D&D 5E Stealth, Spot, and Listen

[mlund]

Sometimes simplicity and precision are competing interests.

Having itemized skill lists and putting each task under exactly 1 silo of skill use is a precise way of measuring skills. It's also complicated and leads to various conflicts that have results that are anything but intuitive.

Considering skills are not balanced against one another in any meaningful way (seriously, "Use Rope" vs. "Persuade" or "Intimidate" vs. "Search"?) precision loses a lot of its practical value in the D&D Skill system.

In the interests of simplicity and role-playing depth, D&DNext should dump pretty much everything in the 3.X/4E style of skill management and look at how you had to handle the Profession Skill in 3.X and what Feats like "Alertness" in 4E were supposed to convey about your character.

Seriously, consider how you can apply "Profession: Sailor," or "Profession: Merchant" to a character. Try to quantify that vs. "Use Rope" or "Balance." You can't. Why? Because "Use Rope" is a precise skill designation and "Profession: Sailor" is an intuitive skill designation.

Can I use "Use Rope" on this check? I ask a very simple binary question: "Does the task rest upon tying a rope?" Y/N

Can I use "Profession: Sailor" on this check? I ask a more nebulous question: "Is this a task rest upon functions commonly performed by a sailor?"

Consider these factors:
- Skill checks have been replaced by Ability Checks
- Skills are no longer married to any one Ability
- Skills are now married to a Background or Class

When I look at all those things laid out, it seems like various ability checks should have a lot of room for overlap between different categories of talents. Whether you get to use the Skill Die or not might be more dependent on context and even role-playing.

While it may invoke shades of "DM may I," the interaction elements of D&D have always traditionally relied on back-and-forth between the DM and the PCs - from the days before even Non-weapon Proficiency to the era of Skill Challenges things have always been up in the air. It's probably better to allow players to pick a small number of intuitive talents / skills / experiences than a laundry list of narrow, mutually-exclusive silos.

It also helps combat the "Knowledge Bloat" that can crop up in some games. More niche knowledge comes packaged in with experience. Someone who was a ranch hand knows a whole lot about the animals - how they behave, what they eat, what kind of illnesses and injuries they commonly suffer. He doesn't need Knowledge: Nature, Knowledge: Geography, Knowledge: Local, Ride, Spot, Use Rope, and Heal just to drive cattle 2 days to market. Further, his skill set shouldn't really clue him into the anatomy of dragons, how to treat an elf's sucking chest wound, or where the magistrate's estate is in Capital City.

The kind of things Skill Checks cover in the last 12 years or so of D&D is much more traditionally a free-wheeling activity. A context-sensitive approach with a couple of talent/skill descriptions is a happy medium between the "butt-pull-background" approach we used in OD&D / AD&D (no parameters to configure your character, just fudge something for a bonus) and the "Oops, I forgot to take Use Rope for my Sailor" (itemized, exclusive silos) approach of 3.X and the "Sorry, but this game doesn't have a skill for that," (narrow knowledge skills, no professions) approach of 4E.

This kind of context-sensitive application can probably be used as options in other parts of D&D to make them more free-wheeling and less mechanically cumbersome on players that want lower-complexity play: be they newer players or players that prefer a more OD&D feel to their games.

- Marty Lund

 

[Obryn]

[MENTION=50304]mlund[/MENTION]: That's more or less what I was getting at with Aspects.

-O

 

[Kobold Stew]

I agree! It doesn't need to be done across the board, too:

If every character has at least one of the "intuitive" skills (and I like the distinction you make between intuitive and precise skills), we're already richer. That's what I was suggesting here:
"make it a requirement that every background (even customized ones) have at least one Knowledge or Profession skill attached to it".

FATE does this, as does Barbarians of Lemuria, both quite effectively.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I don't see that as a problem. I see that as needless symmetry. Sneak/Stealth makes sense as one skill someone would be trained at or be naturally good at. It would be an extremely rare circumstance where a race or class is good at one and not the other, or use one and not the other.

