How to Adjudicate Ability Checks & Skills in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition every character player or monster can be measured based on their six core ability scores strength dexterity Constitution intelligence wisdom and charisma these six ability scores make up a major part of the characters that you play in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and are the root of many of the dice rolls that you're going to be making in this game greetings my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel will recover everything Dungeons & Dragons including advice for players and guides for Dungeon Master's we upload new videos every Thursday so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are discussing using the six ability scores and adjudicating ability checks in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition this can be one of the hardest points of learning the rules and using the rules for both players and Dungeon Master's because how to make set the difficulty class and resolve an ability check is much more noodley in the rules compared to say casting a spell or making an attack roll or even leveling up your character for new players the ability scores themselves can be quite confusing on what they're used for so I have an easy way to remember which is something that we found on reddit using a tomato theory which goes like this strength is your ability to crush a tomato dexterity is your ability to dodge a tomato Constitution is your ability to eat a rotten tomato and not get sick intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad and charisma is being able to sell a tomato base fruit salad which would just be salsa we found the bard well that simple metaphor can really help you decide what these six ability scores are used for it can be a little bit more challenging to decide when to call for a strength check or what the DC on an intelligence check should be we're gonna talk about all this and more let's get rolling almost every time that you roll a d20 in Dungeons and Dragons you're making an ability check a saving throw or an attack which uses the score six ability scores that we talked about earlier but the way that these are used and when you make these checks is different from situation to situation in many cases whether you're making an attack role an ability check or a saving throw you're going to be using one of your six ability scores which modifies what you roll on the die you'll then also add your proficiency modifier if it applies based on your race and class and other attributes there may be other bonuses from magic items that only apply to one of the three different types an attacker all ability check or saving throw you then roll the dice and compare that to the DC set by the dungeon master or the DC or AC that is set by the statistics of the creature that you're saving against DC references difficulty class which is how high you need to roll on the d20 plus adding your modifiers in order to pass that check ac refers to armor class which is how difficult it is to hit a target now this is where the rules for attack rolls ability checks and saving throws get really really different because for many saving throws the difficulty class will be determined by the monsters ability the spellcasters attributes or some other factor that is very clear in the rules when it comes to an armor class the creatures dexterity the type of armor they're wearing any sort of magic items or spells that are in effect tell us how to calculate that AC but when it comes to ability checks that's where things get much more subjective because the difficulty class of an ability check is often decided by the dungeon master so let's talk about what makes an ability check different from a saving throw an attack roll and under what sort of circumstances we would call for one and then how to actually decide what that difficulty class is going to be so Kelly what is the difference between an attack roll an ability check and a saving throw well the attack roll is pretty straightforward you're setting out to do harm to a creature and there's clear rules for that you roll the d20 against their AC in an attempt to hurt the Kreacher when we get to saving throws and ability checks that's where it gets a little bit more difficult in our experience the easy way to remember this is that a saving throw is something that is happening instantaneously that the character needs to respond to where an ability check is something that the character is setting out to do with their own abilities in some cases the rules will explicitly tell us to make a saving throw for example to make a dicksterity saving throw against a fireball spell or to make an attack roll because we're casting the guiding bolt spell or to make an ability check using investigation to notice an illusion so when is the best time to ask my players for ability checks well you want to ask for an ability check when they try to do something where there's a reasonable chance of failure with meaningful consequences you would never ask a player to make a ability check to walk across a completely normal room you would never ask them to make an ability check it to open a totally normal door ability checks are really the action of every scene when the players are meandering about and doing their own thing there's not really any call here for an ability check unless of course they're specifically investigating or trying to perceive something then you might ask for one of those but generally speaking when action is happening that isn't combat related that's when you should be asking for these checks when you are trying to decide whether or not the players or monsters should be making an ability check there are two quick and easy questions to ask yourself the first question is is this task so free of conflict and stress that there would really be no chance of failure and the second is that is this task something that is so improbable or impossible even that there's absolutely no way that you could actually do this if the answer to either of these questions or both of them is no then it's okay to have that ability check rolled there's no point getting your players to roll an ability check for something that is absolutely impossible the Barbarian can't jump to the moon the gnome can't lift the giant boulder above his head and there's no reason to make an intelligence check for information that nobody knows once in a while you might run into a sticky situation where a player insists that they should be allowed to make a role even though the circumstances are impossible this happens most often with charisma based checks for example a player that is trying to convince a little Ord to marry them or seduce the dragon or trying to tell the King to give up their kingdom if the player is super insistent in these circumstances you can let them roll but then you're gonna have to deal with the situation if they roll a natural 20 and everyone at the table is cheering and expecting something amazing to happen in my case I usually say to players that when they attempt something impossible but demand to make a roll anyways that their ability check is helping them avoid the consequences of taking such a foolish action if you're trying to persuade the King to give up their Kingdom and you roll a natural 20 you didn't persuade him to give up his kingdom he just finds you amusing charming and hilarious and he's not going to execute you for making such outrageous requests at the end of the day there's some simple guidelines to follow for when to make an ability check