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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Asmor" data-source="post: 5722447" data-attributes="member: 1154">I ran D&D last night using a little cheat sheet* with example skill DCs, damage amounts, etc by level. I didn't have any stat blocks, and when we had a combat, I just gave all the enemies abilities on the fly.It worked out pretty well, but one thing that worried me a bit at the time was whether it would feel too homogenous using the similar target numbers all the time.In particular, in combat, the "base" defenses were 14 for everything, with +2 for AC. On top of that, I threw in a +2 here and a -2 there (so the orc had a -2 will; the soldiers had +2 AC) as I felt appropriate.What this means is that every monster's AC was either 14, 16 or 18; and other defenses were 12, 14 or 16.This bothered me at the time, but the more I'm thinking about it, the more I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe it's not such a bad thing. There's already a lot of variance in the dice, and how important is it really that the players get a good distribution of 30%, 35%, 40%, etc chances of hitting?The skills were along the same lines; I would decide whether skill checks should be easy, medium or hard, and just the use the exact number printed, every time, regardless of circumstances (circumstances would, instead, help me dictate the difficulty I should choose).I'm actually starting to come to the conclusion that consistency might even be preferable. I kind of like the idea that someone can look at their +x to attack and say definitively that it equates to a y% chance to hit against a "normal" monster.So what do you think? Is variety of target numbers important, does it not matter, or is consistency more beneficial?*I got the cheatsheet from <a href="http://slyflourish.com/lazy_dm_tools.html" target="_blank">Sly Flourish</a></blockquote>

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