I personally think a better system would have been to incorporate party members helping and allow their bonuses to stack with the original member trying to succeed at the ability check.
IE, getting back to the strength check against a door at DC21. That character with an 11 STR would need his friends to add their STR modifiers to help succeed. If the whole party was comprised of characters with 11 STR or less I guess the door would never get open though. :)
Its a crap rule and 99% of the arguments for it being good are the DM can fix it. Good rules don't require the DM to fix it.
This argument makes no sense. It is already a DM's responsibility to adjudicate the results of an action. This new playtest rule simply establishes that there no point to make a roll if it is impossible to succeed or to fail. As far as I know, It has always been how the game is intuitively played at most tables, if not all.
For your reference, the playtest rule states: "The DM determines whether a d20 Test is warranted in any given circumstance. To be warranted, a d20 Test must have a target number no less than 5 and no greater than 30."
The problem is that they've defined it by the end result and not the roll itself. If a L20 character with double proficiency rolls with Advantage, they'd have the equivalent of a bonus of +20 (2x Proficiency of 6, ability modifier of +5, Advantage gives the equivalent of a little over +3), so scoring 31 is about a 45% chance, yet , by RAW, they can't roll for it. Someone who doesn't have proficiency and got the lowest score possible would slightly struggle with 4 (ability score modifier of -4, Disadvantage gives -3) because they have to roll at least a 11 and yet doesn't even need to roll to succeed - despite having roll higher to succeed than the guy that isn't allowed to roll since it's too hard.
If they were going to mandate when a roll is not necessary (not that I think that they should, I don't think they should be mandating so much as offering advice on things like this), it should have been based on what roll was needed, not on what the DC was.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I guess you could say my thoughts on it are: what we have now is flexible enough that nobody's day is getting ruined by it. It's easy for people to do their own variations, and they frequently do. Encoding automatic success and failure into the rules would complicate that. The same goes for changing the rules regarding when to roll an ability check. We really don't need to change any of the rules here. If there is some big problem going on with how ability checks operate right now, I'm not aware of it.
As a counterpoint, do you anticipate the new playtest rule of automatic success and failure to be such a problem that it will ruin anybody's day? You mentioned about people doing variations, which they can still do using the new rules (such as players rolling blind). As I have continuously pointed out in this thread, in reality, there is essentially no difference between the two rules. I know every table is different, but I honestly cannot remember the last time that a natural 20 was not a success at a table that I was a player, a DM, or a spectator.
To address your second point of why make the change if there is no difference between the two rules, it is important to remember the big picture here. This new playtest rule is a consequence of unifying the three types d20 checks (attack roll, ability check, and saving throws) into the term "D20 Test". This, presumably, makes the rules more streamlined, which has a lot of value. This new rule doesn't affects ability checks as much as people make it out to be. It didn't even come up in the past few games that I played in.
I wonder, if this playtest rule had been the original rule, would people consider it an issue? Intuitively, why make a roll if it is impossible to succeed?
3 sessions ago for me. Player with -2 Int rolled a nat 20. I had set a DC before the session for knowing about this particular symbol they had found at 22, I didn’t expect this player to be the one that asked (my table don’t get the person with the best stat to roll, it is the person that asks).
Now I handled this by deciding that the nat 20 roll necessitated a small amount of information, but, I always operate sliding scale DCs anyway for these kind of checks. But the player in no way considered it a success (which was the point he has taken a -2 modifier so he can make rolls he expects to fail on the hope that he gets one right now and again). If I had told that player, no point rolling you don’t know anything, next, he would have felt disappointed.
Now from now on when he rolls that nat 20 he is getting inspiration so he feels like he got something from it.
It sounds like the actual issue here is a misalignment of expectation between that player and yourself. Your player was awarded with some information, but he is not happy with the amount that he got to consider it a success. The issue in question is actually about the difference in expectation regarding a successful outcome. It seems like the player would have been disappointed regardless of which rule you use as the player is, presumably, expecting a spectacular outcome from rolling a natural 20.
