D&D 5E Average skill modifiers by level?

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

We found it really hard to come up with interesting consequences to failure that weren't forced combat, death, or lose a healing surge. To us that was boring.

Agreed. A lot of the WotC skill challenges had poor consequences/stakes. I'm pretty convinced that skill challenges should only be used when there are meaningful narrative consequence with some teeth. So you don't make it to the village you care about in time and it's sacked, you lose the person you were chasing who then goes and does a bad thing, you convince the King to lend part of his army which allows you to both defend city X and city Y at the same time, you break out of the prison but on failure the fellow prisoners that you were trying to save get recaptured and later seek you out for revenge, etc. I find that people I play with find that kind of heavy consequences ok since 1) it doesn't hing on a single dice roll, 2) it's also not dependant on DM fiat of when enough is enough.

That last example was actually from Start Wars Saga edition Galaxy of Intrigue which I think has the best official example of a traditional skill challenge -- reprinted here. The consequences of failure were having fellow prisoners be recapured, which if the party had befriended them have all kinds of fun moral and story implications later...

Skill Challenge Example of Play

Reference Book: Star Wars Saga Edition Galaxy of Intrigue Main Article: Skill Challenges The following example of play is designed to demonstrate how a Gamemaster runs a Skill Challenge and how players might act and react during the challenge. As with the example of play from the Saga Edition...

swse.fandom.com

It's a loosey-goosey system but it was a lot more fun, dynamic, and interesting than the nailed down skill challenges as written.

I also like more of a loose skill challenge as well but that makes it even more important that the DM understand the underlying math I think. You can be super loose and abtract because in the end the mechancial consequences are spelled out -- a successfully check gets you closer to your goal. So you can have all kinds of fun describing your character doing cool stuff and you know it will have impact if you succeed on a roll. Some people don't like this because the impact is set -- no matter what you do you will only get X more ways toward the goal and if you haven't gotten to Y success there will be some other complication introduced. Personally I find it more freeing because you basically don't have to stop and negotiate the stakes of each role.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

4e and 5e are different games with different approaches to action resolution. Skill challenges worked in 4e where the players were encouraged to initiate skill checks and the DM was encouraged to say yes unless there was a compelling reason to say no. I don’t think they work as well in 5e where the players describe what their characters do and the DM determines the results, calling for a die roll if necessary to resolve uncertainty in the outcome. Skill challenges wouldn’t flow right in that action resolution framework, and the meta-structure of the skill challenge just doesn’t feel necessary to me in that context. The exploration rules fill that role for me in a way that is better integrated into 5e’s core gameplay loop than skill challenges would.

Fair enough. I don't think there is anything mechanically about 5e that would inherently prohibit going into "cinematic skill challenge mode" if the table wanted that in their game though.

PF2e for instance would be a harder to do this in IMO because skills are much more explicitly defined. So you would feel the difference in what skills could do in combat and in skill challenges much more acutely.

 

[overgeeked]

It's likely different to serve it's purpose within the skill challenge and have the math work.

On purpose-- The way I run skill challanges is in "cinematic mode". Different than combat enounter mode or general exploration mode. Skill checks represent "strategy actions" that get you closer to your goal and we don't worry about the details of exactly how many feet you can jump, etc. as long as the decription fits within our shared understanding of what somone can do in that "Tier of play". A successful skill check means you get closer to the goal, a failure means no progress and possibility a complication (which might change the nature of what skills are useful). So if we are 5th level and chasing someone through a crowded city, a player could say "I climb up to the roof tops and jump from roof to roof to try to get ahead of him" (Tier appropriate, yes). "I try to convince the 2 city guards near us that the man just stole a valuble gem from a nearby merchant and they should join us in the pursuit" (Tier appropriate, yes). The check represents the success of that strategic action and movement toward the goal but not each individual jump or balance or change in whatever. The fiction changes as we go along perhaps opening up and closing down some skills that are appropriate.

