Managing high skill checks

[False God]

So, looking for a little help here on managing high skill checks, as the title suggests. I enjoy running narrative-focused, high-level, high-magic, often epic+ campaigns, but cannot realistically justify absurdly high skill checks. Sure, the Ancient Puzzlebox may have a DC 75 and the Cursed Amulet has a DC 100 to break the curse, but on the day to day, nothing really justifies a check anywhere close to where my players often have their skills.

Certainly for a lot of things, I just let them succeed. Without including 1 as an auto fail, if your total check would be equal to or greater than the DC for whatever it is you're doing, you just do it. I have allowed rolling as a form of improving the quality of whatever you do, as well as rewarding having skills well beyond the DC, usually in increments of 5. I certainly expect that someone with 70 points in Craft Arms and Armor would be absolutely rockin it on all but the most detailed or magical of items.

The monster challenges aren't a problem, there are an assortment of epic creatures to play around with and an army ran as swarm damage bypasses many standard defenses quite well, even if the damage is low, a thousand cuts ya know. I do my best to attempt to provide non-combat challenges, but at these kinds of numbers, its difficult to regularly present them (and by regularly I'd say that everyone in a traditional 5-man party each holding to their own specialty gets something non-combat challenging coming at least every other session).

The social checks tend to be the easiest to mange, mostly because they are multi-faceted and brute force "rolling the DC or higher" isn't really going to win over the people you're dealing with, not to mention many of them are "on your level" (relatively close so that a die roll really does matter) with their own counter-skills.

Another DM I played with had, if our skills were 100(after the stat mod was included) had you roll a percentile beforehand. Saying that the individual knew so much that it was sometimes difficult for them to remember any singular fact. No d20 roll was required on this check, just the percentile, you always new something related to the subject, but the lower the roll, the less specific, less helpful and less complete your knowledge was. I like this idea, and it works well for investigative checks, but it's not so helpful in other areas.

So, looking for suggestions on how to manage absurdly high DC's without simply artificially inflating the DCs of mundane tasks, lets say I have players who can make skill checks ranging from 75 to 150.

[NichG]

At the level where things are getting so high that you either optimize for it or you won't be able to do it, I think its very important to move away from 'the DM creates obstacles with particular skills/DCs' sorts of play to instead 'the DM advertises in advance what obscenely high checks would be able to achieve, and then the players decide if they want to optimize towards those ends'.

A good recipe for this kind of thing is something like 'a sufficiently high skill check lets you break a constraint that the system would normally enforce'. So lets say you want to do something but there's a feat for it - normally you'd need the feat to do the thing, but maybe you allow a DC 75 check of the appropriate skill to emulate having the feat for a moment. You're not a caster but you want to create some magical effects based on how much you've studied magic? DC 50 + 30 * Spell Level Knowledge(Appropriate) check followed by an equivalent Spellcraft check, as separate and sequential standard actions, in order to slotlessly emulate a spell that you don't have the ability to cast from class as a natural ritual instead. Want to make a magic sword without being a caster? You can use mundane methods to craft a magic item if you can make a Craft DC equal to 50 + 10 * (plus^2). Want to make a Survival check to achieve planar travel without access to spells or portals? Sure, DC 50 Survival check to get to the Ethereal, DC 80 to get to the Astral (outer/inner are easy from there, only DCs in the 40s), DC 120 to directly transit to or from a deep layer of the specified layered Outer Plane, or to reach esoteric demiplanes directly, DC 200 to Walk the Shadows to temporary, ephemeral alternate versions of the campaign setting as if you were a Prince of Amber. Raise the dead via mundane means with a DC 120 Heal check, replace missing limbs with a mere DC 60. Create a new designer species from scratch at DC 200 Heal to do the surgery to assemble necessary organic elements, plus an associated Knowledge check to get the design right.

Another way to make high skill checks make sense is to do things in a way where you get things based on how much you exceed the DC (or where you have things you might want to do repeatedly, which get harder each time, so your skill level tells you how many times you can repeat the thing. Hide/Move Silently checks where you can take a -10 per person to extend the check result to others. Diplomacy checks to 'take back something we said, after seeing how the other person responded' with a starting DC equal to HD/2 + Sense Motive modifier of the target, but going up by 20 every time you use it on that person. Etc.

[Kurald Galain]

I suggest reading some books from the Exalted RPG, and take inspiration from there.

No, seriously. They have "feat trees" for everything. For combat abilities, these are more-or-less what you'd expect, but they exist for every skill. And the system is quite good at writing beautiful and over-the-top powerful abilities for each and every one of them.

[zlefin]

Are you already using the epic skill uses? The ones that give a bunch of stuff you can do at various really high DCs. It's not clear from the OP if you already are. For example, there's a DC for using escape artist to get through a wall of force.

https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/skills.htm

[bean illus]

Are you already using the epic skill uses? The ones that give a bunch of stuff you can do at various really high DCs. It's not clear from the OP if you already are. For example, there's a DC for using escape artist to get through a wall of force.

https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/skills.htm

Yeah, epic skill checks are kinda nuts (like walking through a force wall). They're kinda hard to handle.

Make sure you watch the list for opposed checks, and anything you can make into an opposed check. Leaning onto those might keep skills relevant, and ease some of the conundrum.

Find ways to make the skill harder by stacking checks and saves? For example: the lock isn't too hard, but it's underwater, the lights go out, and the alter is radiating debuffs? Or the lock is 'alive' and there's an opposed will check?

[NichG]

I'd recommend against opposed checks at those scales unless you change the resolution mechanic to d100+skill or something like that, because the variance is basically zero compared to the modifier at that point. So either 'someone invested enough to pass the check and will always pass' or 'someone didn't invest enough to pass the check and will always fail'. Or if you're not going to increase the variance that way, you need a lot of ways that people can make pretty large modifiers appear at cost, like 'I need to spend 4 of this thing in order to get the +40 I need to stand a chance against that guy's Hide check'.