Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="IronWolf" data-source="post: 5258912" data-attributes="member: 21076">Well, it depends on the ditch.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Really though, it really does sort of depend on the ditch.  Just using the real world area of the country I live in, a ditch can be drastically different things depending on which one you are looking at.  Some you can practically step over in a single long stride, others are big enough to lose a car in.  So it really can vary depending on the type of ditch in question.Now with that said, if I describe it as a relatively small ditch, I would hope the player can at least make a ballpark guess as to the difficulty level versus if I describe it as a rather wide and deep ditch with a stream of water running along the bottom of it.  If the player can't then I as DM probably need to consider being more consistent in my setting of DCs for various things to help aid the player in making these decisions without need to analyse in depth each situation.I think over the course of a few sessions (possibly more depending on how many skill checks the players are exposed to in these sessions) that a player will get a feel for what their character is capable of.  Some DMs will go more with the, that sounds really cool, here's a reasonable DC to accomplish it.  Other DMs are going to want a less flashy feel to their game and if the player asks to do something cool or outrageous will be more likely to either say no, not possible or set a really high DC to practically guarantee failure.  The players will learn which type of DM they have during the first few sessions with a DM.For example, in the game I play in, I am pretty confident that if I tell the DM I want my character to not waste time running to the back of the theatre house to rush up the balcony steps and instead say I want to jump up and pull myself over the front balcony rail that my DM is going to say go for it and assign a DC that is reasonable if I have ranks in jump and climb.  I know this because I have played with the DM for awhile and know he wants to see our characters able to be heroic and do cool things.I do agree that a player has to learn which DM they are currently playing with.  One that is all for them doing flashy things or one that likes a less flashy/swashbuckling game.  Games vary from table to table and from DM to DM and for many things it is a matter of learning which style of game this table plays.  I think this applies to even more than skill challenges.</blockquote>

Verification