X successful strategy actions before Y failures or X successful before 3 rounds (different math/system) results in reaching the goal (capture the person they were chasing in this case).

The structure is there to provide closure to the scene that doesn't rely on DM fiat and to provide math structure that ensures a challenge that is neither trivially easy nor impossible over multiple checks (there are of course situations that are both easy and impossible -- but don't use skill challenges for them).

As a DM, I need to set some baseline DCs where you know that say a 5th level party that is likely to have +7 mods has say a 65%-70% of success IN TOTAL over the X checks. Or perhaps assume out of a party of 4, 2 have +7 mods for a physical challenge like this and 2 have +3 mods (either proficiency or high ability but not both). You can use creative uses of non physical skills in a physical challenge but perhaps only once a skill per skill challenge per party to let the physical skill people shine a little (wheras in a social skill challenge you might be able to cleverly use Athetics but again only once a skill challenge per party).

Then I can modify up and down that baseline depending on whether I think the challenge is above or below level so to speak. And characters with skill resources can handle above level challenges as well.


**

On math -- Because it involves evaluating the results after a set of multiple checks, this likely requires different DCs.

It's like those DMs when I was a kid that made us make 5 consecutive successful stealth checks to sneak around. Let's say you have a 70% chance of succeeding at a single check. If you have to make 5 in a row your probability goes down to 17%

Anyway IMO it's fine to have different DCs because they represent different things. You can even call them something different, Skill Challenge Checks -- SCCs, so as not to confuse people. The checks simply represent ability to move closer to the goal using that "Skill mode" as means to the end.

I'm trying to set the SCCs at the right level so I can run these cinematic skill challenges and know that I'm not making it impossibly hard or trivially easy.

It's a very gamist structure but I find that it creates interesting non combat "scenes" and if the math is fair you can attach fairly meaningful story consequences to the skill challenges. For instance, you could have a wilderness skill challenge where you are trying to push your party to get through the wilds before an orc raiding party reaches a town. As a DM I set the DCs where I know there is ~65% chance of them getting through as I think getting though this wilderness fast is an on level challenge. Over 12 skill checks over 3 days and some memorable obstacles, they fail. They arrive too late and the town has been razed, one of their friends was killed ,and there are indications the orcs took prisoners. It's an easy way to abtract this non combat challenge AND put some non arbitrary resolution to pursuit of the goal.

See Stalker's Obsidian system for 4e for a more indepth look at one kind of skill challenge and the math for 4e.

Stalker0's Obsidian Skill Challenge System (Update: Version 1.1) Now with PDF!!

Stalker0’s Obsidian Skill Challenge System VERSION 1.1 UPDATE!! The system has now moved to Version 1.1. The changes are small, here you go. Changes from Version 1.0 1) Critical Success now gives 2 successes, instead of providing rerolls. 2) Table 2’s victory and partial victory numbers have...

www.enworld.org

None of that actually answers the question.

Why would you assume the math needs to be different for skill challenges as opposed to single checks?

 

[Charlaquin]

Fair enough. I don't think there is anything mechanically about 5e that would inherently prohibit going into "cinematic skill challenge mode" if the table wanted that in their game though.

No, not at all! It’s just my own preference

 

[Lyxen]

It's a very gamist structure but I find that it creates interesting non combat "scenes" and if the math is fair you can attach fairly meaningful story consequences to the skill challenges.

For me, this is really approaching the story backwards, really gamist indeed.

4e and 5e are different games with different approaches to action resolution. Skill challenges worked in 4e where the players were encouraged to initiate skill checks and the DM was encouraged to say yes unless there was a compelling reason to say no. I don’t think they work as well in 5e where the players describe what their characters do and the DM determines the results, calling for a die roll if necessary to resolve uncertainty in the outcome. Skill challenges wouldn’t flow right in that action resolution framework, and the meta-structure of the skill challenge just doesn’t feel necessary to me in that context. The exploration rules fill that role for me in a way that is better integrated into 5e’s core gameplay loop than skill challenges would.