only call for a roll if there are meaningful consequences for failure make a check for a task where there's a risk of injury uncertainty of outcomes or some other condition that limits the number of times a creature can attempt a task if the players could simply retry with no consequences until they succeed there's no point in rolling the dice so we determined that an ability check is necessary and we use the tomato metaphor and check the characters proficiencies to determine what ability score we're going to use for the role and if any proficiencies might apply in those circumstances but now how do we decide what the difficulty class should be sometimes this can be really easy because the module itself or a monster stat blocks spell or ability will give you a DC to use for a certain thing that's happening in your game it's when it comes to the DM to make those decisions on the fly that we really need to figure out exactly how different have a challenge that actions going to be the other thing that I like to do at this stage is decide what's going to happen if the character succeeds and what's going to happen if they fail and in some circumstances I will actually tell the player before they make the role if you fail this is going to happen and if you succeed this is going to happen particularly if the circumstances with the role are obvious enough that the player would understand that and often times this is the characters last chance to back out now if we check the players handbook the Dungeon Master's guide or even most en screens they have a helpful little table that help you determine how difficult of a challenge your DC should be five starts at very easy all the way up to 30 which is nearly impossible the idea here is that if the action is something that a average person could do like hop over a small fence or jump over a small hole in the ground it might just be a 5 or 10 my easy rule of thumb for this is that a dc-10 represents something that an average person has a 50/50 shot of succeeding and there's a plethora of things in life that are pretty easy you got a 50/50 shot of accomplishing it but if you fail you're gonna get hurt really badly I think of things like as simple as climbing up onto a roof without a ladder is something relatively easy probably a DC 10 or 15 but if you fail that check you could really hurt yourself and that's why people don't do it a lot so don't mistake a rare action for being a difficult one and this is great because it really ties in to your characters ability scores and proficiencies because when you think about it that's what they are trained and skilled at so if I tried to jump over a 5 foot wall I might have its a dc-10 check and I have no modifiers on my dice roll for that because I'm not skilled at that but somebody who is an athlete and a professional high jumper is going to make that no problem because they have a plus 6 or 7 to their dice roll and have a much better chance of making that 10 absolutely and deferring down to the lower ability checks actually works really really well for your players experiences by you like a lower DC more often the players who aren't trained in those abilities will feel like the risk for them is a little bit lower and the characters who actually trained in those abilities feel awesome because they always succeed at those tasks I think the example of jumping over a fence is a really good one because characters like the Rogues the fighters and the Rangers who are really athletic and acrobatic will feel great as they leap across those things well the poor wizard has to just his way over the fence and struggle but it's not something that they can't do it all Monty actually spent a lot of time making a whole bunch of spreadsheets on various DCs for various skill checks and you can find links to those down below you can also find information like this on a lot of different dungeon master screens which we also will include in the links below so if you are having trouble deciding exactly what the DC's should be for many common ability checks check some of these resources out print them off use them at your table they'll really come in handy especially as you're learning the ropes on how to actually assess these things one last point to make is on contest and opposed checks where one characters actions are directly opposed by another's in this case the two characters are monsters each roll an ability check and compare the results against each other the winner is the one who gets their way in that case sometimes though it's not always the same ability checks like you could have two monsters that are trying to fight over who gets through a doorway and they're both making you post strength checks but things like stealth are often opposed by perception deception are opposed by insight and so on and so forth so what happens if the two characters roll the exact same number and it's a tie this can be tricky if the two characters are both rushing to grab a ring or hold the door open you can simply rule that neither of them succeeds and that the ring pushes out of both their grasps or that the door doesn't budge either way one area this can be challenging to adjudicate is what happens with stealth and perception and deception and insight when there's a tie between those two things circumstances vary and it's always best to use your judgment on this but usually in these circumstances I give it to the character making the perception or the insight check and ruled that the deceiver or the sneaky character has to beat them in order to avoid it again circumstances always vary and use your best judgment on these cases because there might be certain times when you might rule otherwise so we also have a few passive checks that every player character gets how do these come into play so you can rule that a character makes a passive check which is always ten plus their modifiers you don't have them make a dire role at all this is most commonly used for passive perception checks and passive insight checks so if a character isn't actively searching for threats or on the lookout for a deception someone's sneaking up on them or someone trying to lie to them still has to beat their passive check result in order to succeed I also like to use passive checks for intelligence checks I find that if they have a high enough passive history check then they might already know lore about that area and I can just give that information to them freely without them having to roll to uncover it another thing that can be difficult to adjudicate with ability checks are when two or more characters want to work together on the same task or when you ask one character to make a perception check or an investigation check or a knowledge check of some kind and they make the role the role low and then all the other players at the table decide that they want to roll to and how to handle these situations an easy way to handle situations like this are either by using the help action or doing group checks which can be really beneficial for smoothing out those awkward moments at the table so with the help action if a player decides hey can I help this other player out with what they're about to do you might just say that it gives them advantage on the ability check that they're about to make yes and I typically allow characters to help each other on ability checks as long as both those characters are proficient or have some sort of way of actually helping out for example if the wizard is trying to make an Arkana check to decipher a bunch of arcane runes the Barbarian who isn't proficient in our kinda can't helped them