D&D 5E Climbing a tower rules 5e

[TaranTheWanderer]

Thank-you, I think that needed to be said.

 

[Charlaquin]

Thank-you, I think that needed to be said.

Again, I didn’t say no one who has ever played 3e can conceive of any other way of playing. If you can, you’re not who I was talking about.

 

[iserith]

Again, I didn’t say no one who has ever played 3e can conceive of any other way of playing. If you can, you’re not who I was talking about.

Or, even if it's not "can't," for some it's definitely "won't!"

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Again, I didn’t say no one who has ever played 3e can conceive of any other way of playing. If you can, you’re not who I was talking about.

I think it just gets tiresome hearing people refer to a specific style of play (like hand waiving rolls that don't lead to an interesting conclusion) is a new concept to 5th edition. It's not. Why don't we just discuss the edition we are playing instead of referring to past editions anyways?

 

[iserith]

I think it just gets tiresome hearing people refer to a specific style of play (like hand waiving rolls that don't lead to an interesting conclusion) is a new concept to 5th edition. It's not. Why don't we just discuss the edition we are playing instead of referring to past editions anyways?

I would love to do that - in more threads than this one - but then plenty of people advocate for methods of adjudication as if we're discussing some other game.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I would love to do that - in more threads than this one - but then plenty of people advocate for methods of adjudication as if we're discussing some other game.

And yet:

Yes, the PCs climbing by scaling a tower wall with bricks falling out is exactly the sort of difficult situation the rules describe when there might be a Strength (Athletics) check. But these PCs were climbing a knotted rope with no difficult situation or even time pressure in evidence. So, no roll. Now, D&D 3.Xe or 4e? Yeah, you're probably going to make a "skill check." But not in this game.

Here's that assumption that a previous edition would automatically call for a check. Even though any DM could just say, "you climb the rope, it's easy." and nothing in previous editions prevented a dm shouldn't do that.

And then it goes on:

We’ve all been so conditioned by 3.Xe to assume that goal = check and to invent the approach and consequences retroactively that many of us can’t even conceive of another way of doing things. It takes some major deprogramming to make someone who has been accustomed to the 3.Xe way of doing things receptive to the 5e way. Especially if they’re accustomed to playing 5e the 3.Xe way.

I was never conditioned to play that way in 3x...maybe other people played that way....

and etc...

Both games had 'Taking 10' for skill checks, and the DC to climb a rope was 10 or less, so as long as you were unhurried, you also just auto-pass climbing a rope in 3E and 4E.

Absolutely. For example... I don't remember what the DC was, but it was just one check (in 3.x).

So, yeah, I guess it's just my pet peeve to assume that 5e came up with some new radical way of running a game and that 3e players are dice-roll junkies.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think it just gets tiresome hearing people refer to a specific style of play (like hand waiving rolls that don't lead to an interesting conclusion) is a new concept to 5th edition. It's not.

I’ve never said it is. 5th edition’s rules for action resolution are in a lot of ways a throwback to AD&D. It’s just different than 3e and 4e’s action resolution systems.

Why don't we just discuss the edition we are playing instead of referring to past editions anyways?

Because a lot of people still run 5e like they did 3e or 4e, and don’t even realize it. They ask questions or give advice with unexamined underlying assumptions founded on the rules of previous editions, and then get defensive when it’s pointed out to them that 5e works differently.

 

[Charlaquin]

And yet:

Here's that assumption that a previous edition would automatically call for a check. Even though any DM could just say, "you climb the rope, it's easy." and nothing in previous editions prevented a dm shouldn't do that.

The DM certainly could do that in 3e, and some DMs (especially those with experience playing or running previous editions) did/do. But the way 3e was written assumed task = check, and that’s a way of thinking that seems to be very difficult to break for the people who internalized it.

And then it goes on:



I was never conditioned to play that way in 3x...maybe other people played that way....

Right, so then you aren’t who I was referring to.

So, yeah, I guess it's just my pet peeve to assume that 5e came up with some new radical way of running a game and that 3e players are dice-roll junkies.

Well, that isn’t what I assume.

 

[iserith]

And yet:


Here's that assumption that a previous edition would automatically call for a check. Even though any DM could just say, "you climb the rope, it's easy." and nothing in previous editions prevented a dm shouldn't do that.

And then it goes on:



I was never conditioned to play that way in 3x...maybe other people played that way....

and etc...




So, yeah, I guess it's just my pet peeve to assume that 5e came up with some new radical way of running a game and that 3e players are dice-roll junkies.

You will note that I said "probably." That was certainly the paradigm in those games in my experience. "If climb, then climb check."

I also don't suggest in any way that D&D 5e has some radical new approach to gaming. It's just different than the previous two editions that a generation of DMs learned from, many of whom still carry those practices into other games, including D&D 5e. Often times, this can be seen in how a person says they adjudicate in discussions. Or just turn on any actual play on Twitch and watch. More than one person has made references to D&D 3.Xe DCs in this thread, including the OP, as if it has any bearing on adjudication in D&D 5e. People are often influenced by other games when playing this game. Sometimes it doesn't matter. Other times it leads to confusion.

 

[clearstream]

Yeah, I should know this by now, but it came up the other day and stumped the group. They wanted to throw a grappling hook on a knotted rope 80 feet up and snag a small window they'd broken. We were trying to figure out how much the knotted rope would help, but the best we could find was that a magic rope of climbing gives you advantage on the climb check. Fine. So I said your grappling hook knotted rope does the same thing. You climb half speed, so to get that far up would be three checks. The tricky part was setting the DC. I said 12, but maybe that was too high with the knotted rope. The fat dwarf cleric wants to climb up too and the player (my brother) wants it easy peasy it's so easy. DC 5 is he thinks is reasonable. Which, I guess back in 3.x a knotted rope does drop the DC to 5. Maybe I should have said DC 8 or 10. I wanted some difficulty of climbing up 80 feet. Failure wouldn't mean you fall, it means you don't make progress and have to make another check.

The fat dwarf had Athletics +5. The rogue only had Athletics +1. They ended up trying something else because it seemed too dangerous to climb a knotted rope that high up.

How should I have handled this better?

Were I DMing this I would have called for one roll - at DC 8 - for falling from the highest third of the climb. That's perhaps 6d6 of damage, so to my mind worth concerning oneself with. Reflecting, I often find myself thinking about the significant possible point of failure and just calling for the check there. For instance, I might have been more interested in a Sleight of Hand check in this case, to see if the rope had been set up securely. Checks can represent a confluence of factors: falling might not mean that you fumbled the climb itself, but something about the climb. (It is a very old school principle, to warm the hearts of some, that part of why we use dice is because they know things we do not!)

If I decided the only cost was going to be time taken, and they were not under time pressure, then I would not have called for climb checks.