I completely agree there, I'd rather encourage the PCs to think as their characters in an imaginary world than push them to look at their sheet to select the skills that they want to use because it gives them better bonuses and try then to think how this retroactively applies to the story.

 

[Charlaquin]

I completely agree there, I'd rather encourage the PCs to think as their characters in an imaginary world than push them to look at their sheet to select the skills that they want to use because it gives them better bonuses and try then to think how this retroactively applies to the story.

To be clear, I think skill challenges can be run in a way that does encourage the players to think as their characters in an imaginary world. Though, because the advice on running them wasn’t written very well and all the example skill challenges in published adventures were terrible, most 4e DMs ended up running them in a way that pushes them to look at their sheet and select skills with the best bonuses and retroactively apply story to it. Which is why I hated them when I was actually playing and running 4e. It wasn’t until I had moved on to the 5e playtest that I learned there was a better way to run them, and I can see how that would have worked in 4e and I wish I had known it then. But I don’t think it works as well for 5e, at least not the way I understand and run it (which of course is it’s own controversial subject).

 

[jmartkdr2]

It's likely different to serve it's purpose within the skill challenge and have the math work.

On purpose-- The way I run skill challanges is in "cinematic mode". Different than combat enounter mode or general exploration mode. Skill checks represent "strategy actions" that get you closer to your goal and we don't worry about the details of exactly how many feet you can jump, etc. as long as the decription fits within our shared understanding of what somone can do in that "Tier of play". A successful skill check means you get closer to the goal, a failure means no progress and possibility a complication (which might change the nature of what skills are useful). So if we are 5th level and chasing someone through a crowded city, a player could say "I climb up to the roof tops and jump from roof to roof to try to get ahead of him" (Tier appropriate, yes). "I try to convince the 2 city guards near us that the man just stole a valuble gem from a nearby merchant and they should join us in the pursuit" (Tier appropriate, yes). The check represents the success of that strategic action and movement toward the goal but not each individual jump or balance or change in whatever. The fiction changes as we go along perhaps opening up and closing down some skills that are appropriate.

X successful strategy actions before Y failures or X successful before 3 rounds (different math/system) results in reaching the goal (capture the person they were chasing in this case).

The structure is there to provide closure to the scene that doesn't rely on DM fiat and to provide math structure that ensures a challenge that is neither trivially easy nor impossible over multiple checks (there are of course situations that are both easy and impossible -- but don't use skill challenges for them).

As a DM, I need to set some baseline DCs where you know that say a 5th level party that is likely to have +7 mods has say a 65%-70% of success IN TOTAL over the X checks. Or perhaps assume out of a party of 4, 2 have +7 mods for a physical challenge like this and 2 have +3 mods (either proficiency or high ability but not both). You can use creative uses of non physical skills in a physical challenge but perhaps only once a skill per skill challenge per party to let the physical skill people shine a little (wheras in a social skill challenge you might be able to cleverly use Athetics but again only once a skill challenge per party).

Then I can modify up and down that baseline depending on whether I think the challenge is above or below level so to speak. And characters with skill resources can handle above level challenges as well.

So, with this in mind:

I wouldn't worry about magic. Most readily available magic is for one check only, and therefore wouldn't logically apply in these situations. Guidance and Bardic Inspiration would only help with one jump, one guard, one clever recall of an alleyway. It wouldn't help for the whole thing being rolled. Unless the character has a magic item providing a permanent bonus (which are rare), magic is unlikely to apply unless the players get creative.

**

On math -- Because it involves evaluating the results after a set of multiple checks, this likely requires different DCs.

It's like those DMs when I was a kid that made us make 5 consecutive successful stealth checks to sneak around. Let's say you have a 70% chance of succeeding at a single check. If you have to make 5 in a row your probability goes down to 17%

In that case I'd suggest figuring out what you want to end chance of success to be, and use a tool like Anydice to figure out what you need on the dice to make that work- form there you can use the numbers above to back-calculate the SCCs.

