"How Well Did I Do?" for the Lazy DM

Although mentioned in several places in the 3.5 PHB (notably in the skills chapter) the aspect of degrees of success is not - at least AFAIK - explicitly called out as part of the system. That's a shame, because having degrees of success defined helps the DM in his job of adjudicating exactly that the heck just happened there? when half-a-dozen people are shouting over one another, throwing dice, shoving minis around, and hooting like gibbons.

Presented below is my personal "How'd they do?" quick reference table:

Check vs. DC	Degree of Success	Bonus (to Whatever)
-11 or more	Terrible	-2
-6 to -10	Poor	-1
-1 to -5	Fail	-0
+0-4	Pass	+0
+5-9	Good	+1
+10-14	Superior	+2
+15-19	Excellent	+3
+20 or more	"No wai!"	+4

Any resemblance of the above to the successes table from Savage Worlds is...probably intentional, in retrospect.

The Bonus (to Whatever) column is a general thumbnail guide to how a subsequent check (aid another, recovery from falling, etc.) will be affected by the outcome of this one. It could even be used as a bonus to damage if the initial d20 was part of an attack roll (at the moment success and damage in D&D are - critical hits aside - almost wholly dissociated).

note: found out what was causing the table problem. Blogger treats carriage returns in the HTML of tables as line breaks.