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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5301324" data-attributes="member: 82106">Here's the thing, you WANT the players to do these cool and amazing things. If you set the DCs to numbers that are a 50/50 shot for the most skilled possible characters, or at least the most skilled ACTUAL characters in the particular encounter, then they are rather unlikely to attempt them.Consider, I'm the player of the hypothetical +11 Athletics character. If say the wall is DC14 and the ceiling is a DC21 I have around a 40% chance of climbing the wall and the ceiling, assuming they are each one check. So I'm trading at least a full round of attacks for a 40% chance of success vs a 60% of failure most likely resulting in a 'mission kill' (IE once I'm in the pit it sounds like I'm out of action pretty much, plus it seems like at least a 2d10 damage fall, which is not too bad but not encouraging either).I don't know what the reward is for getting across or how absolutely necessary it is to cross. I also don't know if this is something ALL the characters are going to need to do or just one. As a rule of thumb though IMO you want to set the DCs for heroic actions to yield around a 75% chance of success, and maybe even 90%-95% if the failure consequences are dire. Statistically players really can't afford to be making very many 95% success or die type attempts very often in the character's adventuring career or it will be a short career. Intelligent players know this. For lesser consequences they should still have something beyond 50% and 75% really is a good rule of thumb.So assuming one character needs to succeed and the reward is fairly significant and the consequences not too dire then you probably want the wall climb to be practically a gimme and the ceiling climb to be successful on around a 6+. That would yield for the +11 guy a DC of around 17 for the ceiling and realistically about a 12 for the wall. This puts the ceiling into moderate difficulty by what appears to be the new DCs or hard difficulty by the current ones for 4th level. Now, if ALL the PCs need to climb across, and assuming there's no real way that they can make it easier for the less capable with ropes or some sort of magic then the DCs really need to be even lower. You're bound to have some back ranker with a STR of 10 and no Athletics training sporting a +2 Athletics check modifier. For this character a DC of 10 is problematic. Really though with cases like this there just needs to be a way to either bypass the check or mitigate the consequences somewhat, or a way to string him some ropes needs to be provided, etc.</blockquote>

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