So I’m a long time fan and playing my first campaign. First big quest and we’re in a fortress.
Pretty spent after an encounter and some traps. We see a sleeping BBEG in the way of our finish.
Cast pass without a trace to sneak past. Fighter in heavy rolls a nat 1 on his disadvantage.
So it’s 1 + 1 dex +10 pass without a trace = 12
BBEG passive perception is 10. We sneak past.
WTH? I mean sure my PC is happy but I feel somehow disappointed in our DM giving us a pass.
I’ve DMd before and would’ve definitely woken up the boss.
I feel like DM gave us the pass cause it could’ve been a TPK.
Thoughts?
Edit:
Thank you everyone for your thoughts.
I was caught up in the homebrew rule of auto fail nat1s that is NOT in the PHB.
Rules as written we earned that easy win by taking advantage of the bosses low perception and spending a spell slot on pass without a trace.
By the rules, if the entire party is rolling for stealth, only half of them are required to succeed. It’s called a group check.
If your fighter was the only one with a bad roll, and your table doesn’t use crit fail/crit success on skill checks (which is a homebrew rule, albeit fairly popular), then the result is probably legal.
Yeah you’re right. Its a legal call. I just fell for the homebrew rule since all my podcasts use it.
I’ve never listened to any RPG podcasts but this is surprising given that I always see comments talking about how much it breaks the game. Do you think it’s because they’re making an entertainment broadcast rather than just playing a game, so they care more about crazy shenanigans rather than their individual experiences?
I’m a casual D&D fan since my only exposure is from Not Another D&D Podcast but I think it adds to the overall story telling experience. Super charges the lows and highs if it’s a 1 or 20 especially on an important role. Does it break the game? Eh, not that I can tell and I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of the podcast. Though this is my opinion and not based on D&D rules, history, etc.
I also highly recommend Not Another D&D Podcast if you like silly shit mixed with crass humor, some good emotional content, and players fucking with their DM.
Maybe “break the game” is the wrong term, but the classic argument is that the strong fighter shouldn’t be unable to lift a pebble 5% of the time or a player shouldn’t be able to jump over the moon 5% of the time. Of course the counter-argument is that the DM shouldn’t tell you to roll for things you can never pass or fail, but sometimes you need the illusion of higher stakes.
That makes sense. I don’t think there’s been a moment like that in the podcast, the DM keeps expectations in check.
One thing the other comments aren’t mentioning that is relevant: this wasn’t free. A second-level spell slot was expended by someone to make this happen, and since this is your first big quest, it’s likely that it was a significant resource investment because you’re a low level.
To clarify I’m late to the campaign. They’re like 8 sessions in and we’re level 7.
That’s just Pass without trace for you. That spell is so poorly balanced, it’s effectively an auto success on group stealth checks. Just a few things to note here when it comes to RAW:
- There are no crit fails on skill checks
- For a group stealth check it doesn’t matter if one party member fails it. It’s still a success.
Nat 1s aren’t an automatic failure on a skill check in 5e. Your DM played it correctly. Don’t try to attribute their actions to going easy on you. They played it by the book.
Seems fine to me. RAW disadvantage gives you -5 to a passive check, so a sleeping creature which normally has 10 passive perception would have an effective 5 instead. With the help of one of the strongest stealth spells in the game you rolled 12, beating their perception easily.
A natural 1 isn’t an auto-fail unless it’s an attack roll, so unless there were other alarms or noisemaking devices you cleared the encounter. You don’t have to fight everything of you don’t need to, if you’re using xp levelling you’ll generally still get full xp for clearing an encounter without combat.
I’m gonna give the DM the benefit of the doubt here, if they didn’t want it to be possible, why have the boss be sleeping at all? You didn’t get a pass, you fell right into their (metaphorical) trap. Enjoy your false sense of security… for now.
Does your game honour Nat 1 and 20 rolls? If you don’t count them as insta fail then I think it’s ok.
No one has ever rolled a bad nat1. Just silly ones. Things like nat 1 on atk and you weapon gets stuck. I’m not sure.
Critical failure is not a thing in 5e. The only special result for a natural 1 is that an attack roll automatically misses. House rules which make Nat 1s more dangerous are bad because they break the game’s balance and disproportionately affect martial classes (who roll dice more often than spellcasters)
How do you know the BBEG had a pp of 10?
Did you ask your DM in private about it, told them how you felt let down?
Nope. He straight up told us. So since we casted passed without a trace we just cheesed it.
As someone else pointed out you had to learn/prepare Pass Without Trace and then spend the slot to use it. That’s not cheesing it, that’s solving the problem with magic!
I should’ve but after 6 hrs it didn’t feel like the right time. I’ll ping him about it.
He calls the shots and he’s a fair DM I just feel a bit let down we passed that so easily.
Edit: I didn’t wanna complain or start that conversation to my DM after a 6 hour session. Why the down votes? This just happened and I posted here to get another perspective instead of discussing this with my party and “judging the DM”
Bosses sometimes have weak spots. You guys managed to find something the boss wasn’t good at. A passive perception of 10 is pretty low, it should be easy to sneak past him if he has no reason to be suspicious.
It’s hard to feel like he did the wrong thing if everything happened the way it was supposed to happen. Had he decided the boss randomly had reason to be suspicious without any actual trigger for it, you’d probably feel alot worse.
It might feel weird that you got by so easily, but if it is the legit stats of the boss, you did get lucky that it happened to be one of the least perceptive bosses, that pass without trace is enough passive boost for the check to be literally unfailable.
There is a reason critical failures on skill checks is a common homebrew rule. Sometimes it makes more sense that stuff can’t be impossible to fail. But I still know alot of people that prefer to go without it. And in the case of a group check, the crit fail still wouldn’t have counted anyway, as group checks are kind of a “best of” type deal. If half or more than half of the group passes, it’s a pass. Even with crit fails being recognised as such.
And there are DMs who are pro-fail. I was trying to throw a child over a pit in the cellar floor, rolled something small (6 maybe?), kid fell in the 10 foot hole and insta died. 🤷
Damn. I’m a fan of ‘failing forward’.
Trying to pick an important door lock open all stealthily.
Nat 1? You still open it. But you stumbled forward and pulled aggro.
Thank you everyone for your thoughts.
I was caught up in the homebrew rule of auto fail nat1s that is NOT in the PHB.
Rules as written we earned that easy win by taking advantage of the bosses low perception and spending a spell slot on pass without a trace.
The way they play in Critical Role is not by the book.
The point has already been made in this post several times.
In any case I wasn’t referring to CR, but the point has been made. Even my IRL buddy who’s been playing tabletop (pathfinder currently) for years has this rule. He told me stories going back 10 years I’ve known him (before CR) about nay 1 and nay 20 hijinks.
He never told me it was a house rule. I always thought nat 1 was auto fail every time.
