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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 1341072" data-attributes="member: 2629">What you may want to consider is that it is harder to sneak past an entire crowd than just 1 person. Thus, I decided to make a house rule to cover the issue of sneaking past a group.Even when the guards are taking 10 (casual guarding, no stress), they should get a bonus for a group acting together. I calculated the average highest roll for 2 rolls of d20s would be 13.825. NOt wanting to repeat the math, I rolled 3d20s 50 times and received an average on the highest die of a little below 16. When repeated for four dice, I had an average slightly above 16. Based loosely upon my results, I decided that when groups of similar skilled beings make spot (or listen) checks and take 10 on that check, I give them bonuses as follows:2 spotters: +4 (take 14)3 or 4 spotters: +6 (take 16)5 to 8 spotters: +7 (take 17)9 to 20 spotters: +8 (take 18)21 to 40 spotters: +9 (take 19)more than 40 spotters: +10 (take 20 - the maximum bonus)If there is a few creatures with a higher spot roll amongst a larger crowd of rabble, I'll always roll a spot roll for those special beings. If the crowd has a bunch of different spot scores, I only look at the subgroups with the highest spot scores and assume that the others give no real advantage - something that the math proves true if there is a significant difference between the effective spot skills (more than a point or two).This type of thing saves a lot of time, though it does create some problems. You need to account for distance and distraction penalties, so you often must break down a larger group of similar beings into multiple groups of beings with different effective skill scores - which usually results in you only caring about the group closest to the target (that all share a similar distance to the target ... something around a 20 foot difference in their distance from the target).</blockquote>

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