(in D&D at least)
Nat 20? Wait, how are you going to roll a 20 on a d12?
Oh, wrong game.
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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It's technically homebrew, but basically every table Ive played at will give you a little bonus if you roll a 20 for a check and a little negative if you roll a 1. But we still kept that a 20 does not necessarily mean an auto success and a 1 is not necessarily an auto failure. You still need to beat the DC
Agreed, auto success on a skill check nerfs challenges.
If the DC is so high that the PC doesn't succeed with a 20, it seems too random to give it to them.
Then again, it depends on the situation: a nat 20 trying to convince the penny pinching tavern owner to give you a discount seems like fun even if the DC should be infinite; but when dealing with something story related, I'd stick a little closer to the rules.
But at the same time, if the DC is so high that no roll could succeed, then they shouldn’t be rolling for it in the first place
I agree, and if I think an DC might be too high for a player, I just ask them first “Wait, what's your ?”
You're right, but I don't know most of my PCs stats. If the DC on a lock is 21, I'd expect a rogue might make it, but another PC who has never picked a lock wouldn't.
Worse! At just level 7, a rogue is likely to have +11 and Advantage to pick a lock, which combined with Reliable Talent means they can't fail a DC 21, and have a 1/2 chance of beating a DC 26.
So if you want there to be uncertainty and challenge, you have to make the DC more like 25-28. Making it all the more likely that the lock should be impossible to the rest of the party.
If I wanted to formally add ability check crits I would make them add/subtract something from your result. Not automatically pass/fail, because the consequences of that are bonkers.
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This is the way
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They absolutely do, and the bonus effects are listed in the description of each skill action. Oh. you mean in D&D. washes hands
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They do in PF2e. And it rocks
🤓 Pedant mode activated 🤓
🤓 Erm, ackshually, a natural 20 only increases the degree of success by one. This means, for example, if someone rolls a 20 on an attack roll, the total with modifiers is 28, and the defender's AC is 30, the attack will be bumped up from a failure to a normal success, not a critical success. 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
To be even more pedantic: the original poster's meme says skill checks don't crit, not that nat 20s on skills are a critical success. Most skill checks in PF2e have a critical success tier. Thus jagermo was correct when they said that skill checks do crit in PF2e.
That being said, you are correct about how the whole tiering mechanic works and a nat 20 not always being a critical success. :)
Just because a Nat 20 isn’t necessarily the cause, doesn’t mean that skill checks don’t crit.
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D&D has all the money in the entire hobby, basically, and they still make terrible design decisions like this.
Rolling a nat 20 and getting a crit is the jackpot of d&d mechanics. Don't design a system where sometimes you hit the jackpot but don't win anything. That's an objectively bad choice to make.
I 90% agree. I think most of the opposition to this comes from people exhausted with habitual boundary-pushers who think that a nat 20 means they can get away with defying the laws of reality.
Like, no, a nat20 persuasion does not convince the merchant to give you half his stock and all the money in the register... He would go broke and he's got a family to support, along with his own survival that your nat20 does not also convince him to stop caring about.
But at the end of the day, a lot of GMs who are sick of that need to be sent the dictionary page for the word "no." The occasional use of it really does improve the quality of the game, and I'm sure plenty of players will appreciate not letting aforementioned boundry pushers continue to waste time on impossible pursuits that do nothing to move the game forward.
I've seen this easily solved by assuming the 20 succeedes but the DM decides how exactly.
"Okay. The dragon loves you know. They realize you have their old lover's eyes. You remember this too. Old tales in your family that you thought were a joke. You are apparently related. And they do love you now."
If you can't trust your players to act like adults and show some basic maturity. That's a different issue.
This is also a great way to handle it; malicious compliance/monkey paw. Makes for some humorous moments.
And yeah, if a player is constantly having to be told no, a talk may need to be had, and if it can't be resolved, they probably need to go. It's also a reason why Session 0's are so important; talking out what's expected of the campaign both on the part of the players and what the GM has in mind.
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"No" needs to be said before the roll, IMO. Then If the player insists on doing something impossible anyway, just role-play the failure. With that said, actions that are in a narrow sense impossible can still have positive outcomes and if there's the potential for that then I'd say roll for it. The proverbial dragon seduction attempt can still possibly flatter a dragon with a big ego enough to benefit the PC even if it doesn't get the PC laid.
D&D is that way, though. Every time you see a natural 20 for anything that isn't an attack does not automatically succeed unless people are using homegrown, which they often are.
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Rule of cool
If something sounds fun it’s happening at my table.
If you roll a 20 on persuasion or something we’re going to have fun, but I’m not turning characters into literal gods (though that did happen one game)
Fuck you, Im dm so I get to pick what does and doesnt crit >:(
Exactly. Why not make them crit? It's going to be up to the DM anyway to define what a "critical success" means on a skill check. There's no hard rule like the extra damage that comes with crit successes on attacks. The DM gets to choose what a critical success on a skill check actually produces. The DM can easily just make sure the crit success isn't game breaking.