No he is happy, he knew going into the roll he probably wouldn’t get anything, my players like rolling dice to find out how bad the failure will be when they know as players there character wouldn’t know a thing or be able to do a thing and this is the thing many tables run ability checks many ways and the current system allows for that, some allow a nat 2o auto success, others operate a sliding scale system with no pass fail DCs but a range for success and failure. By making this a RAW you then necessitate tables and DMs to homebrew and explain why they don’t operate the RAW. my argument is that at many tables, especially pick up tables or adventurers league tables there is the possibility now with this rule of a lot more disagreement between player and DM.
I personally think a better system would have been to incorporate party members helping and allow their bonuses to stack with the original member trying to succeed at the ability check.
IE, getting back to the strength check against a door at DC21. That character with an 11 STR would need his friends to add their STR modifiers to help succeed. If the whole party was comprised of characters with 11 STR or less I guess the door would never get open though. :)
We definitely need something like this, too. I don't think we need it "instead," but yes.
There is some precedent for DCs that get lower with effort. But they're all these really important, campaign-ending ones. (No spoilers.) And the Help rules are jank (if I had a nickel for every time a YouTuber said "use the Help action"...) and insufficient (only one person can help? Wouldn't it be better just to have them also roll?).
There are a few select areas where I feel that advantage/disadvantage are not granular enough. This is one of them. I could easily make a fix, but I want the fixes all to be consistent with one another, probably. Maybe the new system can just have a rule like, "if you don't like ADV/DIS for something, try this" and just let you decide where to use it. I wonder if that would just result in everyone using it everywhere without consideration.
I can certainly see the argument that if a 20 won't succeed, you shouldn't have called for a skill check.
Regarding things happening all at once and a player taking it on themselves to roll the dice, that's not how the game works - players say what they want to do, DM decides if it succeeds, fails, or needs a dice roll, and if so, what skill. Players shouldn't be rolling dice on their own except in combat, where they are following strict rules. Otherwise you'll get someone say "I want to focus my wildmagic to pop the BBEG's head off immediately, and I rolled a nat 20, so the roll should count because I rolled it".
I personally don't see much of a difference - if a 1 wouldn't fail, why are you asking them to roll? If a 20 wouldn't succeed, why are you asking them to roll?
I'd have no problem asking some players to roll and not others - for example, making a long jump, if a players character can make that jump per the rules, no roll. If a weaker character wants to follow, I might ask them to roll to see how the jump goes - if they have any chance of success.
So i don't like the general "nat 20 is success, nat 1 is failure, only player weapon and unarmed attacks can crit" for this reason:
New DMs and bad DMs let people roll when it should be impossible. Sometimes a roll is needed when something is impossible to determine degrees of failure.
A player walks up to a king and says "You will give me your crown and kingdom"
Now I would let them roll intim or persuasion for this. But not because they can succeed. Instead a good roll might mean the king laughs, thinking it a grand joke. A bad roll might mean the party is arrested. The new system doesn't really feel right having a nat 20 be a degree of failure.
Likewise insp on nat 20's is a succeed up system, and makes players ask to roll dice. I think it would be better to turn nat 1's into insp instead, so you have a fail up system in place. Likewise, giving bonuses to nat 20's means your players will want to roll for everything on the off chance they might get a 20. this bogs down play, and again new/bad DMs are likely to allow people to roll when asked, rather than have players dictate action, and DM ask for a roll when appropriate.
Good DMs dont really need much help, but rules have to be written to help bad/new DMs from pitfalls that might make the experience bad and turn them (or theri players) off to the game.
Lastly crits. Removing spell crits seems silly, unless all spells are being re-written to be save only. I do feel that crits only applying to weapon damage severely affects some classes more than others (no more backstab crits, no more smite crits, etc). Them only doing double damage also means you get the 'feels bad man' double 1's "crit". Instead at the very least jsut have it do max damage, or max+weapon roll damage.
I dont care if monsters cant crit, as it kinda feels bad for a player to die to a random monster crit.
Overall the changes wont make much difference at my table (and we run RAW > RAI > Rool of Cool for like 90% of the game), but I feel that its very poorly thought out and is change for the sake of change. I would love to see the data behind these decisions, but alas, they likely won't release that.
The DM still calls for when a roll is needed or not. With the new system, you could do the same thing. The bard foolishly asks for the crown. Then have them do a charisma check to see if the king takes it well or has them arrested. You just don't frame the success as getting the crown because that isn't a plausible outcome. The new rule doesn't mean the players can make a roll for anything they want any more than the current system.
