I don’t know about you guys but I didn’t know how beginner’s luck worked with disadvantage in play. I made the attachment to act as a play aid. It shows disadvantage of 0, 1 and 2.
Edit: I only realised today I’d been doing this wrong since forever. I always used the standard advancement chart and logged Difficult and Challenging tests to stats (without considering the base undoubled obstacle) and routine ones to Beginners Luck. What goes wrong when you play it that way? I didn’t notice anything really but my campaigns don’t go long term.
I have the same question. It seems odd to me that two tests of the same stat with the same obstacle would be logged differently depending on whether or not they use Beginner’s Luck. My guess is that if you don’t use the base obstacle, it gets hard to get the Routine checks you need to unlock new skills, since Ob 2 doubles to Ob 4 which will be Difficult for many characters.
I made the attachment to act as a play aid. It shows disadvantage of 0, 1 and 2.
I’m not here to tell you how you learn, or anything, but…really? This table seems much more confusing than “check tests against base ob +disadv, roll dice against (base ob)x2 +disadv”.
It would make it much more difficult to learn new skills, whilst also making it much easier to advance stats.
From a common sense perspective, the inherent difficulty of a task(and your ability to learn from performing it) does not increase because you are not skilled in it, even though it is much harder for you to succeed.
For example, if you are repairing a puncture on your bike you are not going to gain a much deeper insight over a mechanic into how to perform manual tasks in general (stat), or how to adjust the drive chain (skill), just because you have never fixed a tire before. You learn a little about the actual task you are performing (base ob).
Similarly, if it’s raining so water is running in your eyes (disadvantage), it doesn’t rain twice as hard, just because you are unskilled.
Really? You can’t see what’s happening in the statement. It’s not obvious that you can end up with having both impossible odds and logging Beginner’s Luck tests. The intuitive heuristic that players pick up is “It was impossible therefore log a challenging test”.
I’d love to say something like “Whenever you make a Beginner’s Luck test and it’s possible to succeed then you log it as Beginner’s Luck.” that’d save a lot of time because those are the majority of tests. But looking at the table the one outlier to this simple statement is an Ob1+2=Ob4 test would be a difficult stat test.
Because you can’t just say simple lines like this you’ve still got to check the standard table to find out what it is. So you might as well check this one because it’s specific to what’s going on.