D&D 5E (2014) Is Intimidate the worse skill in the game?

[UngeheuerLich]

Most of my players have never played 3rd edition (because they where in nappies when it was current).

Some of my players were not even born then...

 

[Clint_L]

I actually used a level 1 side quest in PotA for level 5 characters. And it scared the hell out of them...

but my point is not using ogres at level 10 as the final boss.
But they still make fine minions.

So in other words, you do scale battles to character ability. So why is that okay, but not other challenges?

Also if I build my final boss, if there is a character with +15 stealth in the party, I don't give them +20 perception to counteract. And then add another rogue with +20 stealth in the mix to show the rogue how incompetent they are if they think just increasing stealth at max level brings them anywhere near good scores (they need to have at least 3 magic items that add +5 bonus to actually let them do anything useful).

Well, that would just be vindictive and kind of meta-gaming. However, if you are at a level where characters have ability scores as high as +15, then they should be going up against commensurate challenges, and sometimes that might mean running into a guardian that is just as elite level as them, doesn't it? I mean, it just makes sense that other folks will also get good at doing their job.

Like, if I'm the Level 10 appropriate BBEG with a vault to guard, I'm not hiring low level mooks. I'm getting the pros.

You keep writing as if the DM designing challenges that are actually challenges is petty on the part of the DM. I do not understand this perspective, at all. Players want to be challenged. Being challenged and figuring out a solution is the fun of the game.

Yes. But even they are not all having stealth and perception that is higher than what the party rogue can muster. The rogue who specializes in a skill should feel that their abilities can match the best of them.

There's usually someone as good or even better, even amongst experts. In the Olympic 100m final, someone's going to win, but it's going to be competitive. And if your rogue is level 10, what happens when they run into a level 20?

But the difference in 4e is that everyone got 1/2 level bonus. So now even some level 10 person who never learnt anything about breaking in warhouses can now suddenly pick those locks or sneak in easily.

Becaus sometimes it is important to allow players and their characters to feel competent. To actually feel progression.
If you are constantly faced withs challenges that you only have a 50% chance to succeed at, why should your scores go up at all. Why not just using coin flips forever?

This is such a peculiar way of looking at competence. Characters don't feel competence because they are still breaking into warehouses and finding it easy. They feel competence because now they are breaking into vaults that would have been way beyond them at level 1.

I was a fairly serious climber for many years, and still go to the climbing gym on occasion. Sport climbing uses a difficulty rating system, where an easy climb is around 5.5, and it goes up to around 5.15+ for elite, world class climbers. As I got better at climbing, I didn't keep doing 5.5s. I might warm up on an easier climb, maybe a 5.8-9, but my focus was on doing climbs at the edge of my ability and failing until I figured them out. That's what everyone does - there is not a line-up of skilled climbers waiting to have a turn on the newbie climbs.

You experience your competence and expertise by testing yourself, not by doing boring, trivial tasks over and over. The progression is expressed by facing and overcoming harder challenges. Exactly the same as taking on harder foes, which you've already admitted you do - the ogre that was once a boss is now a minion.

If you think allowing your players to feel that they are competent is a waste if game time at your table, skip those.

See above. I think you are defining competence very, very oddly. Especially given that the game is about creating heroic stories. Breaking into a local bandits's warehouse with a level 10 party is not exactly epic.

I think a bigger waste of game time is always using equal level challenges, because those are the encounters that actually take a long time to resolve.

Not necessarily, but if they do, then they were probably interesting challenges. I will agree that taking out some bandits with a level 10 party would be very quick. It could be entertaining if done for the larfs - in Critical Role campaign 2 the party actually did keep running into the same group of bandits, who went from being a minor threat in the first encounter to comic relief, strictly for RP, in future encounters.

So if I want fun encounters, I try to use rather low level challenges.

This has the added benefit of relieveing pressure from your players to always optimize their characters.
Stop always using hard encounterd and suddenly PCs may play and act as PCs and not as board figures that always do the best tactics.

You are writing as if there is no nuance - as if it's either always do easy or super hard, must optimize challenges. How about setting encounters commensurate with the party's level and the pacing of the story?

But hard challenges are the most important thing in story telling. There are no good stories - not one - in which characters do not ultimately face challenges that test their limits and force them to make difficult choices. Challenges are what create meaning in stories. That's the narrative perspective, and you can pick up just about any book on writing and it will tell you the same thing: the protagonist must be tested for the story to have stakes and for character development to occur. For themes to happen. Some challenges are there as minor tests and setbacks, but others must be extreme.

That's the narrative perspective. From a game-ist perspective, hard challenges are, again, vital. Beating hard challenges is why we play video games over and over. When I played World of Warcraft (rabidly, for too many years), 25 of us ran Ice Crown Citadel for months, over and over, failing again and again before finally defeating the Lich King. If you lose a level in Super Mario Bros, you go again. Once you've got it down, you move onto a harder level. The fact that you are still failing all the time doesn't lessen your sense of growing competence at the game, because you know that you are now attempting stuff that used to feel impossible.

