The DC for jump distances, identifying monsters, etc.

[Skylivedk]

Hello Playground.

I confess: I quite like 5e. There's a few thing that bugs me more than rolling honey-coated on ant-hills, chief amongst them being my complete lack of understanding DCs with skills. I tried searching and I tried the DM (btw... How do we get them to change the index to not be "see ability checks and just put the damn page number there??)

In particular I'm thinking about jumping (and climbing). Also identifying monsters and their abilities.

How far (how many feet) do you get with a jump 20/25/30 check? How do you let movement speed affect this score? There was a table for it in 3x, but I'm wary of copy-pasting since you got such crazy modifiers back then.

Can you help me out?

[Rhaegar14]

Hello Playground.

I confess: I quite like 5e. There's a few thing that bugs me more than rolling honey-coated on ant-hills, chief amongst them being my complete lack of understanding DCs with skills. I tried searching and I tried the DM (btw... How do we get them to change the index to not be "see ability checks and just put the damn page number there??)

In particular I'm thinking about jumping (and climbing). Also identifying monsters and their abilities.

How far (how many feet) do you get with a jump 20/25/30 check? How do you let movement speed affect this score? There was a table for it in 3x, but I'm wary of copy-pasting since you got such crazy modifiers back then.

Can you help me out?

There is no longer a jump check. You do not roll for jumping. With a running start, you can long jump a number of feet equal to your strength score. Vertical jumps and jumps without running starts are some fraction of that. PHB pg. 182.

No idea what to tell you on identifying monsters, though.

[georgie_leech]

The DC's are deliberately left up to the DM, alas. For jump checks it's worth noting that by default you can jump a number of feet equal to your Strength score, so athletics checks are to go above and beyond that. A Wizard with STR 8 trying to jump a 15 foot chasm would have an extremely difficult check, while the STR Fighter makes it without much effort. For how difficult it is to identify monsters... well, I'm with The Angry DM with that not being a terribly interesting way to build encounters, and assume for most creatures that their general natures and qualities are known, whether it's come up in training, bedtime stories, or gossip. I mean, we know that Trolls are big, strong, tough, and can regenerate and we don't even have those! I usually go with a DC 5-10 check to remember a relevant detail or weakness if trained, 10-15 if untrained and they're trying to remember a story or some such. For instance, everyone knows this Generic Wind Monster has a cry that the boldest warrior quakes at and vicious claws that it tears with, but a knowledge check might tell you that they can't stand earth and coatinv yourself in mud is a good way to hide from them. I'm fairly liberal as to what counts as trained though; if the player can justify any given knowledge check, I'll roll with it. Maybe they were a semi-common threat to shepherd's like them in the fields. I'd much rather the challenge in encounters come from interacting with the elements than my players just not knowing what different creatures do.

[Slipperychicken]

For identifying monsters and knowing their strengths and weaknesses, they've given us next to no guidance. I'll give my guess for some setting-agnostic guidelines.


To recall or infer useful information:
DC 0 or DC 5 for creatures which are routinely encountered in the character's life (i.e. dog, cat)
DC 10 for creatures encountered occasionally but not frequently
DC 15 for creatures which the character might rarely observe, or sometimes hears about in lore (trolls, bears, creatures which reside in very deep layers of dungeons and hardly ever surface)
DC 20 for creatures the character has no right to have personally experienced (i.e. a whale when you live deep in the desert), or are otherwise extremely obscure. This is where most of your information comes from secondary sources (i.e. read it in a book, listened to an expert gab on about it for a while).
DC 25 for creatures that are so absolutely obscure that experts in the field routinely get them wrong. Maybe the knowledge here comes from a research paper or treatise that isn't widely known. A wizard could have read about this for his thesis paper.
DC 30 for creatures that are so out there that nobody anywhere should know. Most of it is guesswork, pieced together from really obscure texts. Maybe someone asked a god about it once, and that's where the knowledge came from.

A successful check should reveal something useful, like ways the creature acts or what is useful for defeating it or scaring it off. Knowing some of its stats may be one way to do this. If your group contains unrepentant metagamers, I'd consider making knowledge checks in secret and sometimes reporting incorrect-but-plausible-sounding information on a failure.



There is no longer a jump check. You do not roll for jumping. With a running start, you can long jump a number of feet equal to your strength score. Vertical jumps and jumps without running starts are some fraction of that. PHB pg. 182.


One exception; the PHB says the DM can allow athletics checks to jump higher than the default high jump distance.

[Skylivedk]

There is no longer a jump check. You do not roll for jumping. With a running start, you can long jump a number of feet equal to your strength score. Vertical jumps and jumps without running starts are some fraction of that. PHB pg. 182.

No idea what to tell you on identifying monsters, though.

Thank you very much. I was dumb enough to check under Athletics :)

I like the liberty they give the DM; I just wish they gave a few more pointers on the DCs of skills. I quite often feel the DC is being artificially heightened to match our bonuses due to the lack of structure (not due to ill-will, just because, y'know - there's no way for the DM to know what would be reasonable). In particular, the knowledge of monsters seem to cause quite a lot of bewilderment in my group.

Once again, thanks to all of you.

[HammeredWharf]

For monster knowledge, I go by the in-universe availability of such knowledge. It's tied to how common and/or famous the monster is, not necessarily its strength. For example, knowing that a dragon is a dragon is pretty easy (Arcana 10), but knowing how to fight a dragon is significantly harder (Arcana 20), because barely anyone fights them. However, if the dragon is Betty, whom every villager around here knows because she's awesome and funny, she's really easy to identify (Arcana 5), but no easier to gain combat-related knowledge of.

It's not a linear progression from general knowledge to combat knowledge, either. In a setting with constant orc wars, almost everyone would know how to fight orcs, but few people would know about their everyday life.