Ain’t No Mountain Low Enough
The Climb skill. My old nemesis. At last, we meet again.
Back when I was first getting into GMing Pathfinder, my players ran afoul of an especially nasty pit trap. They climbed down into a forest of spikes, looked nervously up at the identical set of spikes on the ceiling, then swore loudly when the room rotated 180°. “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” they cried, shaking their puny 1st level fists at the ceiling. And then the room rotated again. Thoroughly damaged but still alive, they healed themselves up a bit before limping toward the far exit, now a paltry 20′ above the chamber’s spiky floor.
What followed was a statistical anomaly. I have never seen so many failed climb checks in my life. It was like watching a chubby kid in gym class (read: my 7th grade self) struggling to do a pull-up. It was funny at first, but with each progressive sub-10 roll of the die, the situation became more pathetic and un-fun. Eventually I relented and said, “You struggle for some time, but eventually you’re all able to haul yourselves out.” I remain proud of that call, simple as it was. It was my moment as a fledgling GM where I recognized something important: My players were not having fun, and I had the power to change that.
Like all die rolls, the Climb skill is only as interesting as you make it. I’m sure you’ve heard this advice before, but the principle of “don’t ask for a roll if there are no consequences” was very much in play for my encounter.
In a more recent campaign, I had a player who explicitly wanted to play an Assassin’s Creed style PC. This character was all about creeping along ledges, making death-defying leaps, and performing over-the-top parkour stunts. With this guy in mind, I wound up designing an encounter with a canyon-spanning mine bucket. When a hapless PC inevitably fell into the bucket and began to wheel across the canyon, our pal Ezio attempted a daredevil climb followed by a heroic leap. Like my players in that long-ago pit, he failed his check. What followed was more than a frustrating series of failures though. Rather than falling to his doom, Ezio wound up dangling from a chain beneath the bucket. The pair of desperate PCs careened across the canyon, and Mr. Assassin’s Creed had to shinny up his chain tout de suite or else slam into the far canyon wall on the next round. It was exciting. It was interesting. It made the player feel like those ranks in Climb were well-spent.
When it comes to skills, you want to do more than allow your PCs not to suck. Performing mundane tasks competently is the opposite of adventure. Your players are big damn heroes, and even when they fail they should fail with style. Give your skill checks panache, I say! Chances are it will make for a more interesting encounter.
Question of the day then: What’s your best climbing encounter? Did you plummet to ignominious doom, or cling to that cliff edge through sheer willpower and one intrepid fingernail?
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All the more embarrasing knowing the fact that she is part spider-demon.
We all reject our demonic heritage in different ways.
My all time favourite was a fighter I played in 3.5e. She had a great score for climbing, something like +13.
We had a house rule for skill checks, 20 gave you a +10 bonus and a 1 gave you -10 penalty.
I’m sure you can see where this goes.
She could climb like a world class rock climber normally, unless there was spikes below her. It could be a simple 10′ gap and she would miraculously fall onto those spikes.
This became something completely entwined into her character though and became not only something that affected myself, but other player playing her in the case of my absence.
This character ended up in a dungeon where the central entrance was a HUGE pit with corridors coming off different sides. So as the party were climbing down the side into this dungeon, the big bad starts throwing fireballs around at us to try and make us lose our grip. Eventually he uses a message spell and messages me “Why don’t you just give up and fall and die already?”
So she replies with (To stunned silence from the GM and the other players as they watch this unfold) “Ok then” and just jumps off the side of this dungeon wall, about 120′ up onto a floor of spikes. Then just to add insult to injury to the big bad (who seeing this had assumed she had died and stopped paying attention to her) just picked herself up and crawled out of the spikes looking worse for wear but still alive.
She had both a blessing and a curse when it came to spikes.
If the 120′ fall plus spikes were preferable, you know those fireballs must have been nasty.
My very first 5e session ever, our characters were captured and held in some sort of gladiatorial arena. After attempting several clever-ish methods of escaping this predicament, we decided to go with the good ol’-fashioned prisoner riot. We waited for the next fight to start, our opponents a raggedy band of fellow prisoners. We ignored them and started our escape attempt, and the prisoners followed suit. We threw torches into the crowd to get them to part, then began climbing up the walls of the arena.
My Cleric, being a very athletic woman, managed to climb out easily. Likewise, our Halfling Rogue scurried up with little difficulty. Our Wizard, though, probably didn’t have a youth spent climbing trees and rock faces. He struggled for six (!) rounds to escape. Time was not on our side by any means, so he had to keep rolling. Even when he got Advantage from trying to climb the other prisoners, he still failed 3 times.
By the time he finally managed to climb up, his shield of patrons and other prisoners was quite thin indeed. In fact, he was surrounded by guards. Only by dashing and oh-so-luckily avoiding a string of OAs was he able to escape.
He did fare better than my Cleric, incidentally. He ran out on his own two legs, at least. I went back to rescue the Wizard and got knocked out by the guy in charge. The halfling had to drag me back out in the confusion, hiding me in the shit pit outside until the heat had passed.
Such are the sufferings of the righteous.
What was the penalty for failing all those rolls though? If time wasn’t on your side, what did each of those failed saves actually do?
When the Rogue and I climbed up, there was still a large screen of distractions in the form of panicking spectators and other escaping prisoners. With each passing turn, that protection diminished. By the time the Wizard managed to make it up, he was practically surrounded by guards with nothing to screen for him. He escaped by the hair on his Elven chin, which of course is damn little. =)
Nice. Good stakes right there. Rock solid GMing. For my money, encounters that mix a skill check with a combat are some of the most exciting. I imagine that the guards might have started to actually take pot shots at him if that mess had gone on much longer.
