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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ravenight" data-source="post: 4297019" data-attributes="member: 69229">On topic, but shifting gears, I want to actually ask Stalker0 about some of the things Mr. Baker says that I find interesting, but am somewhat too impatient to do the math or simulation of myself:Let's assume that the players are level 2, as he says. Let's assume that in general they have 3 trained skills with at least +3 from a stat and that one of those skills is +5 either from a stat alone or from a stat +racial boost or from a stat + feat bonus. This means that by default, they each have 3 options with a +9 to +11 bonus. Let's also assume that the DM designing the challenge is aware of their stats and intentionally designs the encounter so that each of them can use one of those skills as primary and the other two only as secondary. Let's also codify a secondary skill use as being a check that gives +2 to the next check if it succeeds and does nothing on failure (so no hard DC secondary checks to potentially gain a challenge success).Given these parameters, using 20 as the baseline DC, we could simulate the encounter by saying that each character, in order, is going to make a check. 2 times out of 3 that check will be at +9, the other time it will be at +11. 2 times out of 3, that check will count directly to success or failure, the rest of the time it will give +2 to the next person's check (if successful). With that simulation, what are the odds of success for a complexity 1 and a complexity 5 challenge?Then, we can vary things by saying that the DM hands out the occasional "best friend", so each check has some tweakable percentage chance to get +2. We can also adjust them by saying that the DCs are not all 20, but are distributed around 20 (basically, make a table of values 15-25 with percentages of each). I think this would give us a pretty good sense of just about where you have to put things in order to ensure a reasonable challenge (depending on what you want that to mean - since it isn't like an encounter because the penalty for failure isn't death, the chance of failure can be much higher, even though the rewards are the same).Maybe I'll write the program myself...</blockquote>

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