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.
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.