Playing as a Dwarf Knight in 3.5, we came across a set of very precarious “Hey, these things are almost definietly going to fall” spiral stairs heading down. We sent the lightweights first: the rogue obviously, then the ranger, then the elven favored soul, and each time the thing creaked and groaned like hell.
The real issue, though was that the other PCs at the bottom would have been crushed if the thing fell, because they were basically standing directly below the stairs, and the only door out might as well have had a “Here Be Dragons” sign on it so they didn’t want to go through w/o the fighters. The only two left were the barbarian who might have made it despite weighing 300 pounds of pure muscle, and my PC wearing full plate with a tower shield; that -16 AC penalty is a bitch.
So instead of of risking the whole party we decided just to jump. There was just enough room to land on the side, we had the rest of the party move to the other side, and went for it. We each took some pretty solid fall damage, but it was better than killing the other three, and we healed up before heading on.
Looking back we should have just knocked the thing down and tossed a rope down. Oh well.
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Played some AL SKT with some friends, at one point there was a steep rock pyramin to climb (closer to a wall really). I had brought a rope and grappling hook, but one person, who had a decent athletics score, refused the assistance out of pride. After 3 or 4 attempts he went unconscious from fall damage, and conceded that he should have just used the rope.
Did he at least get inspiration for playing to his weaknesses?
Well not exactly my incident but once, i had a kineticist who was slightly paranoid and insisted on using his rope to knot a hamock up in trees to sleep for the night. The druid thought that was a clever idea and tried to climb the tree to set-up like me. Missed his climb check twice, falling on her butt the first time then breaking a branch and falling flat on her face the second time.
Please tell me you made tree-based jokes at the Druid’s expense.
“Maybe you should branch out into another class.”
“Such shameful treetment of a druid.”
“You’ve got 99 nature’s allies but a birch ain’t one.”
“I think this particular plant is guilty of treeson.”
“Try not to land on your ash too hard.”
“Don’t be surprised when I ham-mocking you for that.”
“You forgot to limber up.”
“Getting boled over like that is knot the idea.”
“If you need some help setting up, you should put out a dryadvertisement.”
“Leaf this to the professionals, lass.”
Oh 5E, second story work rogue class feature. Savior of my halfling’s butt so many times. “Give me an athletics roll.” “I have a climb speed.” *Sigh*
As I am currently playing a 5e rogue with a crap climb skill, I would very much like to know how you’re getting a climb speed.
Sorry buddy, but that’s not how Second Story Work actually works. Let me explain it a bit.
Regarding climbing, here’s what the PHB has to say:
“While climbing or swimming, each foot of movement costs 1 extra foot (2 extra feet in difficult terrain), unless a creature has a climbing or swimming speed. At the GM’s option, climbing a slippery vertical surface or one with few handholds requires a successful Strength (Athletics) check.”
Second Story Work says “climbing no longer costs you extra movement.” It doesn’t say anything about gaining a climbing speed. It just says you can ignore the movement penalty.
Furthermore, having a climb speed doesn’t preclude you from making those checks either. The Monster Manual describes Climbing Speed as such: “A monster that has a climbing speed can use all or part of its movement to move on vertical surfaces. The monster doesn’t need to spend extra movement to climb.”
What you are thinking of is most likely Spider Climb. Players under the influence of this spell, or monsters with this ability, “can climb difficult surfaces, including upside down on ceilings, without needing to make an ability check.”
Sorry to burst your bubble. It’s never fun to disillusion my fellow rogues. I had to explain to someone else the other day that Blindsense is not Blindsight and doesn’t actually negate the penalties of being unable to see and felt like a total jerk about it.
My very first game, different group than the one I’m playing with now. We went walking through a cave and the only way out besides the way we came in was on top of a cliff. I was playing a gnome (Lini the bard) and another player was a halfling Rogue. Due to being level one, the chances of us two making the climb quickly was low. So the barbarian (don’t remember his race, I think it was human) grabbed the Rogue and just hurled him to the top. The toss didn’t hurt him, but the horde of gremlins that immediately set on him did. Poor guy died before the rest of us could make it up there.
One more time for the gamers in the back!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waa2ucfgVgQ
That song is surprisingly catchy. For the rest of the game, if we had to climb the cliff, I just had the barbarian carry me.
I was GMing for a party who were being chased by beastmen in a forest. Realising that they couldn’t outrun them, the party opted to climb a large tree and hope the beastmen didn’t bring ranged weapons (they hadn’t). turns out that the beastmen statblock does not include training in the climb skill so the party were able to shoot at the warband with impunity until they ran out of bolts, by which point there were only like 5 gors left. moral of the story, make sure your monsters pack javelins before the encounter.
What, the gors didn’t have torches? Or did they forget the lyrics to “15 Birds?”
Climbing a tower in pathfinder with a Salamander monk. Got airdropped in by my flying teammate and did some world-class snek-climbing antics (if you’ve ever owned a snake that tried to escape its tank, you know what I mean). Bandit king we were sent to “convince to stop harrassing our caravans” (read: probably kill, but IC I knwew I probably couldnt fight my way back out and opted for the “I’m not from the outpost” route) was so impressed that I managed to get so far in without anyone realising he tried to hire me. Good fun.
Playing both sides against the middle, eh? And they say that ranks in climbing are wasted….