The DM still calls for when a roll is needed or not. With the new system, you could do the same thing. The bard foolishly asks for the crown. Then have them do a charisma check to see if the king takes it well or has them arrested. You just don't frame the success as getting the crown because that isn't a plausible outcome. The new rule doesn't mean the players can make a roll for anything they want any more than the current system.
That's a key people need to remember. Players never call for rolls or determine whether it's possible for them to succeed, the GM always does. The GM is the representation of the world and all that is in it and all that is possible. They know whether that stuck door has any weakness or whether it is just physically stuck and only the application of X lbs of force will move it. With that knowledge they can say yes, giant 350 lb 24 str barbarian can try and push it open and no, the 40 lb 6 str wizard can't roll because it's physically impossible for them.
That's a key people need to remember. Players never call for rolls or determine whether it's possible for them to succeed, the GM always does.
And also defines what success or failure actually means.
You said this like it's a big gotcha, but it's not. Let's take another look at the rules.
"The DM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results. [...] If the total equals or exceeds the DC, the ability check is a success--the creature overcomes the challenge at hand."
In the case of "it's impossible, roll to see how badly you screwed up," the actual process is meant to be like this: The DM tells them they failed without a roll, then tells them to roll not to screw up too badly. If they beat the DC of that check, they don't screw up too badly. It's basically the same, but there is a difference, which is that they're not rolling to do the impossible thing, so they can't auto succeed at the impossible thing. They're rolling to salvage the situation, and they certainly can auto succeed at that.
You said this like it's a big gotcha, but it's not.
It's not a gotcha, but it is a thing DMs and players get wrong. A player can't say "I roll X to do Y", they have to describe what they're doing and the DM tells them both what (if any) rolls are required, and what they're actually rolling to achieve.
You said this like it's a big gotcha, but it's not.
It's not a gotcha, but it is a thing DMs and players get wrong. A player can't say "I roll X to do Y", they have to describe what they're doing and the DM tells them both what (if any) rolls are required, and what they're actually rolling to achieve.
Alright, we're in agreement lol.
Though it's true that most people either don't know or don't care about this. It's just, when the argument is "I'm gonna ignore this new rule," it's like, okay, but you were already ignoring the old rule.
You said this like it's a big gotcha, but it's not.
It's not a gotcha, but it is a thing DMs and players get wrong. A player can't say "I roll X to do Y", they have to describe what they're doing and the DM tells them both what (if any) rolls are required, and what they're actually rolling to achieve.
Alright, we're in agreement lol.
Though it's true that most people either don't know or don't care about this. It's just, when the argument is "I'm gonna ignore this new rule," it's like, okay, but you were already ignoring the old rule.
The proposed version of the rule will just make it even more critical for GMs to really think about when and how to call for rolls to make sure they don't let players try things the characters do not/should not have a shot at succeeding in.
It's just, when the argument is "I'm gonna ignore this new rule," it's like, okay, but you were already ignoring the old rule.
The proposed version of the rule will just make it even more critical for GMs to really think about when and how to call for rolls to make sure they don't let players try things the characters do not/should not have a shot at succeeding in.
Good! Maybe it'll also cause them to stop making players roll for things that are trivial.
Honestly I'm not a fan of the new rule as a thought-experiment, but I might let my players playtest to see how it is in practice.
Of course a lot of these situations won't happen very often, because a Nat 20 is somewhat rare, however it will happen enough probably to at least cause some sort of feeling about the matter.
I'm thinking of the example given about the door. The Strength 11 character can never break the door down by themselves naturally, even with a Nat 20 in the current rules. However they could attempt things to change the DC of breaking the door or let a stronger character have a chance at it if it went something like this.
STR 11: "I try to break down the door." DM: "Ok, make a Strength Check." STR 11: "Natural 20! For a total of...20!" DM: "This is a heavy iron door. You push with a mighty force, brimming from somewhere inside of you you've never accessed before. You push against the door, it creaking and bending against the might of your shove and....it doesn't give in, unfortunately. But you can feel you were close. As if just a little more would do it, but you were unable to summon that strength."
