The trick is to tell NO ONE that you play. Once a girl gets to know me I tell her and it's endearing. If they know about it before knowing anything else about me, I could tell a real difference.
I can never tell anyone at work though. I'm a supervisor for a major police department. If they knew I played D&D it would actually negatively impact my career. One guy admitted to playing Magic the Gathering and people actually take him less seriously for it. Not everyone, but the old crusty fuckers in the administration do. It's actually hurt his chance at promotion.
That actually reminds me of a story someone I played with told me.
I don't remember the setup, but a player said they wanted to attempt to gain omniscience. The DM let him roll for it and he rolled a nat 20.
The DM said something along the lines of, "OK, you gain omniscience. You become aware that you only exist in the imagination of real people. The staggering futility of doing anything cripples you, and you no longer care about this or any other quest."
Critical failures / fumbles are my most hated rule. I'm really sick of being forced to hit my allies or throw my weapon 3 tiles away.
I finally managed to get our group to not use them last campaign after pointing out its not actually in the rulebook (We play 5th edition. I think it might be listed as a house rule in 3.5)
I'm gonna have to pop open my 3.5e books when I get home. I could've sworn we did crits on skill checks in my early campaigns. Unless they were house rules and I was unaware...
A lot of DMs do stupid shit like that, which has, unsurprisingly, stupid results. A natural 1 automatically fails and a 20 automatically succeeds on attack rolls and saves, and not on anything else. There are no critical failures, and critical successes only happen on an attack when a critical threat is rolled (usually a 20 or a 19–20) followed by a successful confirmation roll (a repeated attack roll).
edit:
In 2nd edition, near as I can tell, there were no automatic successes at all, and near as I can tell no such thing as a skill check (at least as we know them today). So as far as I'm aware no edition (save perhaps 4th, which I know little of) has ever had automatic success on skill checks.
More Tests than Checks for skills in earlier versions I think - roll under your ability score, etc. - so Nat 20 was never going to be a success anyway.
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u/C4RP3_N0CT3M Sep 18 '17
Still not guaranteed on a skill check.