Spot & Listen by CR

[BowStreetRunner]

This one is for you DMs out there who put a lot of effort into optimizing encounters. What are the highest spot and listen bonuses you are generally able to throw at the party at each CR? For the purposes of this discussion, let's just look at CRs 5, 10, 15, and 20. However, if there is an important break-point where some new bonus comes into play feel free to point that out.

Assume the party sneak (rogue, scout, etc.) is able to hide without cover or concealment even while being observed and can overcome abilities like blindsense, blindsight, scent, tremorsense, and even mindsight. What I am after is not what ways the DM is able to get around spot and listen checks, but when I am able to get past those abilities what sort of DCs are my Hide & Move Silently checks going to need to be able to beat in order to be not just good, but great at stealth?

[hicegetraenk]

Well it really depends on the PCs. Assuming they are non-optimized, I'm going this way:

Take the max rank a PC can have at current level. For lower level chars, just add about 20 to the DC. So a player with maybe a +6 Dex and a +5 elven boots and maybe +5 for bonus via feats still has to roll 14 or higher. Characters in armor or without magical enhancements will fail this DC for sure and the skilled ones have to roll decent.

From lvl 10 on it tends to be a bit trickier since there's many ways to greatly affect total skill value. You'd have to increase the DC way more to deliver an appropriate challenge.

5th: 20-30
10th: 30-45
15th: 45-70
20th: 70++

That's what works with my group, which consists of many experienced players, but may / want not to get all the juice out of power gaming and optimizing.

[Chronos]

I think at pretty much any level, the highest Spot/Listen scores are going to be on the appropriate true dragons. They've got lots of HD, decent Wis, and both as class skills that they tend to max out.

That said, dragons tend to be more powerful than their CR would indicate, so you shouldn't always just throw a CR X dragon at a level X party.

[BowStreetRunner]

Just to clarify why I am looking at this - the last handful of stealthy characters in our party have been killed while scouting ahead of the main party. So I am trying to build a character that has two primary qualities. First, I want him to be able to survive long enough for help to arrive if he is detected while scouting ahead of the party. Second, I don't want him to be detected while scouting ahead of the party.

The problem is that I don't really know how good he really has to be at sneaking, because I don't know what encounters the DM has lined up for us. (Well, except one. We know we will eventually face a Red Dragon in the Great Wyrm category, but that's not until CR 26 so probably still about 10 levels away.) The DM is good at optimizing encounters (nothing munchkin, but solidly optimized) so I want to try to make something that will handle whatever he throws our way.

At present, we have just been operating without anyone in this role, but it has caused some issues and it would be nice to be able to cope with these problems again.