 

[Blue]

Has anyone done/seen a chart with average skill modifiers by level for a 5e character that has invested in a skill and not? How much can you expect to improve on the base from there in an encounter (through spells, etc.) if you decide to use resources?

I am trying to run some 4e type skill challenges (regular and Obsidian) in 5e and this would be very helpful.

With bounded accuracy the paradigm has changed from 4e where DCs were by level to set numbers. The advice is to use the difficulties in the PHB, pg 174.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

For me, this is really approaching the story backwards, really gamist indeed.

To be clear, I think skill challenges can be run in a way that does encourage the players to think as their characters in an imaginary world. Though, because the advice on running them wasn’t written very well and all the example skill challenges in published adventures were terrible, most 4e DMs ended up running them in a way that pushes them to look at their sheet and select skills with the best bonuses and retroactively apply story to it. Which is why I hated them when I was actually playing and running 4e. It wasn’t until I had moved on to the 5e playtest that I learned there was a better way to run them, and I can see how that would have worked in 4e and I wish I had known it then. But I don’t think it works as well for 5e, at least not the way I understand and run it (which of course is it’s own controversial subject).

Yes, exactly. It's a totally different resolution mechanic. It's gamist because there is no particulary reason why X checks will lead to the conclusion of the goal vs. X-1. However, the actual play produced can be very much immersive. The benefit is that you know that action which is in character and fits the fictional situation actually will contribute to toward reaching the goal with a successful check. 4e mostly had badly executed and written up skill challenges (and very bad math before errata) and it killed what is otherwise a nice abtract and very flexible multi skill check non combat resolution mechanic.

It doesn't work for all tables. For instance, you need to be comfortable switching to a different "mode" from the 1 skill check = 1 discrete action resolution normal D&D mode to the 1 skill check = abtracted action related to the skill that means progress toward the goal resolution.

Anyway, I think this is tangential to the thread as there are tons of old threads on groups that could and could not make Skill Challanges work and I don't think that changes much from 4e to 5e.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

So, with this in mind:

I wouldn't worry about magic. Most readily available magic is for one check only, and therefore wouldn't logically apply in these situations. Guidance and Bardic Inspiration would only help with one jump, one guard, one clever recall of an alleyway. It wouldn't help for the whole thing being rolled. Unless the character has a magic item providing a permanent bonus (which are rare), magic is unlikely to apply unless the players get creative.

..

I only have the core books so helpful to know there aren't many things that change all rolls during an encounter. Bardic inspiration and the like are fine then as it is certainly ok to bend the curve using limited resources, especially for 2-3 rolls out of say 10 or 12.

In that case I'd suggest figuring out what you want to end chance of success to be, and use a tool like Anydice to figure out what you need on the dice to make that work- form there you can use the numbers above to back-calculate the SCCs.

Thanks, you get it! That is exactly what I am trying to do. As soon as I am comfortable with the typical modifiers, I can use Anydice or Negative Binomial / Binomial calculators to figure out the SSCs!

I was thinking that I probably want to roughly keep the RAW success percentages of single checks and apply them to the skill challenge.

For instance a 5th level party facing a "medium" skill challenge should succeed around the same as a single check -- so +7 mod against DC15 = 65% of the time. A 5th level party facing a "hard" skill challenge should succeed 40% of the time.

So on a 8 success before 3 failure type skill challenge the SCC should be 12 for Medium and SCC of 14 for Hard. This would lead to roughly 68% and 38% success rates over the challenge. Close enough.

However, skill challenges are full party challenges so perhaps not everyone will have a top skill to use every round so perhaps I should lower the SCCs even a little further to compensate for this.

I actually like the Obsidian version a little better, >X success in 3 rounds = success vs. X before Y failures, so will probably work on that first.