it. When you roll a 1 on a check for something that should have been pretty simple, it seems unrealistic. It ends up being described as a terribly silly failure. "the barbarian knocks on the door firmly, but to his surprise, it does not burst into a thousand pieces"

Epic failure only ever happens with people who are incompetent. Ability scores describe basic competence, so it makes sense that a reasonably high scores eliminates your possibility of failing certain tasks. 

I’m looking at what the people who are making the game are saying. It was and exaggeration on my part to say there will no longer be rolls for DCs, but they are pushing in that direction. My basic issue is still valid. The randomness of the game is much more front end. High stats you win, low stats you loose. Not having much in the way of skills to compensate adds to this point.

Maybe I’m not understanding what they are saying, but if it’s just a “gimme putt” kind of thing why do they talk about it so much? It’s obvious they are trying to move away from rolling by how they respond to questions.

Parts of a transcript from DDXP 2012
www.enworld.org/forum/news/317494-semina...

Monte: We wanted to distill down the essence of D&D. We wanted to make sure that the ability scores and their modifiers had a big influence. Looking at all the editions of the game, you can easily see that ability scores are really important. Often times, people will use ability scores to help them define their character, or they'll have an idea for a character and then look at the scores first to make them fit that idea.

A couple of days ago I talked a little bit about how we want the core mechanic of the game to be the interaction between the DM and the player. And one of the great tools for that is the ability score. So what we want is to empower DMs and players so that if you want to attempt to do something "I want to open the door" then the DM doesn't have to even have you roll, he can just look, see you have a 17 strength and says "Yeah, you burst through that door". We want to get past some of the mundane rolls and not tie up a lot of table time with that and move on to the more interesting stuff and the table narrative.

Bruce: An example I saw yesterday was a rogue going into a room and looking for traps. You can describe what you're doing and roleplay what you're doing. If he says I look in the jar and I know there's a gem in the jar, I'm not going to have him roll. However, if something is more hidden, like a secret compartment on the shelf I would look at their intelligence and see if he can just automatically find it or if he's looking in the exact right place. However, if he's doing that check in the middle of some other stressor like fighting, then I'd have him roll.

Rob: Earlier this week I had some players fighting some kobolds in the room. One of the guys wanted to jump over a pit, he had a 15 strength so I let him just do it - it wasn't that big of a jump and it sped up combat. It's very liberating to be able to do that kind of thing and just keep the flow going.
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Greg: Talking about ability scores leads easily into skills. What are you guys tossing around for skills and their uses?

Bruce: Looking at the playtest characters here, you might have noticed that a class or a theme might have given you a bonus to skill, but you didn't have a skill list. Normally if you were to call for a check, you would just call for the ability score - like a dexterity check for sneaking up. But if you have a class or character feature that gives you a bonus to sneak, you would add that in. There are a lot of different expressions for skills. Trained, sneaking at full speed (stealth twice). Lots of options.
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Monte: We're not just giving more power to the DM, we're giving more power to the players. In a way we're giving more power to the players, and not just the characters. We're giving the player the ability to come out with his crazy ideas and say I want to do this. And instead of giving the DM lots of concrete rules, give him rules for making calls and keeping the action and roleplay going. So when a player goes I want to jump up onto this table and kick the magic helmet off the monsters head, the DM will know that he can just let it happen because of the ability score and/or require a roll for some of the things that are going on.

Feb 4, 2012 -- 5:59PM, Newfie_Keir wrote:

Okay, so lets say the DC for a door was 18. Without houserule, a fighter could break that down. With houserule, he'd have to roll a 14 strength check.

The DCs wouldn't line up.  

The thing is I don't believe we will have ability score modifiers like 3e or 4e.   A 13 would be a +3 and a 17 would be a +7 if you rolled.  It is a +1 for every point over 10 and a -1 for every point lower than 10.  

So you would only have to roll a 10 or higher if you had an 18 strength and faced a DC of 18 if you didn't want to use the passive check.