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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8825138" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Not necessarily, especially if the DM uses that descriptive language consistently. “Make a hard Dexterity check” could convey very nearly as much information as “make a DC 20 Dexterity check” if the DM consistently uses “hard” to mean DC 20. Slightly less if they use it to mean “a DC greater than 15 and less than 25,” but still enough that players can get a decent sense of their likelihood of success. I find that the main benefit to using exact DCs over descriptive language is that it’s a bit more expedient - the player can simply announce if they pass or fail, instead of announcing their total result and waiting for the DM to say if that’s enough to succeed or not.I’m not sure I’m understanding you here. It sounds like you set a DC for the trap itself, and using that same DC both for when the PCs try to find it and for when they try to disarm it? But also missing the DC when trying to find that trap by only a small margin gave them partial information about the trap - they know it’s there but not how to disarm it? Or am I misunderstanding something?It sounds like we have just entirely different action resolution processes, which may be contributing to my method sounding worse to you than I think you would find it in play. Not to say you wouldn’t still dislike knowing the DC, just that you seem to have a different conception of what a DC even is than I do. In my games, it’s not that the trap has a DC of 15 or whatever that I’m telling to the players. It’s that when they try to search for it, I tell them they need to spend X resource (usually 10 minutes of time) to attempt that and they need to roll at least a 15 to succeed. If they then try to disarm the trap, that’s going to be a different action, potentially with different costs to attempt or consequences for failure, and with a different target number to succeed. DCs don’t exist independently of actions in my games.And maybe it wouldn’t. I’m just saying I used to think that too, until I tried it.</blockquote>

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