but a great time to do this is if there's a heavy door and one character is trying to push against it and another character who is standing within five feet of him says I'm gonna help push against the door you might say that the character whose turn it is can then use that role with advantage another thing that I do when the players are trying to lift or push something together is I simply add their strength scores together and use that as a passive check result and then we come to group checks which is when every player at the table wants to check for the same thing which usually applies to perception this commonly happens when the ranger is taking point scouting ahead for the party and you ask them to make a perception check and then all of a sudden everyone in the back goes we want to make perception checks - did he see anything he rolled really bad and then so you get the other four or five players all making perception checks and now it doesn't matter what the stealth check on the ambushers was because the players got six rolls to try to find out whether or not they noticed it in time the really hard thing to grasp in D&D is that if one person is scouting and everybody at the table sees them roll a two or a three then instantly they want to check as well it's it's one of those things that can really drag down the game so by making a group check it just helps smooth that over and lets everybody participate and gets rid of the metagame enos of looking at each other's dice rolls it is totally reasonable for you to rule that one player was the only one who even had a chance of noticing that threat and if you suspect that there's a circumstance where all the players would be able to participate for example in searching a room this is when I will often stop before the rolls are even made and I will go around the table and ask all the players how they want to individually contribute to searching for that ambush or the trap or the hidden object in the room and then you have them make a group check and as long as half of them made a success they find everything that is available to find group checks can also be really beneficial for party dynamics where you might have a few characters who are very skilled at something and a few that are not for example using a group check for stealth where the skilled characters are helping the less skilled characters get through an area unseen if they make a group check and over half of them succeed they're able to squeeze by without being noticed making ability checks rolling the dice is a ton of fun unfortunately one of the things that the ability score system and the skill check system can cause and this is particularly problematic for new players or players that are prone to metagaming is that they look at their character sheet and describe everything that their character does in terms of their proficiencies and skills so rather than describing how they move the character simply says I want to acrobatics the room or the dreaded I would like to roll a perception check that really doesn't give you as a dungeon master much information but what the player actually wants to do the players are just using mechanical language this is where we want to encourage our players to use natural language natural language makes the game more fun for everybody involved and allows you as a dungeon master to determine when and where the dice will be rolled instead of the players trying to decide that for you you as the dungeon master are the one and only arbiter of when the dice are and are not rolled and so when the player makes the presumption of making the die roll you can simply remind them hey I didn't ask you to make that roll yet tell me what you want to do and then I'll tell you if a die roll is even necessary and that puts a positive spin on it reminding the player that there's a chance that they could describe something they want to do and they simply succeed automatically a really great example of this is a player that wants to search a desk might say eye perception the desk and I say no no what are you actually looking for and then the player says well I want to open the drawers and see if there's a secret compartment well I would simply say to that player oh it turns out that there is one you've found it automatically because you specifically said what you wanted to look for or what if you have a player examining a coat of arms rather than having them roll a intelligence history check the information might already be there if the player says I would like to go look at this coat of arms and see if I know anything about it maybe they do and maybe that's a good opportunity for you to just give them that information because they've used natural language to determine what it is they'd like to do which warrants information using natural language is an excellent way to get the players to engage with the world more openly and have better roleplay and it's just more fun for everybody at the table now you can take the lead on this by using more descriptive language yourself it's a really good diagnostic tool for you as a dungeon master to recognize when you need to be more forthcoming with information if your players are telling you all the time I want to make a perception check I want to make a perception check that probably means that you're not describing the environments in enough detail for them to figure out what they want to even interact with in that environment a great way to get better at describing environments is by incorporating all of the senses what do they hear what do they see what do they feel what do they smell what do they taste even things like temperature or environmental effects that are happening how do they perceive those what's going on around them and these can all help them use natural language which will then call for the ability checks that they need to make another great example is if the player characters are scouting an area or trying to be wary for an ambush one of the players might say I'm gonna pay a particular attention to the rooftops whereas another player might say I'm the one watching behind us and another might say I'm gonna make sure that nothing's coming down this alleyway and that makes it much easier for you as a dungeon master to break up their perception checks depending on which direction the ambush is actually coming from so when you encourage your players to describe everything they do in natural language rather than have them say something generic like I make a perception check then you'll be better equipped to know when those ability checks when those perception checks are actually necessary and what the difficulty class for them should be so this has been a look at how to handle ability checks in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition if you have any other tips for handling ability checks tell us about them in comments below if you're enjoying the show please consider supporting our work on patreon you can follow the links in the description below to find out how you can support the channel don't forget to check out our live play dungeons of dragon hime which airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. Eastern on Twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we've got plenty more tips and tricks and rules explanations for dungeons and dragons for the addition over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

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Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: M29sQ5OUNkw

Length: 22min 43sec (1363 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019