So this gives the players options. Instead of the STR 11 wizard pushing the door, let the STR 18 Barbarian. This allows that character who built their character with Strength in mind to shine in the way they wanted their character to shine. Or they could be crafty. "I have 4 vials of acid, and I apply them to the door's hinges." This lowers the DC enough that the lower Strength character might now be able to shove the door open. Etc. The current system allows players to shine in the ways they have wanted their character to shine, while the new system (albeit rarely) allows others who might have methods of stacking advantage or whatever to consistently shine in areas their character isn't designed for.
In that scenario you could always simply say 'the 11 strength character cannot break the door open' if you were just going to say they fail on a nat 20 anyway. If there's an 18 strength character right there I struggle to think of reasons why they wouldn't be the one trying to bust it open in the first place anyway.
If a nat 20 isn't going to succeed then you might as well not have givne that player false hope and let their 11 str wizard roll and just had the barbarian roll instead.
With the d20 system though, that is something that just happens sometimes. The 20 int wizard with history prof will sometimes roll lower than the 8 int barbarian on a history check. The two hit with the same strength save spell there are times the barbraian will hit a nat 1 and fail yet the wizard will sometimes roll lucky and beat the DC. This is just something that happens now and then in a d20 system and can be funny when it does.
In that scenario you could always simply say 'the 11 strength character cannot break the door open' if you were just going to say they fail on a nat 20 anyway. If there's an 18 strength character right there I struggle to think of reasons why they wouldn't be the one trying to bust it open in the first place anyway.
If a nat 20 isn't going to succeed then you might as well not have givne that player false hope and let their 11 str wizard roll and just had the barbarian roll instead.
With the d20 system though, that is something that just happens sometimes. The 20 int wizard with history prof will sometimes roll lower than the 8 int barbarian on a history check. The two hit with the same strength save spell there are times the barbraian will hit a nat 1 and fail yet the wizard will sometimes roll lucky and beat the DC. This is just something that happens now and then in a d20 system and can be funny when it does.
The 18 strength player may otherwise be occupied, the fighter is you know fighting, while the bard in the back who is out of spells is trying to figure a way past the door. In my games there are countless times the person not optimized to a task is the one attempting it. A door beyond your strength is the easiest to visualize but a wall they can't climb, something they can't balance on, a merchant they can't haggle with, for whatever the reason the player not best suited to the task happens to be the one attempting it.
You could say "The 11 Strength Character cannot break the door open", however to me that just feels so...uninspired? Might as well just say when they approach the door "The only character that can open the door with strength is the Barbarian. Otherwise the Wizard can use the Knock spell." It just diminishes options.
Also, if you just say to the Strength 11 character, "Sorry, you can't push the door open" without asking for a roll, there's a good chance that the rest of the party assumes the door is too strong to be pushed open by anyone in the party.
Also it just feels...wrong on so many levels. So now the STR 7 gnome can somehow push this door open because they rolled a Natural 20?
I like to let players try things that are impossible for them, but possible for someone in the party, or possible with some thinking and creativity. Plus if you just tell the STR 11 character "Nope, you can't attempt to push open the door" then that doesn't allow for anyone to use things like the Guidance spell or any other boosting magic on them.
I can certainly see the argument that if a 20 won't succeed, you shouldn't have called for a skill check.
Regarding things happening all at once and a player taking it on themselves to roll the dice, that's not how the game works - players say what they want to do, DM decides if it succeeds, fails, or needs a dice roll, and if so, what skill. Players shouldn't be rolling dice on their own except in combat, where they are following strict rules. Otherwise you'll get someone say "I want to focus my wildmagic to pop the BBEG's head off immediately, and I rolled a nat 20, so the roll should count because I rolled it".
I personally don't see much of a difference - if a 1 wouldn't fail, why are you asking them to roll? If a 20 wouldn't succeed, why are you asking them to roll?
I'd have no problem asking some players to roll and not others - for example, making a long jump, if a players character can make that jump per the rules, no roll. If a weaker character wants to follow, I might ask them to roll to see how the jump goes - if they have any chance of success.
Sometimes the roll isn’t to define success or failure but to define how long it took.
I do this a lot with investigation, the player rolls, I know what will be found, I know it’s going to be found regardless, the dice roll however tells me if the party will be interrupted by a guard, be late to the next event etc. It helps give players another choice to make, to loot or to just move on.
