How do you create fair encounters without knowing your player's character's stats? 🤨

Think of it from their point of view though. They want to try and do something. For me to just flat out tell them "no, there's no possible way" is discouraging and robs them of autonomy. Obviously for crazy extreme circumstances I won't let them, like "let me convince the king to abdicate to me!" type things. But if I think the DC should be 25 or something I'm not gonna bother wasting my time calculating what the theoretical maximum could be for the roll because I genuinely cannot know. The player can always do things I don't expect or use other players' things to help. For reasonable but implausible things I'll allow rolls even if a nat 20 wouldn't work because I'm not calculating what a nat 20 could theoretically be. Plus, I often give people little flavor benefits for nat 20s even if they don't have mechanical success.

Throwing whatever you please at them. It's fair because they're informed of the risks and given opportunities to adjust their plans.

20 peasants stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and attempt to jump across. On average, should one succeed?

In casual play you can rely on veteran players to know their stats. If they're the type to lie intentionally then they can leave the table. If they're making mistakes then maybe something goes a little too easily, oh well. The best DMs i had didn't give a shit and focused on rewarding players for learning.

This. You only need dice if the odds are dicey.

Hello fellow Pathfinder!

On page 242 of the Dungeon Master Guide 2014, it describes crit successes and fails as an optional rule. As optional as multiclassing and feats.

Dating back to 3rd critical skill checks in D&D suck because a lot of skills are written as pass/fail. Example: picking a lock. If we want to add criticals, a 1 breaks the lock; mostly okay, with the long acknowledged fringe problem of experts being incompetent 5% of the time. What does a natural 20 get? I adore opportunities to be creative, but there’s not a lot better than, “You did it perfectly.” A regular success earns that according to the rules, I don’t want to take it away. A speech about how cool and ninja the PC is can come off pretty cringey to me. The correct mechanical answer would be to let the 20 roll over to the next check because the PC’s in the zone or whatever. Not awful, but it doesn’t directly reward the player right when they rolled the 20, which is the occurrence we’re trying to incentivize. I’m also rewriting several rules at this point. I personally don’t mind pass/fail rolls in D&D or other games. Seeing the highest possible number on my die is inherently satisfying to me. It’s saving throws where a 20 or 1 really pulls at my heartstrings. 5e has critical saves as written and they work okay. Meanwhile, PF2e baked degrees of success into everything. On a crit fail they break the lock, on a fail they leave traces of their fruitless efforts, on a success they get one success toward opening the lock while scuffing it up a little, and on a crit success they get two successes and leave the lock looking pristine. The players don’t feel cheated when they get a normal success and scuff up the lock. The 20 has some reward for most characters. The 1 has a setback, even a reasonable setback for an expert with a +25 trying to open the DC 10 lock on Grandma’s rickety shed. I really love it.

While no individual peasant ought make it across, im pretty sure on average, one in twenty people can jump the Grand Canyon

> Many of them can be re-rolled later once you get more skill points. It calls these white checks. Specifically they'll unlock again once you level up the skill or stat they're associated to. You can also find or buy dice that'll unlock some of them. > Others are one and done unless you reload or start a new game. It calls these _red_ checks. And they're often much more fun than white checks, _especially_ when you fail them.

>You can also find or buy dice that'll unlock some of them. Those actually *do* something?

> don't let the country bumpkin make Arcana checks about monsters he's never seen Why not? It could be fun! Of course non-critical rolls would be useless, but on a critical failure they could convince the whole party that dragons can't see movement, and on a critical success they could buy mere chance figure out where its voonerables are (it's a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!)... > or let the stick figure try to punch down a wall Again, why not? _All_ rolls, they take a bit of damage; critical failure, they break their arm or hand, _and_ manage to dislodge a brick which starts a comically unlikely and _extremely_ noisy Rube Goldberg chain reaction which ends up waking up and alerting all the guards; critical success, they hit the hidden button that opens the secret door (in _another_ wall), starting a whole new subquest.

They do! [Each one](https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Dice) reopens a different set of white checks, and reduces their difficulty!

Yep, those are all great responses. I learned a lot. Funwise, it seems like a good solution would be "failure... but!" approach. So the player have at least some reward for doing the best they can even if it's not enought to clear the chalange completely.

It has the same mouthfeel as a crit, I want my wildest dreams to come true every time I see that two zero

The problem with DND¹ is that it's a wargame cosplaying as a role playing game. We're _not_ recreating historical battles. Let the players (and the DM) have fun. --- 1.— It boggles the mind that one of the early failed experiments at making role playing games (by slightly modifying the rules of pre-existing wargames) is still somehow the standard. Sure, it _was_ one of the main inspirations for the genre... but there's a good reason we're not still driving Ford Model Ts.

Once in a blue moon, an impossible check impress a scale of difficulty on the players. D&D example: a player with a high bonus attempts an Arcana check to figure out an enchantment and rolls well, up to a natural 20. I let the players have their moment of joy. Then I make a big deal of telling them they don’t have any idea what’s up with this enchantment. I really talk up how weird/complicated/confusing/impenetrable the enchantment is. I’d be trying to prompt emotions I want the players and PC to share. Frustration, inadequacy. The players viscerally know they need to try a different approach. And because I gave the check a decent chunk of game time, it has more narrative weight. A back and forth skill check is heftier in the player’s minds than a quick monologue on how the task is impossible and that trying is impossible. Instead, I let them try and they failed despite doing well. It’s a niche scenario, I admit. Most of the time just don’t ask for the check.

I don't think I've ever need more information than character level and a vague sense of whether that character/player is more or less effective in combat/social encounters than usual to make them. I definitely don't need to worry about whether they've got expertise in history, that's something they can bring up when I ask them for a history check

Fuck you, Im dm so I get to pick what does and doesnt crit >