Saeviomagy
Adventurer
Turn based checks effectively mean that you will fail your infiltration unless your stealth score is so good that you don't actually need to roll. Do you have a 75% chance of remaining undetected for one roll? Well after 5 rounds, you've got a 23% chance of being undetected.Definitely. This is one reason why turn-based* exploration rules are a good idea, because you handle the whole turn with one check.
Now you might be effectively doing what I suggested: treating a failed stealth roll as a step down a track towards detection - a guard comes to investigate a funny noise - rather than full blown detection itself, which allows chances to correct for a failure.
Really passive checks should be considered separately depending on whether they are against fixed DC or an opposed roll. Against opposed roll they are actually fine (as long as the opponent is rolling normally), because the essentially change the skill contest into a single check vs DC, which is fine (the two work basically the same, unless you are using different degrees of success, since an opposed check has double swingy-ness). Against fixed DC they totally remove randomness, but if you remove randomness then why are you even wasting time thinking about what kind of check you should be using? At best you can use passive scores to "gauge" what kind of challenges you should handwave and declare an autosuccess, but then for consistency you should allow autosuccess on the same things also when the player actively tries to do them (which most DMs don't).
Agreed. Passive checks in this edition are so fraught with inconsistency they basically have no value.
I think you'll find that absolute impossible to back up, and I have personal experience to the contrary. Any time I've gotten lost, I've been quite aware ahead of time that I'm not sure the path I have chosen is correct.Knowing where you are is not an absolute condition, everyone who gets lost believes they are headed in the right direction until they are in fact lost.
There are certain extremes which would make you aware, and certain levels of screw up where you would find a deception unbelievable and be likely to pre-emptively take countermeasures. For instance: you are walking across an open field, approaching a target from the rear. You step on a twig, which makes a large cracking sound when you are about 10ft from the target.How would you know if you are spotted if you can't see the spotter or if the spotter sees you and acts as if he doesn't? You wouldn't. The perception check is to see if you think you have given up the game, either through your own knowledge or the reaction of other.
I imagine that an amateur at stealth would freeze and watch their target for signs they heard, then be flabbergasted when they didn't actually get a surprise round.
I imagine a pro would immediately dive 10ft forward and engage, simply assuming they had been heard.
I can't imagine a pro not noticing that they screwed up.
Extensive research proves the opposite. Incompetent people are more likely to overestimate their ability: they simply don't know what they don't know. Competent tend to underestimate their own ability.People who train skills believe in them, whether that belief is well founded is an awareness question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
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