There’s no crits on skill checks in the book. Play how you want
Crits on skill checks ruin the game because nothing becomes impossible, which ruins the story. You shouldn’t e.g. be able to jump infinitely high by rolling Athletics until a 20 comes out, assuming you want your world to, you know, have prisons in it.
Critical successes and failures can easily exist while still having the impossible be impossible, that’s the DMs job
Player rolls 20 on an intimidation check despite their roleplay being more awkward than intimidating? Critical success, because it’s funny and entertaining usually to do so and it’s theoretically possible anyway.
Player rolls 20 on a strength check to lift a giant iron gate? You did a really good job of trying, but no, you’re not strong enough to lift something 100x your size and weight
Thats literally not a critical success though. Your example of doing critical successes right is not having critical successes
Nat 20 on trying to convince the king to give you his throne? He’s amused and either hires you as a jester, or let’s you have a literal replica of his chair.
I see Nat 20’s on skillchecks as “something good happens, but if it’s impossible then the good thing might not be what you expected”
In other words of what others have already said, a crit skill check isn’t making the impossible possible, it’s the best possible outcome you could hope for. Just like how a crit on a thing you can’t hit is the best you could hope for. You don’t instantly kill it, you just get a very good shot in.
You don’t convince the guard to let you go free, but maybe you manage to get him to believe you’re inept enough that he can go to the other room and have a nap.
I really like Pathfinder 2e’s graduated success model, where how much you beat the DC by matters. A crit bumps you up a success bracket, so if you roll a 20 on a DC 100 check, you still fail but it’s not an abject flop. It could be a success at great cost, or a failure without as great a penalty, and the move tells you which.
While I agree that rules should be used more as guidelines, the last campaign I was in allowed crits on skill checks, and it my my lock (built partially around filling a “face” role, as everyone else min-maxed for combat) and I felt absolutely useless.
Our negative modifier int and cha barbarian player had a lot of lucky rolls, and thus was better than a cha based character with proficiencies in all the speaking skills…
I often felt left out of all aspects of the game really. Lock spell slots are limited, but is made up for by the short rests… If your party ever takes them. Bah.
That sounds like a few problems and there should at least be a discussion with the group about expectations before future campaigns.
But the inverse of a skill based build getting a lot of lucky combat rolls and outdoing the combat character is possible in the book. A good DM can and should mitigate skill crits but is kinda stuck on combat ones.
Regardless, I’m sorry you had a crap time.
Not my first campaign, I started in 2E with my mom as the DM lol.
It was everyone else’s first time, including the DM.
Our first session zero had characters created and we were going to run the mines of phandelver. Except the entire party was evil aligned, and thought that meant they should just go straight murderhobo on anything that breathed, and ganged up on my gnome illusionist and murdered him. House rule, no evil aligned characters. Re rolled to lock with being a face in mind, based on the party composition - I decided to handle whatever hole popped up in the party, and just roll with it. I’m the type of player who has half a dozen character sheets generated just because they like character building, and being table top as opposed to a video game, backstories were relevant to the overall plot (in theory)
But whatever, had some fun, enjoyed the experience overall. Glad to see people interested in the game.
Just… the the player of the Barbarian had his own negative INT modifier to work with, if you catch my drift. No one else needed consistent help with the simple math involved of low level combat (and we got wasted the whole time, he didn’t drink for religious reasons) and no one else consistently made stupid decisions that were also completely out of character after like the second session. Yeah, there can be a bit of a learning curve, especially separating character from player, but it got pretty decent and OOC chatter had a gesture associated to it, so people would pop in and out of character and make meta commentary OOC to good comedic effect, enhancing the overall experience even though a poor decision was made, it was in character - at a certain point someone made the gesture and just said “I’m so sorry,” long story short a diplomatic situation that was being handled peacefully was interrupted by a consistently tardy wizard who was well educated, but lacking in wordly experience, and raised on tales of romanticized monster slaying and a very black and white view of morality threw everyone’s favorite problem sovler - fireball. We all cracked up as soon as he said sorry out loud. Poor tactical decision, completely in character, well accepted.
I’d do it again, just might not invite the barbarian and another person (attendance issues).
The rules as written, tell you not to follow the rules as written. Play the way everyone at your table wants to play. The basic rules are a guide for if you can’t make up anything you like better.
The rules as written, tell you not to follow the rules as written.
So… We should follow the rules as written?
That’s one of the many reasons 5e is complete trash.
