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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Attacking defenseless NPCs
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<blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7626998" data-attributes="member: 6775031"><p>I mainly use my understanding of the situation to double check its interaction with outside factors. The inherent ability of the character performing the action is a factor outside of the the approach to action. Many DMs forget that. (I'm not saying that you have that problem. Just in general.)</p><p>It guarantees that the <em>only</em> ones who automatically fail are the ones with a modifier of -5 or worse, and the only ones to automatically succeed are the ones with +14 or more. It guarantees that the characters who <em>should</em> roll, <em>do</em> roll. It prevents you from accidentally narrating the feeble wizard into failure, when they actually should have had a chance to succeed. It prevents you from narrating the agile ranger into success, when they should have had a chance to fail.</p><p>It prevents you from accidentally saying that anyone ever fails, under any circumstances whatsoever, even when it should be mathematically impossible.</p><p></p><p>There's a huge problem in 5E, where DCs rarely drop below 10, and yet a specialized PC may still only have +5 to the check. The problem is called Bounded Accuracy. Many DMs will see an easy task, look at the mighty barbarian, and just say that they succeed - even when the underlying math (Bounded Accuracy) tells us that they might fail.</p><p></p><p>You can get around that problem if, as you suggest, you don't consider who the character is when you evaluate their approach. Giving something a DC of -5 is literally equivalent to saying that the outcome is certain, regardless of who is trying it. You need to really mean it, though. A common pitfall of bad DMs is that they'll let a competent-seeming character slide by without a check (or without even checking the numbers), and then force the less-competent-seeming character to make a check, with a DC that the competent-seeming character <em>could have </em>failed at.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="The Crimson Binome, post: 7626998, member: 6775031"] I mainly use my understanding of the situation to double check its interaction with outside factors. The inherent ability of the character performing the action is a factor outside of the the approach to action. Many DMs forget that. (I'm not saying that you have that problem. Just in general.) It guarantees that the [I]only[/I] ones who automatically fail are the ones with a modifier of -5 or worse, and the only ones to automatically succeed are the ones with +14 or more. It guarantees that the characters who [I]should[/I] roll, [I]do[/I] roll. It prevents you from accidentally narrating the feeble wizard into failure, when they actually should have had a chance to succeed. It prevents you from narrating the agile ranger into success, when they should have had a chance to fail. It prevents you from accidentally saying that anyone ever fails, under any circumstances whatsoever, even when it should be mathematically impossible. There's a huge problem in 5E, where DCs rarely drop below 10, and yet a specialized PC may still only have +5 to the check. The problem is called Bounded Accuracy. Many DMs will see an easy task, look at the mighty barbarian, and just say that they succeed - even when the underlying math (Bounded Accuracy) tells us that they might fail. You can get around that problem if, as you suggest, you don't consider who the character is when you evaluate their approach. Giving something a DC of -5 is literally equivalent to saying that the outcome is certain, regardless of who is trying it. You need to really mean it, though. A common pitfall of bad DMs is that they'll let a competent-seeming character slide by without a check (or without even checking the numbers), and then force the less-competent-seeming character to make a check, with a DC that the competent-seeming character [I]could have [/I]failed at. [/QUOTE]
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