Death to the d20 Skill Check

 

There are a couple great bundles on itch.io right now:

Palestinian Relief Bundle

TTRPGs for Trans Rights - West Virginia

On the off chance that somebody reading this post in the next few weeks isn't already aware of these, well, now you know! Get in there! These are both great causes and they're asking incredibly low prices for a ton of cool stuff; both bundles contain, and either bundle is worth it just for, FIST (an immaculate work of genius, reading which is akin to touching the face of God). Highly recommended!

The second bundle also contains Songbirds 3e, which I'm reading through right now. Beautiful design, lovely writing, lots of fascinating ideas. I was, however, brought up short by this:

It's my bête noire: the d20 skill check. A completely average, untrained person can accomplish the impossible 15% of the time? And the highest bonus you can get on a check (at least from stats and skills) appears to be +9, so even the world's greatest expert at something is going to fall at a task of normal difficulty 10% of the time?

This isn't to pick on Songbirds, which is better equipped than most D&D-derived games to ameliorate the weird badness of d20 skill checks (with complications instead of outright failure, and multi-check challenges to squash the variance a bit). Songbirds just happens to be in front of me (and to have made some infelicitous choices in describing the DCs). These systems are everywhere, a crummy bit of received unwisdom that we can't seem to quit even though Traveller's beautiful 2d6 checks are right there.

In a 2d6 system, even one that has fairly small modifiers, it's possible to have a DC that's literally impossible for an average, untrained person (say, DC 12 in Stars Without Number, where an untrained character gets a -1) that a highly competent character (with, say, +3 from the relevant skill and +2 from an attribute) will succeed at more often than not. A particularly specialized character (with the Expert class ability, the Specialist focus, etc.) can do the impossible regularly even at lower levels, and at higher levels can do it almost routinely. That's cool! It gives players satisfying character definition just from a few +1s, without demanding loads of crazy bespoke special abilities.

SWN, true to its Traveller roots, is a little fussy—much more granular with skills than most OSR games. But 2d6 is still great even with a minimalist system. Look at FIST! Apart from some very narrow trait-based specialization, you've basically just got a -4 to +4 range of modifiers from attributes. An unspecialized character is only rarely going to get a full success on anything, but a specialist will usually succeed, and almost never outright fail, in their wheelhouse. Every point counts for a lot; finding time for a smoke break so you get a +2 on your next RFX roll makes a huge difference. It's all satisfying and rewarding for the player, but with plenty of room remaining for things to go horribly, unpredictably wrong (especially when you push the characters to do stuff they're not good at).