D&D 5th Edition: Thread #7

[Craft (Cheese)]

It's not an in-combat vs. out-of-combat divide, though. If you want a dragon to be noticeably better than a goblin, you need a wide enough gap for that to be the case whether it's the dragon attacking the goblin or vice versa, the dragon rolling Hide vs. the goblin's Spot or vice versa, or both of them rolling either against a third party. Again, it's the bonus spread relative to the width of the RNG, the bonus spread between opponents, and the DC benchmarks that matter, not the importance of individual rolls.

He's referring to a simple math trick: Rolling multiple times and summing the result lowers the variance, which means it's less swingy.

To be completely arbitrary, let's say the Dragon's Spot is +7 and the Goblin's Hide is +0.

If we do this as a simple contest, the chance of the dragon spotting the goblin is 77%. But if we do it skill challenge style and keep rolling until one side gets 3 successes before 2 failures, the chance of the dragon spotting the goblin rises to 92%. 5 successes before 4 failures brings it up to 99%.

Skill challenges, and all the bowel-clenching anxiety those words entail.

Skill challenges sucked because they basically weren't interactive and had no real choices. Doesn't mean that, say, an in-depth and detailed Diplomacy subsystem would be impossible.