3.5 Help on Skills

[Bloodzy]

I am new to DM'ing 3.5 and am curious what points I should attribute to skill checks such as spot and how to calculate these numbers. My PCs are around 9th level and have crazy spot check so when I make it something like 15 or 20, there is almost no failure. Should I ramp it up because they are so good at spotting or should I just let them pretty much spot whatever I throw at them? This is just an example. I don't know how to put numbers on any of the skills, move silently, exc.

Thanks for the tips,
Bloodzy

[ComaVision]

I would advise reading the the skill descriptions (http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/skills.htm).

Spot is opposed by Hide.

Listen is opposed by Move Silently.

Don't punish the party for investing in skills by arbitrarily increasing the DC.

[daremetoidareyo]

spot checks vs. disguises and hiding are opposed rolls. They should scale with the PC's level.

Spot checks to notice things don't need to be scaled in the same way necessarily, PCs are hyper wary murderers of sentient life, they will interrogate their surroundings after years of bloodshed.

But, you are totally OK to make some higher spot check DCs for things: just not everything.

Spot checks above 20 give the PCs an awareness of an invisible thing around them, not a pinpoint.

The only spot checks that should be really really tough are when the archer is shooting a bunch of range categories away at an enemy in a visually occluding environment (woods, city, anything that offers a large bit of cover).

[ExLibrisMortis]

You should not increase the difficulty of spot checks, just because your party is good at spotting. For example, a low-level character can spot a town from a mile away, and a high-level character can spot it from two miles away. That's the way the game is supposed to work - higher-levelled characters are just better at everything.

You should make your higher-level enemies better at hiding, and you should make special dungeon details harder to spot in more dangerous dungeons. For example, a 9th-level sneaky villain would have 12 ranks in Hide, 16 dexterity and +1 leather armour of shadow, giving them a Hide bonus of 12 + 3 + 5 = 20. If the villain rolls a 10, the PCs must make a DC 30 spot check to find them. Of course, not every villain is sneaky, but the ones that are, should be hard to find.

A dungeon could have a hidden button that opens the gate, without springing the trap and alerting the guards. In more dangerous dungeons, this button is smaller and better-hidden, so the Spot (or Search) check to find it increases. However, it should never be 'whatever the players can find, if they roll a 15'. Instead, set the DC based on what an average-quality scout could find. That way, if a player goes above and beyond the standard optimization for scouting, they are still rewarded for it.