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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • hedgehog@ttrpg.networktoRPGMemes @ttrpg.networkTasha's alignment
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    5 months ago

    By that description, the vast majority of people are evil. Well, both evil and good, since most people at least occasionally do things that aren’t in their self-interest to help others. But primarily evil, thanks to the inaction clause on the evil side and nothing comparable on the good side.

    They’re also more evil the more educated they are, since they’re more aware of ways that people are suffering harm that they could potentially abate.

    For example, if you are not homeless and you are aware that some people are homeless and a storm is coming, if you don’t help them all find shelter - to the extent of bringing them into your own home even if it means you end up not having a place to sleep - by your definition, you’re evil.

    I’m not a fan of that definition, either for D&D or anything else, but if it works for your table, great!


  • The DM doesn’t necessarily have your modifiers memorized and asking what they are every time slows down play. The DM also likely doesn’t want to share the DC. The easiest fair solution is to always ask for a roll (assuming it’s possible, generically, to succeed or fail) and to then consider passes to be passes. If you only avoid asking for a roll when you know the player will make it, then you’re likely to be biased toward the players whose characters you’re more familiar with.

    So a 1 should always be a fail.

    RAW this is not the case. From the DMG:

    Rolling a 20 or a 1 on an ability check or a saving throw doesn’t normally have any special effect. However, you can choose to take such an exceptional roll into account when adjudicating the outcome. It’s up to you to determine how this manifests in the game.

    My experience with having nat 1s being auto fails and is that this results in characters who are “erratically … tragically incompetent” as well as taking away player agency (Nick Brown on rpg.stackechange explained this well). Maybe you and your players like a game like that, but I certainly don’t.


  • It’s the second shittiest common house rule, assuming you mean that if someone with a +15 bonus rolls a nat 1 on a DC 5 check, they automatically fail (possibly with a worse effect than if someone with a -1 rolled a 2).

    On the other hand, there are other ways to have crit fails on skill checks that are much more palatable, like:

    • having a slightly worse effect when someone rolls a nat 1 and would have failed anyway
    • having a worse effect when someone’s total is 1 or lower
    • having a worse effect when rolls are failed by certain thresholds, like by 10 or more (potentially, but not necessarily, only when the roll was a nat 1)

    (The worst common house rule, btw, is crit miss tables for additional effects beyond an automatic miss when you roll a 1 on an attack roll.)