Your players are in an audience with the king. The bard tries to be funny and tries to convince the king to give him his crown and hand the kingdom over to him. Actually making the bard the new king would break the game. But maybe a critical fail means the bard gets sent to the dungeon to be tortured for daring to make such a request. A critical success means the king will grant the bard one "wish," ie, any reasonable single reasonable request that is within the king's power.
The whole situation is fully in the DM's power.
Ok, but if the 20 doesn't succed, why did you let them roll in the first place?
I… Don't? Is that so magical?
Like, if something would need a DC 25 Acrobatics check, I ask the player “Wait, how high is your character's Acrobatics? +3? Ah no sorry, you can't do that.”
Maintaining the illusion? Not revealing the (impossible) DC?
Because I don't have everyone's modifier for every skill, ability, saving throw, and attack memorized off the top of my head, nor do I have magical foresight into whether or not they will choose to use abilities that would add more additional points on top of those modifiers.
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In addition to what the others have said, I think degrees of failure are often a fun thing to introduce whether they are in the rules or not (I'll assume D&D 5E). It might be that a 20 with your +3 athletics isn't enough to completely leap over that huge gap, but you manage to grab a handhold a few metres below the edge. You'll have to take a turn or two to climb up, but you're okay. The cleric's roll of 3 with a -1 athletics, on the other hand, sees him plummeting to the bottom and taking a heap of fall damage
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They do if the DM says they do, y'all get way too hard for the rules as written.
Not to mention which game you're actually playing.
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They do at my table. Because it's more fun, god damn it!
Taking a 10 is a strategic choice. You can automatically succeed because the DC is >10, or you can roll for it and try to get a critical success that comes with a random fringe bonus (such as extra XP, or making an action more permanent; like you crit a lockpicking check which just breaks the lock so it can't be relocked) but also with the chance of critically failing (you broke the lock and now it can't be unlocked!).
It also allows you to maybe succeed even if your stats would not let you. The DC is 50. With your bonuses, even a 20 would not beat the DC. But maybe fate intervened and you got lucky as fuck. Disco Elysium uses this a lot. Hell, there's a whole sidequest locked behind a door that can only be opened if you roll a double 6.
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*in the core rules.
If you want to homebrew it then go for it.
On page 242 of the Dungeon Master Guide 2014, it describes crit successes and fails as an optional rule.
As optional as multiclassing and feats.
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put bards in garbage can. hm makes sense.
I like the idea of extraordinary luck given to players. Giving everything they do a 5% chance of incredible success no matter the difficulty is such a small tweak to let some really hilarious, or awesome things play out. And they will take more risks knowing there is potentially a great reward. How do you balance this? 5% chance of terrible failure no matter how easy. No more automatic success. Sometimes shit just happens and when it happens, it really hurts.
And also, you can just make regular failure more punishing or even make success a monkey's paw thing: "You want to seduce the lich?! already rolling dice "No, you fail. In your attempt to seduce the lich, his aura of evil has made you impotent. Permanently." OR "YES NAT TWENTY!! DM deadpan for 10 seconds, then "I have a fetish for fingers. I'll give you the information you want in exchange for a few those delectable, dainty fingers, half-elf" (Some temporary debuffs that can heal, and they get to skip the fetch quest)
They do if it's funny. Fails too.
Depends what system you're playing
20 peasants stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and attempt to jump across. On average, should one succeed?
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Acrobatics does. Add an extra flip.
...If we fall off the rope bridge because you did a backflip I'm haunting you though.
I have zero regrets about my sick-ass backflip.
If the players are demanding wild results, especially if they're the kind to roll unprompted, then sure.
But in my experience, it's usually just a little flourish or a small bonus, which I think is fine.
And if the issue is that a nat 20 doesn't guarantee success, technically, sure, but I'd be more annoyed being asked to make a pointless roll. I know there are reasons, like a hidden target number, or other characters being able to do it, but in general, I'd rather just hear "no" than go through a pointless check.
They can’t crit, but success can be determined by numerical thresholds that the dm sets, and they just so happen to align with rolling a 12 for success, 20 for glorious accomplishment, and 1 for terrible snafu.
The problem with DND¹ is that it's a wargame cosplaying as a role playing game.
We're not recreating historical battles. Let the players (and the DM) have fun.
1.— It boggles the mind that one of the early failed experiments at making role playing games (by slightly modifying the rules of pre-existing wargames) is still somehow the standard.
Sure, it was one of the main inspirations for the genre... but there's a good reason we're not still driving Ford Model Ts.
D&D today is almost an unrecognizable game from its first incarnation in the 70's, though. I'm not really seeing the parallels to war games other than the fact that you have the option of using a battle map in combat, which is hardly unique to D&D.
To borrow your analogy, no one drives the Model T today, but cars still have 4 tires and a steering wheel.
It's a game designed around math, combat, and dungeon crawling, not around roleplaying.
The objective isn't to have fun roleplaying, but to roll the right numbers to maximise damage to the enemy. Any real fun comes from ignoring the rules and homebrewing.
The car might have gotten a few coats of paint over the years and maybe more ergonomic seats, but it's still the same old chassis and engine underneath.
There are many games built around the concept of getting the players to have fun roleplaying, but DND has never been one of them, and if it ever became one it'd no longer be DND.
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