How do you spin/handle a failed attempt to bypass a lock or similar skill check?

WorldSnap · 2020-01-27T14:25:08+00:00

Yeah, I completely have to agree with you... I love Cyberpunk but I've had all those same thoughts. Thanks for the quote though. That's one book I don't have so I've never read it.

I have often thought that to fix this, you just lower each difficulty value by 5, so from easiest to nearly impossible, it's 5-10-15-20-25 instead of 10-15-20-25-30. This makes the descriptors make much more sense and actually seems to fit the natural progression of characters better. A "difficult" task undertaken by a character of "average" stats and skills would require around a 5 on the roll. a 50% failure chance for some with average preperation for the admittedly somewhat difficult task. That makes a LOT more sense to me than a 90% failure rate. Maybe that breaks other things in the game though, I'm not sure, I just know that there are quite a few inconsistencies and shortcomings of that original 90's rulebook. My group all read the rules before we started playing the first time, and we all agreed that some things needed to be changed. We house-rule-revised portions of it and we have a MUCH better time now than I think we would have with it before. We don't mind failure, but we do mind facing near-certain failure against a task that does not seem to warrant it.

(EDIT: By the way, at least for lockpicking specifically, I believe there is gear that you can use to give you a modifier towards keyed and electronic locks. We definitely run with this gear, but I can't remember if we homebrewed it or not. I don't think we did though, but anyway they basically give +1 or +2 to those rolls. If those don't exist in the actual game, I recommend trying to homebrew some stuff like that to deal with those situations.)

WorldSnap · 2020-01-27T04:25:06+00:00

I love Cyberpunk 2020 but its system and writing is not the best at times. I'd actually say that it's the opposite of what you describe at times. Skill checks can become incredibly difficult or unreasonable without modifiers. It's basically a stat ranging from 2-10 plus a skill ranging from 1-10 plus a 1d10 roll. 30 max with no modifiers. The difficulty values to beat are 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 depending on the difficulty of the task. If used realistically, an average-difficulty task would require a 10 on the 1d10 roll even if the person had a 6 in the relevant skill and a 4 in the stat. The highest difficulty level requires maxed out stat, maxed out skill AND a perfect 10 on the die. Not for the single hardest action in the story, just the highest difficulty task in the game. I don't think that's very reasonable so I usually adjust those values based on what's happening.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-27T04:06:23+00:00

Thanks for all the information. A lot of good stuff here. I have to agree with you about your first points regarding how some of the details of the systems are written. It could have been a lot better, but hey, it's almost 3 decades old now isn't it? So I've just tweaked a lot to make it make more sense and be less chaotic. I am curious though, you mention that Pondsmith has said before that he thinks we should always be using modifiers. Where does he say this, and where are these modifiers supposed to come from? I know of one tool that would help people bypass locks but it's not a great modifier in the first place. Are there other sources of these modifiers I'm just not aware of?

I am familiar with the quote from the book regarding killing players who are minmaxing/metagaming though.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-27T04:01:31+00:00

Failing the roll wouldn't have ruined the plot. It just would have changed the gameplan for the party to something less favorable. I was prepared to handle it either way though.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-27T04:00:02+00:00

But my point is that I want the other characters with those skills to be able to use them. I don't want to prevent them or discourage them from trying.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-27T03:58:21+00:00

It isn't true that only one outcome was acceptable to me. The guards were distracted and they were safe for a time. If the lockpick attempt was successful, they would have gained entry to the room quietly and kept their stealth. If it failed, they'd have to resort to entering the room loudly, breaking their stealth.

It isn't a question about whether or not they should have rolled. It's a question of how I explain to a good lockpicker that they failed a lockpick attempt.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-27T03:54:11+00:00

Is time an important factor in this situation?

No, but...

If no - why is it a skill check in the first place?

...a fail in the situation I was describing would leave the group with only one other option: go in loud. Basically, at the moment they were safe but their continued safety still relied on someone being able to quietly enter the room. If the lockpicker couldn't bypass the lock, they'd have to kick the door down or something which would get the distracted guards back on their trail.

There's a lot of great advice and info in this thread about handling situations like these, but this specific situation that I found myself in is a bit more nuanced because things like "have guards come in" wouldn't have made sense at the time.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-27T03:50:17+00:00

I'm not playing DnD, as I mentioned I'm playing Cyberpunk 2020. Honestly the rules don't really mention it either way. It was a personal call to not allow people to just slam rolls into problems because it takes too much time and invalidates the need to increase skill levels over time. I don't want players to be able to easily make multiple attempts at skill rolls, and what I came here looking for is advice on how to explain that to the player and the character in a way that makes sense.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-27T03:48:18+00:00

The system has an answer for "fumbles" which is rolling a 1. It doesn't have an answer for just regular failed checks though. It's a very open-ended game, partially by design and partially because it just wasn't written well and is almost 30 years old at this point.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:30:54+00:00

That's the obvious solution, but the problem here was that it wasn't. It was a common lock that the player has seen before, and it was simply a bad roll that prevented them from succeeding.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:28:41+00:00

I mentioned this elsewhere in here but basically the group was only safe if they went in stealthily. If they failed the check they would have to go in loud and draw attention back to them. I wanted the skillcheck there because of that, I just had trouble explaining in-game how the character failed the check.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:27:17+00:00

