…half the wearer’s remaining health rounded down.

I know it sounds crazy, but I swear the emotion there was like the first cow was trying to wake up the hit cow

That isn’t crazy. Tons of social mammals do that, including cows.

A picture of a dog’s head resting in someone’s lap doesn’t mean they would act the same around a stranger. Same for cows.

I know that I can, based on experience. It is often an outline and can be revised, but having that as a starting point makes rolling with the unexpected easy enough.

Like having a route and planning on how to handle unexpected roadwork or changes in train schedules. It isn’t necessary to plan every detail or how it will pan out, just major things that need to be handled until the end of the session and there is time to hash out the details before the next.

It might be a little bumpy at first, but should speed up with a bit of practice and the practice of thinking about failure will happen more often!. Plus the more you think about it the better you will get at coming uo with ideas for failure and that will let you being back the random rolls!

Prior to rolling, think about what will happen if the roll fails or succeeds. If you are worried about failure at all, that is a good sign that failing is probably not an option. Basically, if you are able to make the decision to fudge it when it happens you had the same time frame to decide notnto risk that need to fudge in the first place.

Over time with more experience you will find ways to make failure a bump in the road to fun tims.

Fudging removes the joy of surprises and working through failures, or is a band aid to poor planning if failure isn’t an option.

You could just skip the roll, because if failure is unacceptable then it isn’t appropriate.

It is a common example of “lol you fail 5% of the time any time you do a minor task” to mock the d20 system.

I am a GM and don’t do secret checks because I don’t feel they add anything to the game. If the players know I am rolling for something, they might as well be doing the rolling because they already know something is being randomized. I want players to roll with good and bad rolls without metagaming, so I don’t see a need to hide anything from them.

The biggest benefit is that there is less tedious rolling because why randomize a lot of common tasks the players should be good at when they are not under pressure? If the characters are competent they will take care of the small things the players might not think to say every time. If the players have creative ideas, let them succeed unless there is some kind of barrier or opposition.

What that leaves is still a lot of rolling, but in circumstances where they fail cooking breakfast on a sunny morning. They might fail in a snowstorm, or on rough seas, but then they also feel rewarded when they succeed on a roll against apparent odds.

They wouldn’t get that feeling if the roll was secret.

I even come up with two or three, but as long as what they come up with works then it works.

There are always n+1 ways to solve my puzzles!

Fight Club

If you have enough crimes they apparently can’t just prosecute you for them at the same time!

Of course it only applies to some builds, like anything else. A couple extra bonuses to avoid negatives on savings throws can be nice though, if the goal is to reduce weaknesses.

Honestly, every class should get at least one skill with expertise. Maybe pick one from their class list, like a Fighter with expertise in Athletics so a Bard isn’t better than them at throwing goblins around. A Bard and Rogue would just have more.

Base humans are generalists, which by their nature won’t have something specific that stands out. +1 to each stat and I think an extra skill is nice if you like not being terrible at anything. Not great at anything is a tradeoff that other races don’t have though…

Pawsing.