Using skill rolls as luck

I play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, as you may know. I’m often the DM and so I’m very interested in new techniques I can use to improve the games I’m running. Recently I noticed something that celebrity DM Brennan Lee Mulligan was doing in his games that profoundly changed how I think about skill checks.

Here’s the revelation: the effect of a failed skill check result doesn’t need to apply to the task itself.

Typically, in D&D, when a player wants to climb a dangerous cliff, the DM might ask for an Athletics check. The most straightforward way to adjudicate the result is: if the check succeeds, they climb with no problem, but if it fails, then they slip and fall. But what if that’s too uninteresting? Falling from a wall might be funny or cause some damage but most of the time the character will just get up and try again. What if, instead of falling, the failed check created consequences somewhere else?

In this scenario the character succeeds at climbing the wall no matter what they roll. The check actually is a sort of “luck check” for something else that just happens to be using the character’s climbing ability as a trigger.

When the roll fails, it turns out that a monstrous worm bursts from the cliff side and grabs the character. Or the climber is spotted by a raven servant of the necromancer who then sets and ambush for the party. Or the climb succeeds but dislodges enough rocks that the wall becomes unclimbable for the other party members, forcing them to find another path. These are all a lot more interesting results than falling 10 feet.

There’s so many options when you stop associating the failed roll with the actual task at hand. The check could mean anything.

This could even apply to attack rolls! If a fighter swings their sword at a rampaging troll and rolls too low, you could rule that the attack hits anyway, but at a cost. Maybe the troll didn’t make any effort to dodge and instead slides up the blade and grabs the fighter, hoisting them into the air. Or the attack hits but the troll’s cry of pain awakens a nearby wolf pack who are more than happy to surround both the troll and the party members.

As an actual example: in my game the players were trying to set an ambush for a group of enemies and hid in the undergrowth of a forest. One of the players rolled a low Stealth check but I decided in the moment that the enemies would not find them; instead, one of the enemies rode their owlbear mount directly over the character’s hiding place, nearly pinning them in place. This created a much more tense moment than just being spotted by the enemy.

This is a powerful ability. But like anything with great power, it must be used with care. For the most part, a roll should represent the thing being attempted. After all, if a rogue fails at an Athletics check and this results in their character being spotted by the necromancer’s spies, the player may rightly complain that if it was a Stealth roll, they would have succeeded.

Nevertheless, using this technique well can free the DM’s creativity, prevent pointless failure cases, and create surprise and suspense. It’s one of my new favorite things to do for my groups.

Photo by Matilda Krantz on Unsplash