Climbing DC/difficulties.

[The Shadowdove]

Hey forum-lurkers,

I am going to be having my group do some various degrees of mountain scaling soon.

As they get higher up, it'll be windy.

There will also be fewer places to grip safely or use climbing equipment. As the rock itself is hard, but there are also places that are dangerously unstable.

What kind of rolls should be done to determine whether they can identify the perils and attempt them?

How should extreme winds affect the difficulty of this task?

Raised DC, disadvantage,etc?

Thank you in advance,

Dove

[JAL_1138]

Not a direct answer to your question, but related: the more rolls you require for success at the task (if one failed roll means they could fail the task), the higher the probability of failure. If you want players to succeed even moderate DCs without needing extraordinary luck, then keep the number of rolls per character low.

[Sneak Dog]

Personally, I'd make the penalty for failure not instant death or anything equivalent.
Have them roll multiple times, mostly for how awful/awesome they do. Deal a couple of points of damage when they fail. If they fail particularly many without somehow making up for it, set them up for a challenge. Perhaps a hostile creature found them, or they won't be able to take a short rest before the next part of the adventure.

Considering the binary nature of advantage/disadvantage, I'd save that for the players actively making it easier or harder for themselves. Besides that, I wouldn't raise the DC above 15, usually having it be 10~12, to take into account that they'll be rolling more than once.

If you want to brush over it, give them a DC 15 check and if they fail, some penalty, then move on.

Climbing is athletics.
Finding the optimal route is survival, or perception if obvious (man-made stairs, animal tracks).
Resisting the weather is either a constitution save or if you feel like using skills: Wisdom (survival), constitution (athletics) or constitution (survival).

Those would be my thoughts on the matter.

[Kurt Kurageous]

Consider what you are doing. What do you as DM want to have happen? Spend a session rolling dice? Kill your players? Or just get to the top of the mountain with various resourced drained?

Me, I'd sum it up in two die rolls for each stage of the climb for the whole party.

First roll vs. DC X for party's ability to climb based on lowest athletics score. Anything other than a 1 is some level of success, but anything below X is damage times how much they missed by.
Second roll versus the mountain. Same DC. Anything less than X is some multiple of hours they are delayed. If that gets into darkness or a change in weather, second check vs. survival or suffer exhaustion.

Consider various consequences of failure beyond the obvious falling with resultant damage and/or dying.

Gaining an exhaustion level begins a death spiral you can't shrug off with cure light wounds.

[Steel Mirror]

Also remember the possibility of "failing forward". If every roll you ask for in the mountain climbing encounter is save-or-die or success-or-fail, your players are going to be doing a lot of dying and a lot of redundant rolling as they just try to reach your DCs. Letting some of the failed rolls be a "success, but..." allows you to keep the game moving while still giving exciting consequences to failed rolls.

Take for instance your party coming across a fissure in the stone. Let's say the DC you decide on is 13. That represents a serious hazard to even a trained climber, and a very difficult one for anyone who isn't trained. Often GMs will adjudicate this situation by saying that, if you roll a 13, you can pass. If you roll below a 13, you either cannot pass or, if the GM particularly dislikes his players, you fall. The problem with doing it that way is what happens next. If failure just means you don't pass, you have to roll again...and again, and again, until your d20 decides to cooperate and give you a number high enough to let you by. That's no fun for anyone and just takes up time, and success is guaranteed eventually, so why did you even roll? The falling is basically the same thing, except it also punishes your character each time they fail (I'm assuming it doesn't outright kill them, as you can see the problem with handling it that way) with the added bad effect of possibly forcing your players to a complete stop once they can no longer risk failure.

Instead, consider interpreting a failure as a "you succeed, but...". For example, "You make it past the chasm, but your legs are getting tired and you wrench your leg between the rocks and take 1d4 damage", or "You climb through but as you go a missed step slams you against the sheer cliff, knocking some items out of your pack to plunge down the mountain. Roll a Dex save to catch them before you lose them forever". Those kind of results keep the penalties for failing a roll real so that the players will strategize to grant each other advantage and look out for the best route to scale the mountain, but not penalize them so badly for failure that further progress becomes impossible or things bog down into repeated pointless rolls without any tangible weight to them.

Also consider letting your players make a single roll for large parts of the ascent and then use that same result until they reach a particularly difficult or extraordinary obstacle, so that the encounter isn't just you listing off a series of features you have for the ascent and your players rolling a ton of rolls in response. Mix things up with other kinds of encounters, like maybe one of them accidentally disrupts an eagle nest and has to climb away while being buzzed by the angry mom, or your group could come across an old body of someone else who attempted the climb, and they have to decide whether to take the risk to try to reach him in order to recover what looks to be some pretty sweet loot. And there's always combat encounters, too.

Now, with all that said, I'll try to actually answer your original question. XD

I think DCs should start around 8 to 11, ramp up slowly to 13 or so, with maybe a couple as high as 15 spread out over the whole ascent. Obviously Athletics is going to be a primary skill here, whole Acrobatics could be useful for some obstacles, and Perception will be very good for planning out routes. I would say that a very good Perception check made before attempting an obstacle could be a good source of advantage on rolls. Finally, Nature and Survival will probably be attempted by players who have it, and I think using those to allow someone to make a reroll or avoid minor natural dangers is a good use of them. Finally, proficiency in climbing tools should be useful for almost anything, if anyone has it. If someone has both Athletics and climbing tools, I'd give them advantage on most of their rolls just because when else are they going to get to use that climbing tool proficiency?

If you have something like occasional extreme winds and so on that flare up and make the climb harder, disadvantage is probably the fastest way to handle that. I'd use it sparingly though, and have there be options available (if the PCs are smart enough to think of them) that let them roll a skill to give themselves advantage (which cancels out the disadv) just so that you don't get too bogged down.

[Vogonjeltz]

Hey forum-lurkers,

I am going to be having my group do some various degrees of mountain scaling soon.

As they get higher up, it'll be windy.

There will also be fewer places to grip safely or use climbing equipment. As the rock itself is hard, but there are also places that are dangerously unstable.

What kind of rolls should be done to determine whether they can identify the perils and attempt them?

How should extreme winds affect the difficulty of this task?

Raised DC, disadvantage,etc?

Thank you in advance,

Dove

There's no check required to climb normally, just movement, so disadvantage just from wind doesn't make sense. If they fail to notice the unstable rocks, that I'd put disadvantage on the check for (to simulate some of the rocks possibly giving way).

DC 10 Strength (Athletics) check seems reasonable if the wind is really so bad as to require a check at all. I'd recommend the party use Climbers kits to safely traverse.

To notice the rocks are unstable? You could pepper the dialogue with a description of how there's loose rubble present on the mountain; Maybe a Wisdom (Perception) score to notice, probably also DC 10, maybe up to 15, treat it like a trap that, if triggered, imposes disadvantage on the windy climb.

As for consequences, failing would just be no progress, fail by more than 5 would mean slipping.

[The Shadowdove]

If normal climbing has no penalty, then someone with a climb speed just supplements that speed for their walking speed?

A tabaxi with 30 movement and 20 climb speed gains a 5 foot climbing advantage over a human?

Do they still suffer penalties for poor climbing conditions(steep, no handholds, loose, slick, wet, sharp, etc?

If there aren't DC's associated with climbing conditions does that make them difficult terrain instead of a higher DC ?

Thanks again!

Dove