If it isn’t dangerous, it just encourages doing stuff your character wouldn’t do. Your barbarian shouldn’t be going around picking locks. Having a 1/20 chance to randomly succeed encourages then to though. Yeah, they’ll usually fail, but there’s no harm in most skill checks, so why not take them?
Skill checks don’t succeed on a natural 20 in the rule book. It’s a house rule thing, that got passed to a lot of players. It’s not a good way of handling it. Pathfinder 2e has a good system for it if you’re interested. It has degrees of success falling above/below the DC by 10 is a critical. Also, a natural 1/20 decreases/increases the degree of success by 1. That means if you really don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily critical fail and have negative consequences. If you’re really skilled you may critically succeed even without a nat 20.
But that also means that you would fail 95% of the time? I’m not sure why that seems unfair.
Sorry, I don’t really play but I like hearing and reading the stories.
If it isn’t dangerous, it just encourages doing stuff your character wouldn’t do. Your barbarian shouldn’t be going around picking locks. Having a 1/20 chance to randomly succeed encourages then to though. Yeah, they’ll usually fail, but there’s no harm in most skill checks, so why not take them?
Skill checks don’t succeed on a natural 20 in the rule book. It’s a house rule thing, that got passed to a lot of players. It’s not a good way of handling it. Pathfinder 2e has a good system for it if you’re interested. It has degrees of success falling above/below the DC by 10 is a critical. Also, a natural 1/20 decreases/increases the degree of success by 1. That means if you really don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily critical fail and have negative consequences. If you’re really skilled you may critically succeed even without a nat 20.