Sat 14 Jan 2023, 01:24
So i finished another session with my group, and we discussed a bit on what the GM can do to influence the difficulty on the checks. One idea we came to was basing this off another ttrpg we played.
The idea is that rather than changing the difficulty of the checks, you can change the effectiveness of the outcome of the success.
Let us say you run an adventure in an old ruin, and the players come across an old text deep within of a long forgotten civilization, and a player wants to try and decipher it. Sense they have an 16 in Languages they are going to succeed, but you want to retain on some level that this is a difficult text to decipher.
When the player is going to roll, you declare that this check has "limited Effect on the outcome", basically even if they succeed, they are not going to get much out of it, only bits and snippets of information. Likewise, if the player would happen to have say a book that happens to have a cipher of the language, you can say the check has "Greater effect on the outcome", and the player can get much more information out of the ancient text.
This gives the GM an simple tool that can change the effectiveness of a players actions without adding/changing the rules too much. It might not work in combat, but it would work for most other checks.
Beware the fey!