I'm thinking of trying a new type of roll, maybe even as a standard practice. Instead of rolling a d20, roll 2d10. One issue with 5e ability checks is that your chance of success can vary widely. You'd think that someone with a Strength of 19 could always succeed on lifting something that someone with a Strength of 4 could never lift, but with DC between 6 and 17 a natural 1 fails for the former and a natural 20 succeeds for the latter. With 2d10 the range is still wide, but numbers near the mean are more likely.
A natural 2 would be a critical fail, because you can't roll a total of 1 on 2d10. Crit fails and crit hits would both be a lot rarer. Maybe that's undesirable. If so, you could actually make it a crit if either die rolls a 1 or 10. That would make crits about 4x as common, which could be fun.
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I'm thinking of trying a new type of roll, maybe even as a standard practice. Instead of rolling a d20, roll 2d10. One issue with 5e ability checks is that your chance of success can vary widely. You'd think that someone with a Strength of 19 could always succeed on lifting something that someone with a Strength of 4 could never lift, but with DC between 6 and 17 a natural 1 fails for the former and a natural 20 succeeds for the latter. With 2d10 the range is still wide, but numbers near the mean are more likely.
A natural 2 would be a critical fail, because you can't roll a total of 1 on 2d10. Crit fails and crit hits would both be a lot rarer. Maybe that's undesirable. If so, you could actually make it a crit if either die rolls a 1 or 10. That would make crits about 4x as common, which could be fun.