Honestly I'm not a fan of the new rule as a thought-experiment, but I might let my players playtest to see how it is in practice.
Of course a lot of these situations won't happen very often, because a Nat 20 is somewhat rare, however it will happen enough probably to at least cause some sort of feeling about the matter.
I'm thinking of the example given about the door. The Strength 11 character can never break the door down by themselves naturally, even with a Nat 20 in the current rules. However they could attempt things to change the DC of breaking the door or let a stronger character have a chance at it if it went something like this.
STR 11: "I try to break down the door." DM: "Ok, make a Strength Check." STR 11: "Natural 20! For a total of...20!" DM: "This is a heavy iron door. You push with a mighty force, brimming from somewhere inside of you you've never accessed before. You push against the door, it creaking and bending against the might of your shove and....it doesn't give in, unfortunately. But you can feel you were close. As if just a little more would do it, but you were unable to summon that strength."
So this gives the players options. Instead of the STR 11 wizard pushing the door, let the STR 18 Barbarian. This allows that character who built their character with Strength in mind to shine in the way they wanted their character to shine. Or they could be crafty. "I have 4 vials of acid, and I apply them to the door's hinges." This lowers the DC enough that the lower Strength character might now be able to shove the door open. Etc. The current system allows players to shine in the ways they have wanted their character to shine, while the new system (albeit rarely) allows others who might have methods of stacking advantage or whatever to consistently shine in areas their character isn't designed for.
For every 20 ability checks rolled you can expect a nat 20 at least once. But add in advantage and you start to see that in the average session nat 20’s are not a rare occurance.
Now remember that the character also gets inspiration for a nat 20 so that increase the odds of another Nat 20.
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I personally think a better system would have been to incorporate party members helping and allow their bonuses to stack with the original member trying to succeed at the ability check.
IE, getting back to the strength check against a door at DC21. That character with an 11 STR would need his friends to add their STR modifiers to help succeed. If the whole party was comprised of characters with 11 STR or less I guess the door would never get open though. :)
The problem is that they've defined it by the end result and not the roll itself. If a L20 character with double proficiency rolls with Advantage, they'd have the equivalent of a bonus of +20 (2x Proficiency of 6, ability modifier of +5, Advantage gives the equivalent of a little over +3), so scoring 31 is about a 45% chance, yet , by RAW, they can't roll for it. Someone who doesn't have proficiency and got the lowest score possible would slightly struggle with 4 (ability score modifier of -4, Disadvantage gives -3) because they have to roll at least a 11 and yet doesn't even need to roll to succeed - despite having roll higher to succeed than the guy that isn't allowed to roll since it's too hard.
If they were going to mandate when a roll is not necessary (not that I think that they should, I don't think they should be mandating so much as offering advice on things like this), it should have been based on what roll was needed, not on what the DC was.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
No he is happy, he knew going into the roll he probably wouldn’t get anything, my players like rolling dice to find out how bad the failure will be when they know as players there character wouldn’t know a thing or be able to do a thing and this is the thing many tables run ability checks many ways and the current system allows for that, some allow a nat 2o auto success, others operate a sliding scale system with no pass fail DCs but a range for success and failure. By making this a RAW you then necessitate tables and DMs to homebrew and explain why they don’t operate the RAW. my argument is that at many tables, especially pick up tables or adventurers league tables there is the possibility now with this rule of a lot more disagreement between player and DM.
We definitely need something like this, too. I don't think we need it "instead," but yes.
There is some precedent for DCs that get lower with effort. But they're all these really important, campaign-ending ones. (No spoilers.) And the Help rules are jank (if I had a nickel for every time a YouTuber said "use the Help action"...) and insufficient (only one person can help? Wouldn't it be better just to have them also roll?).
There are a few select areas where I feel that advantage/disadvantage are not granular enough. This is one of them. I could easily make a fix, but I want the fixes all to be consistent with one another, probably. Maybe the new system can just have a rule like, "if you don't like ADV/DIS for something, try this" and just let you decide where to use it. I wonder if that would just result in everyone using it everywhere without consideration.
I can certainly see the argument that if a 20 won't succeed, you shouldn't have called for a skill check.
