D&D 5E Questions That Have Come Up in 5thEd

[ccs]

4) How difficult and time consuming would you say it is to light a fire with flint and steel? We were trying to do it in combat with trolls to stop the regenerating.

In real life?
It can be anywhere from easy enough but time consuming to a pain in ass & more time consuming. And that's without adverse conditions (including any type of breeze). There's a reason matches & lighters were invented.
But whatever the DC, it absolutely takes longer than a 6 second D&D round to get a practical fire going with F&S.
Except in conditions so dry that any spark will instantly morph into a California wildfire....

In D&D/games?
*Out of combat/no threat I've always ruled it to be automatic. If we really want to know for some reason I've always defaulted to d5 minutes to get it started.
*Adverse conditions = a skill check every d5 minutes.
*In combat? HA! At best a very hard skill check. And your not moving anywhere or doing anything else. Especially not if you expect a practical flame within 6 seconds. Success would equal you getting a flame at the end of the round.

That's how I run it.

 

[S'mon]

I understand that IRL travellers carried little fire pots containing embers, which could be used to light a new fire fairly easily. Not in 6 seconds though. Lighting a torch as a combat action - I'd allow that if there were another torch or similar fire source to use, or the PC was using fire magic!