NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 3186682" data-attributes="member: 5171">While I'm no fan of TPKs, I dislike the idea of having a dozen Listen checks. I've played games where the DM makes any task have a large number of checks associated with it. Past a certain point, you're almost definitely going to fail one of them. It's not fun, and I believe that it perverts the spirit of the rules.I could possibly see one extremely difficult Listen check for picking the lock and opening the door, and one easier Listen check for moving toward the PC. Assuming that the thief takes 10 both times, I'd assume that the DCs are some like 30 for the lock-opening check and 20 for the Move Silently check. That would reward anyone with an absurdly high Listen check and give anyone else a fighting chance.In this case, things went badly. That's too bad, but the solution to things going badly isn't to completely change the rules or force an absurd number of skill checks in the hopes that the PCs will make (or the thief will fail) one of them.At 7th level, I wouldn't have wards on my room every night, but I would have, say, a chair behind the door and a bell on the chair. The door opens, the chair moves, the bell rings, I get a better chance to wake up. Costs me a gold or two, tops, and I can easily do it every night, unless I'm entertaining company for the evening, in which case, if I die, at least I die happy.And if the players don't want to have to play their characters as careful enough to do something like this (not a full ward, but a trap, essentially, that the intruding thief would have to find and disable like any other trap to avoid ringing the bell), then the DM probably shouldn't put in encounters like this.(In a published adventure, this is hard -- published adventures ought to, and sometimes do, come with warnings about the difficulty level and how players should play their PCs in order to succeed. As a player, I appreciate a friendly, "If you don't have a lot of hit points AND a high AC, this module will be difficult and frustrating for you" or "If you don't have many ranks in social skills, it will be tough to get much enjoyment from this module" from the module writers.)</blockquote>

Verification