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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lacyon" data-source="post: 4195819" data-attributes="member: 63046">Once you find the control panel? Not much. Go ahead and roll Thievery. Success means you make it a certain amount into disabling the trap. One check disabled the trap in the example because a perception check had located the control panel, a pair of insight checks had given assistance into the nature of the mechanisms, an athletics check slowed the walls enough to buy him some time. Without any assists it would've taken 6 Thievery checks to disable.That gets you nothing in Escape from Sembia. It gets you something in a lot of other challenges. Either way, it's not a "free" success anymore than Thievery is a "free" success - you still have to roll the check, and if you're better at Thievery than Perception or Insight, it's Thievery that's the easy success, not the other way around.Sure you do, if it's locked.The lock, for one (if there is one). Athletics checks to get the party up to the ceiling and out the door. You need X more successes.a) There's no particular reason why the players need to be allowed to leave without gaining X successes - see the above example, where you still have to make enough checks to get the party out the door, possibly checks to unlock it, etc.b) There's no particularly good reason for the players to know whether a complication is waiting for them or not. They don't know how many successes they need.c) "Let's stay in here and try some random skill checks" doesn't work. "Let's stay in here and try to disable the trap" might, but you risk death by trap instead of unknown bad stuff by complication. You're welcome to assume that players who do, for some reason, know how many successes they need, will choose to risk death by trap instead, but there's no actual benefit to them for doing so.d) There's no reason you can't, if you want to set the whole thing up in advance, decide that it only takes 5 checks to disarm the trap, but takes 6 to get the whole party out the secret door, and checks to do one or the other don't count on the other side. You probably need to be careful about tweaking the system this way (allow a bit more room for failure), but it's a natural extension. The system itself, however, is abstract enough that you don't need to plan the whole thing out in advance - you can know that requiring X successes before Y failures at DC Q is a level N challenge suitable for J players. You don't have to decide if the trap door is locked until the players are ready to open it. You don't have to know if the trap requires 1 Thievery check to disable or 4 until the players start rolling Thievery. You don't even have to know if a PC has the Thievery skill trained at all, because they can use their other skills instead.</blockquote>

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