 

[Chaosmancer]

NO YOU DO NOT!

For God's sake, what do I have to do to prove this to you? Do I need to dig out the difficulty classes from the most recent 5e adventure I've played? Because I guarantee you they absolutely the hell are not universally fixed at 10, 15, or 20. They are ALL OVER THE PLACE. And they go UP as you face more dangerous threats. That is literally how the actual game is written.

Your fantasy of a world where there are only and exactly three difficulty classes and they remain perfectly fixed no matter what is completely invented. That's not how 3e worked, and it's not how 5e works as the book is written nor as its adventures are written.

You created this, as a house rule, because you knew that with 5e's system, allowing DCs to keep scaling up ensured that either only experts succeeded, or experts exclusively succeed and never fail.

Honestly, I think half the issue is that people are looking at it from the wrong angle.

They are thinking "An Adamantium door is always DC 25, therefore it is fixed at DC 25 and will always be DC 25." Meanwhile, the truth is, you don't plan an encounter with an Adamantium door at level 1.

Which does get into the whole idea of pre-writing the world and quantum ogres, because someone will inevitably say "Well, if the door is there then it is there, I don't adjust the world to match the PCs" Which is technically true, but misses the point that the "sliding" DC of 4e was meant to represent that same idea, just from another angle. Instead of saying "This Adamantium Door is DC 25" (and yes, I know you posted the door DCs, just keeping a consistent advantage) it says "If you want to challenge a PC of level X with a hard door to break through, you should look for a DC Y door" with the implicit understanding that the DM will fill in the narrative of what that door is that makes it so tough to get through.

Which is something I do and would not be surprised that most improv DMs do. We think "how hard should this be?" before deciding how to describe the locked door.

 

[Chaosmancer]

4e was built on the pre2e assumption that PCs all dabble in all adventuring skills in downtime so there were no skills. Fighters can pick locks in offtime and wizard can freehand climb on the weekend.

It was 3e that introduced the idea that if you didn't specifically train in something, you suuuuuuuuuuuccckkked at it.

Not only that, but the half level bonus just made sense.

Sure, maybe your level 2 Barbarian doesn't know anything about magic.

Your level 22 barbarian who has been blasted by magic, fought magic creatures, used magic items, gone through magical portals, eaten magical food, been eaten by magical food, and lived in a magical house... has probably learned something about magic.

Maybe your level 3 Paladin didn't know anything about stealth. But your level 14 Paladin who has spent the last two and half years sneaking into places has to have eventually learned SOMETHING about being stealthy. He just literally could not stealth as often as he has and learn nothing about how to be sneaky, even if purely from doing it wrong and learning what NOT to do.

Add to that the thing about essentially living 24/7 with an expert in a field? Sure, maybe you don't know anything about medicine, but if you lived for ten months with a world-class medical doctor... you probably learn SOMETHING about medicine, especially as you follow them around and watch them work in extreme conditions.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

But your level 14 Paladin who has spent the last two and half years sneaking into places has to have eventually learned SOMETHING about being stealthy

He has learned to take off his plate mail first.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

So in other words, you do scale battles to character ability. So why is that okay, but not other challenges?

No. I used that premade side quest as is. I did not scale it at all. I just used it as it had been for level 1.

And yes, character of higher level usually search for higher level monsters.

I did not read the rest as you are clearly building a straw man.

 

[Minigiant]

Page 42 says you are wrong. The example that I quoted clearly uses level to scale the DCs.

No.
4e DCs don't scale with PC level.
4e DCs scale with Challenge, Power, Item, NPC, or Obstacle level.

A level 15 Magma Flow hazard who is easy to dodge has DC 11.
Not
A level 15 rogue is dodging a Magma hazard. The DC is 11.

Because if the rogue has a 16th level fighter ally, the DC doesn't become 12.
If the rogue comes back in 3 levels, the DC doesn't become 12.

How much better in 5e depends on if it's a single roll or if you have many retries. If it's a single roll, the odds are that both of you will fail against that lock. With many retries he outdoes you every time.

Most D&D out of combat is single rolls.

 

[Clint_L]

No. I used that premade side quest as is. I did not scale it at all. I just used it as it had been for level 1.

And yes, character of higher level usually search for higher level monsters.

I did not read the rest as you are clearly building a straw man.

Yes, if your only response is to resort to an ad hominem attack, it's best we move on. I do not build straw man arguments. Ever. That's a very insulting comment.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Bye @Clint_L who wrote some message and blocked me so I can't read it.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I will point out that it’s perfectly possible to unintentionally construct a strawman argument. Done it myself. Pretty much everyone on these boards argues in good faith.