Regarding things happening all at once and a player taking it on themselves to roll the dice, that's not how the game works - players say what they want to do, DM decides if it succeeds, fails, or needs a dice roll, and if so, what skill. Players shouldn't be rolling dice on their own except in combat, where they are following strict rules. Otherwise you'll get someone say "I want to focus my wildmagic to pop the BBEG's head off immediately, and I rolled a nat 20, so the roll should count because I rolled it".
I personally don't see much of a difference - if a 1 wouldn't fail, why are you asking them to roll? If a 20 wouldn't succeed, why are you asking them to roll?
I'd have no problem asking some players to roll and not others - for example, making a long jump, if a players character can make that jump per the rules, no roll. If a weaker character wants to follow, I might ask them to roll to see how the jump goes - if they have any chance of success.
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So i don't like the general "nat 20 is success, nat 1 is failure, only player weapon and unarmed attacks can crit" for this reason:
New DMs and bad DMs let people roll when it should be impossible. Sometimes a roll is needed when something is impossible to determine degrees of failure.
A player walks up to a king and says "You will give me your crown and kingdom"
Now I would let them roll intim or persuasion for this. But not because they can succeed. Instead a good roll might mean the king laughs, thinking it a grand joke. A bad roll might mean the party is arrested. The new system doesn't really feel right having a nat 20 be a degree of failure.
Likewise insp on nat 20's is a succeed up system, and makes players ask to roll dice. I think it would be better to turn nat 1's into insp instead, so you have a fail up system in place. Likewise, giving bonuses to nat 20's means your players will want to roll for everything on the off chance they might get a 20. this bogs down play, and again new/bad DMs are likely to allow people to roll when asked, rather than have players dictate action, and DM ask for a roll when appropriate.
Good DMs dont really need much help, but rules have to be written to help bad/new DMs from pitfalls that might make the experience bad and turn them (or theri players) off to the game.
Lastly crits. Removing spell crits seems silly, unless all spells are being re-written to be save only. I do feel that crits only applying to weapon damage severely affects some classes more than others (no more backstab crits, no more smite crits, etc). Them only doing double damage also means you get the 'feels bad man' double 1's "crit". Instead at the very least jsut have it do max damage, or max+weapon roll damage.
I dont care if monsters cant crit, as it kinda feels bad for a player to die to a random monster crit.
Overall the changes wont make much difference at my table (and we run RAW > RAI > Rool of Cool for like 90% of the game), but I feel that its very poorly thought out and is change for the sake of change. I would love to see the data behind these decisions, but alas, they likely won't release that.
The DM still calls for when a roll is needed or not. With the new system, you could do the same thing. The bard foolishly asks for the crown. Then have them do a charisma check to see if the king takes it well or has them arrested. You just don't frame the success as getting the crown because that isn't a plausible outcome. The new rule doesn't mean the players can make a roll for anything they want any more than the current system.
That's a key people need to remember. Players never call for rolls or determine whether it's possible for them to succeed, the GM always does. The GM is the representation of the world and all that is in it and all that is possible. They know whether that stuck door has any weakness or whether it is just physically stuck and only the application of X lbs of force will move it. With that knowledge they can say yes, giant 350 lb 24 str barbarian can try and push it open and no, the 40 lb 6 str wizard can't roll because it's physically impossible for them.
And also defines what success or failure actually means.
You said this like it's a big gotcha, but it's not. Let's take another look at the rules.
"The DM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results. [...] If the total equals or exceeds the DC, the ability check is a success--the creature overcomes the challenge at hand."
In the case of "it's impossible, roll to see how badly you screwed up," the actual process is meant to be like this: The DM tells them they failed without a roll, then tells them to roll not to screw up too badly. If they beat the DC of that check, they don't screw up too badly. It's basically the same, but there is a difference, which is that they're not rolling to do the impossible thing, so they can't auto succeed at the impossible thing. They're rolling to salvage the situation, and they certainly can auto succeed at that.
It's not a gotcha, but it is a thing DMs and players get wrong. A player can't say "I roll X to do Y", they have to describe what they're doing and the DM tells them both what (if any) rolls are required, and what they're actually rolling to achieve.
Alright, we're in agreement lol.
