D&D 5th Edition: Thread #7

[Zeful]

This leads to another problem with individual checks for everything, i.e. that it skews or breaks the probabilities involved.

For instance, suppose there's an invisible (or hidden) object or character in the area. If you allow people to keep rolling for this, e.g. because you're a team of 6 people plus henchmen plus pack animals, then somebody is bound to roll a 20. That means that being unseen is basically undoable (this is the fundamental problem with the illusion rituals in 4E's PHB1). If you compensate for this by increasing the DC for detecting it, then you run into the opposite problem, i.e. that it becomes near-impossible for a lone creature to detect anything.

This is fixed by making only a single check (for the most skilled person in a group, with some bonuses for the amount of assistance he gets). This also has the twin advantages of being much faster and requiring much less bookkeeping.

After all, if your smart wizard friend says that wall over there is an illusion, wouldn't you tend to believe him? It's what he's good at, after all. If your elven ranger friend points out an ambush in the trees, you might still not see the ambush, but his warning should increase your alertness, negating the combat bonus of your hidden enemy. Come on people, combat in D&D lasts long enough already without the DM having to keep a matrix of 60 hidden statuses.

The sixty statuses only apply in a handful of situations, and if compared to the number of situations where the number of hidden statuses will be much less, we find the latter is larger by a huge amount, to make the situation where the DM having to track 60 statuses similarly likely to a situation where one member of the party having a +22 to spot and another having a -3. And since you've already dismissed that argument as being an outlier, and thus inappropriate for discussion, the same must follow for the 60 statuses.

Also incidently, if they can't see the ambush, they haven't made the spot check, so your own example requires you to handle the hidden status individually. Doesn't mean they aren't aware, as following with the surprise round rules from 3.5, which actually doesn't specify the need for every character to make a spot check to be aware of the enemy. Which is yet another thing the DM has to track.

I'm entirely fine with everybody being able to see through an illusion once one person points it out,*and I'm entirely fine with having one roll for a group here to prevent the probabilities from going way out of the acceptable range. Furthermore, this doesn't change the fact that your entire assertion of equivalency is based on an objectively incorrect understanding of the mechanics involved. Similarly, trying to spin pointing out this false equivalency as pointless whining doesn't prevent the equivalency from continuing to be false.

*Some sort of group roll mechanic would be helpful anyways, and if this "bounded accuracy" skill system lives up to the name it should probably be fairly easy to make.

Really, so it's not based in logic to compare two situations that share similar qualities to emphasize that the complaint that it's "too much work" is a really bad argument? Firstly because Illusions and Stealth share actually do share quite a bit in common mechanically, essentially being one roll away from outright not working; and secondly because the original complaint, it being "too much work" for the DM to track hidden statuses, is kind of silly, despite the claim of 60 hidden statuses (which my response is that it's the DM's fault for forcing a stealth section on the party where he needs to track 60 statuses at once), because not only will he generally be handling more elements in combat anyway, but encounter and environment design is on him. Building a stealth proof dungeon is really easy, with the DM only really having to justify why it's all brightly lit to completely make stealth impossible.