Supporting degrees of success and failure when rolling

Question

I have only played D&D so far, but I'm not that happy with it, mainly because the results are so binary. Take, for example, picking a lock. You roll a dice, you add your lockpicking modifier and compare that to a static number indicating the difficulty. If you roll equal or higher to the DC, you succeed, if you roll lower, you fail. This just seems so... gamey to me, and too binary to feel authentic.

Is there a way to make the transition between success and failure less all-or-nothing? like "Oh, you rolled a 19-21 for a DC 20 lock? You open the door, but with a negative effect, like a broken lockpick. You rolled 22 or more? you succeed without negative effects. You roll a 10-18: you just fail, but suffer no ill effects. 5-10? you fail AND you break a lockpick. a 2-5? you fail and trigger an alarm. a 1? critical failure: someone opens the door from the other side while you're picking it and you get you lockpick jabbed into your eye."

Now, obviously, I can just use a homebrew rule for this, but I'm looking for something that's somewhat more integrated with D&D, like an optional ruleset or something. If possible, I'd like a D&D 5e solution, but a 4e or 3.Xe solution also is fine.

Answer 1

In many cases, for published adventures and challenges, D&D will use multiple DCs. This is especially common for knowledge or perception checks.

For example, with a DC 10 knowledge check you might know that trolls regenerate damage; with a DC 15 you might know that fire prevents said regeneration.

When designing challenges as a GM, you could extend this to other challenges. Make opening a lock at the cost of breaking your tools DC 18, while opening the lock without negative consequence would be DC 22.

Answer 2

Fail Forward

Actually, there is support baked right into the 5e cake for part of what you're asking. From p. 58 of the Basic Rules (emphasis mine):

If the total equals or exceeds the DC, the ability check is a success—the creature overcomes the challenge at hand. Otherwise, it’s a failure, which means the character or monster makes no progress toward the objective or makes progress combined with a setback determined by the DM.

This is doubtless a response to the fail-forward ethos that many games have embraced since 3.0 was released. It does not address everything, because it doesn't really cover the extreme failure you're looking for. Looking at the Basic Rules, I don't see a special-case or "critical failure" for anything besides attack rolls, where a natural 1 just always misses, regardless of bonuses, etc..

But it does move the game into a trinary system of success / success-with-cost / failure, giving you more of the flexibility you are looking for with no house-ruling necessary at all.

See this question for related issues and likely-illuminating answers.

For more about the fail-forward ethos, see this question and answers

Answer 3

There isn't a solution for this native to 5e. At least not yet. This is the kind of thing that might see publication in the DMG or a latter book in the series, however that's no kind of guarantee.

As you said, you could homebrew this. It's actually fairly easy to handle from a narrative perspective, and in a few instances D&D provides a bit of guidance. There are times where it refers to "Failure by more than 5" and then gives a consequence. One of them is climbing where failure by more than 5 means you start falling.

As far as ideas from previous editions. This is not a concept that D&D has historically done. You won't see these ideas in 4e, and I'm pretty sure you won't see them in 3.5. So you'll either be looking through third party publications which can be hit or miss (sometimes the official sourcebooks are hit or miss), or you'll be scrounging the web for other ideas. Generally as published, D&D works in a state of success or failure, there isn't a system of degrees built in, so you'll have to make one yourself or find someone who has already.

Honestly, this is a situation where you can just wing it though. You may want to look around for ideas, but, ultimately, a lot of what you need to think about is what fits the story you are telling, this is something you can brainstorm, but it's not necessarily something you can research. You know your setting and adventure best, you need to decide on what success and failure means in your adventure.

So, while there may be a resource out there for a previous edition, there really isn't a need to find one unless you're completely out of ideas. Think about how many possibilities you want to have, and then decide how likely you want those to be. After that give your players the heads up that you'll be using a degree of success system, explain your ideas and make sure you have their buy in.