Though it's true that most people either don't know or don't care about this. It's just, when the argument is "I'm gonna ignore this new rule," it's like, okay, but you were already ignoring the old rule.
The proposed version of the rule will just make it even more critical for GMs to really think about when and how to call for rolls to make sure they don't let players try things the characters do not/should not have a shot at succeeding in.
Good! Maybe it'll also cause them to stop making players roll for things that are trivial.
Honestly I'm not a fan of the new rule as a thought-experiment, but I might let my players playtest to see how it is in practice.
Of course a lot of these situations won't happen very often, because a Nat 20 is somewhat rare, however it will happen enough probably to at least cause some sort of feeling about the matter.
I'm thinking of the example given about the door. The Strength 11 character can never break the door down by themselves naturally, even with a Nat 20 in the current rules. However they could attempt things to change the DC of breaking the door or let a stronger character have a chance at it if it went something like this.
STR 11: "I try to break down the door."
DM: "Ok, make a Strength Check."
STR 11: "Natural 20! For a total of...20!"
DM: "This is a heavy iron door. You push with a mighty force, brimming from somewhere inside of you you've never accessed before. You push against the door, it creaking and bending against the might of your shove and....it doesn't give in, unfortunately. But you can feel you were close. As if just a little more would do it, but you were unable to summon that strength."
So this gives the players options. Instead of the STR 11 wizard pushing the door, let the STR 18 Barbarian. This allows that character who built their character with Strength in mind to shine in the way they wanted their character to shine. Or they could be crafty. "I have 4 vials of acid, and I apply them to the door's hinges." This lowers the DC enough that the lower Strength character might now be able to shove the door open. Etc. The current system allows players to shine in the ways they have wanted their character to shine, while the new system (albeit rarely) allows others who might have methods of stacking advantage or whatever to consistently shine in areas their character isn't designed for.
In that scenario you could always simply say 'the 11 strength character cannot break the door open' if you were just going to say they fail on a nat 20 anyway. If there's an 18 strength character right there I struggle to think of reasons why they wouldn't be the one trying to bust it open in the first place anyway.
If a nat 20 isn't going to succeed then you might as well not have givne that player false hope and let their 11 str wizard roll and just had the barbarian roll instead.
With the d20 system though, that is something that just happens sometimes. The 20 int wizard with history prof will sometimes roll lower than the 8 int barbarian on a history check. The two hit with the same strength save spell there are times the barbraian will hit a nat 1 and fail yet the wizard will sometimes roll lucky and beat the DC. This is just something that happens now and then in a d20 system and can be funny when it does.
The 18 strength player may otherwise be occupied, the fighter is you know fighting, while the bard in the back who is out of spells is trying to figure a way past the door. In my games there are countless times the person not optimized to a task is the one attempting it. A door beyond your strength is the easiest to visualize but a wall they can't climb, something they can't balance on, a merchant they can't haggle with, for whatever the reason the player not best suited to the task happens to be the one attempting it.
You could say "The 11 Strength Character cannot break the door open", however to me that just feels so...uninspired? Might as well just say when they approach the door "The only character that can open the door with strength is the Barbarian. Otherwise the Wizard can use the Knock spell." It just diminishes options.
Also, if you just say to the Strength 11 character, "Sorry, you can't push the door open" without asking for a roll, there's a good chance that the rest of the party assumes the door is too strong to be pushed open by anyone in the party.
Also it just feels...wrong on so many levels. So now the STR 7 gnome can somehow push this door open because they rolled a Natural 20?
I like to let players try things that are impossible for them, but possible for someone in the party, or possible with some thinking and creativity. Plus if you just tell the STR 11 character "Nope, you can't attempt to push open the door" then that doesn't allow for anyone to use things like the Guidance spell or any other boosting magic on them.
Sometimes the roll isn’t to define success or failure but to define how long it took.
I do this a lot with investigation, the player rolls, I know what will be found, I know it’s going to be found regardless, the dice roll however tells me if the party will be interrupted by a guard, be late to the next event etc. It helps give players another choice to make, to loot or to just move on.
For every 20 ability checks rolled you can expect a nat 20 at least once.
But add in advantage and you start to see that in the average session nat 20’s are not a rare occurance.
Now remember that the character also gets inspiration for a nat 20 so that increase the odds of another Nat 20.