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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edgar Ironpelt" data-source="post: 9395337" data-attributes="member: 32075">Not a god, and not of dodging, but there is the mythological example of the Buddha, who Did Not Get Hit by all the attacks that the armies of the demon-god Mara threw at him.I'm not so confident about saying "never" when it comes to PCs, as I don't always expect players to "color inside the lines" of bounded accuracy. Nor am I confident about what is "obvious" to me always being "obvious" to my players, or vice versa.No, I like standards and guidelines other than GM whim when it comes to deciding between "that's obvious" and "you have to roll for that." Also, I vaguely remember various arguments in other threads about whether or not a PC can spot various items or clues in a room without having to make a roll and/or going into nasty excruciating detail in describing where he looks. I'd really like to short-circuit such arguments when I play or GM, and this is my method for doing so: If the task really is easy enough, or the character really is good enough, then the mechanics will hand out an automatic success. "Absurdly high numbers" is just a stress-test for this: If the mechanics give the right results for those absurd numbers, as well as for ordinary average numbers, then they can be trusted to give decent results for in-between cases also.That's actually an argument in my favor. Sometimes the "obvious" actually is not obvious. Thus the desirability of mechanics that can handle such maybe-obvious cases. A football field is 100 yards or 300 feet. That's a -30 penalty by the 3.5e RAW, and 300 feet is not all that huge a number by real-world outdoor distances. And while the RAW insists on very short "within the video-game-screen" distances for encounters, not everyone plays outdoor encounters that way, at least not all the time.</blockquote>

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