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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vyvyan Basterd" data-source="post: 5651819" data-attributes="member: 4892">Nope, never said that.You should know the characters your players are playing. If you know that the highest Arcana check in the group is +10, then making the DC to decipher the script 40 should obviously tell you that you intend for the group not to be able to deal with their challenge on their skill alone. Even if you make it DC 20, you should be prepared for them to need assistance 45% of the time. The distinction is that, as DM, you get to set the difficulty at a level that determines whether the challenge is able to be accomplished with the direct skill of the characters. This is just as planned as if you make the DC a 10 when "Arcana Guy" has a +30 Arcana check.Depends on how much a DM prefers to prep ahead. If he likes winging the Sage encounter, that's fine. But calling the encounter "unplanned" when it is actually "unprepared" is the difference.Pre-planning reasonable courses of action the players might take is pointless and bad DMing? I beg to differ. I don't have to prep the Sage encounter, but I may well want to keep that eventuality in mind as a common thing one might do when unable to resolve the issue themselves.I never said this either.I took it into account, I just didn't mention it since it is a basic premise of the game. But a DM can also make those random die rolls irrelevant by placing the DC too high or too low for a level-appropriate challenge.You're not wrong about no risk of failure. But I never built my premise around 'no risk of failure.'Yes, dice are fickle and some days I set aside the new pretty dice and pull out the worn out 30-year-old crayon-filled dice. Welcome to the grognard club.But, the dice can be as fickle as they want to be when it comes to skill checks. Without the auto-fail and auto-hit feature that attack rolls have a character with a +10 Arcana can never fail an encounter requiring an Arcana check of 11 or less and can never succeed at one requiring a 31 or more. So it is not as 'regardless' as you claim.I'll go so far as to say that Good DMs do anticipate courses of action their players may take and give some thought to non-mandatory encounters. Ad-libbing an encounter does not automatically make it worse, some people are good at that. But pre-planning can improve anyone's ability to provide a more interesting encounter.Open up a copy of Keep on the Borderlands and look at the NPCs the author prepared for use when the PCs came looking for their aid.</blockquote>

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