However, it makes logical sense that hearing and vision are the two most common perception senses, and races and classes can be good at one, and not the other. In most circumstances, when making a Wisdom check to perceive a foe, having either one of those skills is going to be helpful, so there is no issue. But there are a myriad of situations where one applies and the other doesn't.

Hiding and Moving Silently do not need to exist separately to follow a needless symmetry to mirror Spot and Listen.

It's still only one check per contestant.

Ah - I hadn't grasped that that was the way you were implementing stealth. I think that works then, yes, if you have a stealth skill opposed by either spot or listen. In most circumstances you'll use your best, but sometimes one or other won't apply, so the super-alert character invests in both just in case. I would still separate search from the two, however, else spot becomes a much better choice than listen.

 

[Wyckedemus]

Ah - I hadn't grasped that that was the way you were implementing stealth. I think that works then, yes, if you have a stealth skill opposed by either spot or listen. In most circumstances you'll use your best, but sometimes one or other won't apply, so the super-alert character invests in both just in case. I would still separate search from the two, however, else spot becomes a much better choice than listen.

I completely agree with you that Search should still be different than Spot, the difference being that Search would be an analytical aspect of perception that includes mental deduction of the circumstances and is primarily Intelligence-based.

This also helps characters who are "smart" have a way of contributing to exploration challenges beyond Knowledge/Lore.

 

[billd91]

I completely agree with you that Search should still be different than Spot, the difference being that Search would be an analytical aspect of perception that includes mental deduction of the circumstances and is primarily Intelligence-based.

This also helps characters who are "smart" have a way of contributing to exploration challenges beyond Knowledge/Lore.

The answer to this, in D&DNext mode, would be use the same skills (spot/listen) but add them to an Intelligence roll instead of a Wisdom roll.

 

[Wyckedemus]

The answer to this, in D&DNext mode, would be use the same skills (spot/listen) but add them to an Intelligence roll instead of a Wisdom roll.

But I still think that rolling it into Spot makes it too much of a "must-have" skill. Spot and listen already help against surprise attacks by monsters. Should it also apply to searching for the secret door that leads to the loot? I'm of the mind that it shouldn't do that much.

And for those that agree with that statement, I would suspect that Search as I've (generally) defined it makes sense, and portrays a valid, recognizable delineation of those two functions.

 

[Kobold Stew]

The answer to this, in D&DNext mode, would be use the same skills (spot/listen) but add them to an Intelligence roll instead of a Wisdom roll.

To help break the one-skill-to-rule-them-all conundrum, I suggest doing exactly this, but doubling Search (Int) and Track (Wis).

 

[Mandingo]

I personally liked the idea of the combined listen/spot versus the combined hide/move-in-shadows. The reason is that generally: the purpose of a successful detection is whether or not the threat is noticed. Whether you hear the rustling of the bushes versus see the bushes rustle is irrelevant, since your ability to react to that is the same. Not to mention that most characters use whichever of those skills are optimized. If, for some strange reason, you need to distinguish specifically whether a threat was seen or heard; then you can use situation modifiers as appropriate.

As far as track: I once was in a game where the homebrew rule was to have the Track feat allow characters to use Search instead of Survival for tracking, if they preferred.

 

[Argyle King]

The reason why I feel there needs to be symmetry (regardless of whether that means 2 skills vs 2 skills or perception vs stealth) is because it makes stealth far too good. If I'm only required to buy one ability to do something, but everyone else is required to buy two abilities to oppose me at doing that something, I feel that heavily favors the person who only needs to buy the one thing because he's spending half as much. If he spends the same amount, it's being placed into one pot instead of two, so he'll be potentially twice as skilled. This was already bad enough in some 3.5 situations; in a system where the math is more flat (which I applaud,) it makes a bigger bonus even more useful.

In theory, I like having 2 skills for sneaking around and 2 for observing your surroundings. However, after considering that D&D doesn't have facing -nor is ever likely to as a default assumption- I think it makes the most sense to simply have 4E style perception and stealth. If a particular race is good at hearing things, simply give them a small bonus to perception checks when trying to hear or detect a sound; if a particular race has really good eyes, simply give them a small bonus to perception checks when dealing with things they have line of sight to (or possibly reduce the penalties to spot they'd have for long distances.)