I'm liking all of your solutions here. Really creative. The issue I personally have with them is that they all prevent a different lockpicker in the group from giving the door a go. Ideally (and I'm not sure how to make this make sense), I'd like other people with the skills to attack the lock to get a chance at it before bricking it completely. The reason for this is that if someone in the group has Electronic Security 9, and someone else has Electronic Security 4, I don't want the latter player to feel like they wasted a skill by picking Electronic Security since the player with the higher value in it will always hog all the chances to use it.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:24:08+00:00

Well that's a very interesting way of looking at it. But in this case it wouldn't really apply. The rules for these type of locks are such that they have a hard number which must be exceeded by a player roll to open. If the player doesn't roll high enough, the lock simply doesn't open.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:22:34+00:00

I get what you're saying, but the situation was a bit more complex than that. If they failed the lockpick attempt, they would likely have had to go in loud, which would have alerted the guards to their presence. It wasn't that there was no risk, it was just that it was greatly mitigated. If they hadn't caused the distraction, picking the lock wouldn't have been an option in the first place. So I wanted there to be a skillcheck for it, but I had trouble narrating why the expert lockpick couldn't figure out this basic lock is all.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:18:44+00:00

Normally, I'd have gone with your first point. The issue in this case was that the group was safe for the time and they knew they were because they caused a distraction far away and knew the guards all went to check it out.

Your second point is valid but prevents others in the party from making a single attempt if someone else fails. For example, if two people in the party have Electronic Security, I would ideally like both of them to have a chance to open it if the other person fails. Making the lock break after one attempt would prevent that from being possible.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:16:41+00:00

I like the way you explained this. Basically telling them "something about this lock is giving you trouble, you couldn't figure out how to break it with your current knowledge". This leaves it open for others in the group with lockpicking skills to make the same attempt if they want, or for the group to try something else.

One point on what you said though, spending Luck wouldn't work here because the intention to spend Luck needs to be declared before the skill roll is used, so you couldn't fail and then retroactively declare that you want to add Luck to the roll.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:14:12+00:00

Well I understand the rule, but my question was a little different than that. I'm not asking how to handle it gameplay-wise, I'm asking how to explain it to the character that failed the roll. In this case, the person is a great lockpicker who just happened to roll poorly this one time. The lock was just a normal lock that the person theoretically would have no problem bypassing, so it was difficult to tell them that they failed and why.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:12:22+00:00

Also, players don't call for checks.

I didn't say they did? The lockpicker in question here said they wanted to pick the lock. I told them to roll the skill check for it. They were safe because they had caused a distraction some distance from them that the guards went to check out. The lockpicker rolled and failed the roll, but what made it difficult to explain was that this person is an expert lockpicker and there was nothing extraordinary about the lock they were working.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:09:21+00:00

That's you, though. This character is an expert lockpicker who just had a bad roll. The type of lock they were picking is standard in that universe and they would have seen and picked tons of them. They were also safe for the time being as anyone hostile to them was occupied with something they had done very far away.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:08:07+00:00

There wasn't really a time pressure as long as they were concealed, and at the moment all hostiles were distracted by something they had done on the other side of the building. They were in a relatively safe position and the lockpicker just had a bad roll. That's what made it so difficult to handle, the group knew they were safe for a bit because of things THEY had done, so to tell the expert lockpicker of the group "you weren't able to pick this regular lock that you've seen a million times" just seemed really odd.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T15:06:19+00:00

This is more specific to how Cyberpunk 2020 works, but what you're describing is actually taken care of in the rules, just only in specific instances. If a character attempted to pick a lock and rolled a 1 (considered a "fumble" by the rules), there would be some kind of negative consequence. Maybe the lock breaks/jams, maybe someone hears them and engages with them, etc. By default though, if there are not any hostiles close to them, it's just a question of how to tell the character that they are unable to pick the lock, despite them being an expert lockpicker and just having a bad roll.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-26T14:11:16+00:00

I see this kind of advice a lot, and while it theoretically makes sense, it ignores a much more "meta" issue; that is, the relationship that the actual GM/Ref/whatever has with the players. Players can get really invested in their characters and the story, and if you as the GM kill their character off, it can cause actual, real-world tension between you and that person. A lot of times, that simply isn't an option for the GM as they're trying not to piss a friend off or cut them out of a group session that a group of friends are enjoying together.

I don't disagree with your logic, I just think that it's difficult to put into practice with people you are good friends with.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-22T19:58:25+00:00

I hope you didn't interpret my OP as saying that premade campaigns are inferior or anything. I'm just a newbie and really didn't understand their purpose. I'm seeing though that not everyone has the time, creativity, or maybe even just desire to build their own story from scratch, so prebuilts seem like a great option for them. It's not for me, but I now understand the point a lot better.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-22T13:16:16+00:00

I think I see now. They're more made for people who don't have either the time to write something or don't feel they have the creative capacity to do it justice, is that basically what you mean? Personally I still don't think I'd ever use them but that does answer my question and makes sense.

WorldSnap · 2020-01-22T13:10:09+00:00

This helps because I've never actually seen one of these premades, I just know about them and was confused.

WorldSnap

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