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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 1922385" data-attributes="member: 18549">"Yes, because I have the same number of ranks in listen as you do, am also taking 10, and that guy trying to sneak past rolled less than required to succeed.  Had I not also heard it, it would mean that you are standing closer to the source of the sound than I am, which says nothing about the quality of our skill at listening, but does point out the utility of using multiple listeners to overcome distance penalties."edit:The problem with using additive probabilities is that if you have a master thief sneaking behind a curtain, if you have enough guards on the other side of the curtain you can all but guarantee that they'll hear him.Let's say that any individual guard will only succeed on a 20.  If there are 20 guards, the chance of success is about 65%.  Which seems excessively high, considering that this is a "master thief" and he's trying to sneak past 1st level nobodies.  If the guards use an additive probability method to detect the thief, 65% is the minimum chance for 20 guards to detect him, and if the thief puts one more rank in, the chance drops to zero, because they need to roll 21 in order to hear him.  I find that 65% drop pretty weird, and would like to give the thief more credit for being sneaky than that.  If there were 50 guards, the chance is increased to 92%.  This doesn't account for distance penalties, but how could it without becoming even more unnecessarily complicated?  Again, add one rank of Move Silently and the chance drops from 92% to zero.On the other hand, a single listen roll can be made for all the guards, as per the description of the Listen skill.  This gives a 5% chance to hear the thief, which drops a mere 5% to 0% if he gets another rank.  If you really want to, you can use Aid Another to give a +2 bonus to a particular individual.  However, I'd want to cap the maximum number of aiders pretty low, possibly only two, especially if the guards are 10 feet apart from one another.  That would give the guards a 25% chance to hear the thief, which might be fair.IMO, to use additive probability is unrealistic, and it devalues the Move Silently skill as a result.</blockquote>

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