Brought to you by: thedeckofmany.com / zeebashew The Forge Of Fury Module we played: (3rd Edition) www.dmsguild.co... Music: Arabian Sand by: E's Jammy Jams Under Cover by: Wayne Jones
As usual I gotta use my pin to correct something! There was slippery moss on the sides of the water, and the jump may have been a littlee longer (I don't remember) But the DM is one of the very best I've played with. So to everyone bagging on the DM it's my mistake in the retelling, he's a rockstar, and this was a great game. (edit:Even more corrections :))
Having just checked the module myself, the stream is exactly 5ft across and moss is not mentioned anywhere in any edition of the module. While it is certainly likely that your DM may have added these as changes to their own adventure, your video is very misleading, especially from a ruling standpoint as - with a 20ft running jump - a check to clear 5ft isn't even required.
Yeah I must have gotten it mixed up with the moss in one of the other caverns. Anyway it was slippery in our run. Why did you buy multiple editions of the module?
It's a great module. Both the 3e and 5e editions of it are great dungeon crawls when modified to fit the playstyle of a group, and it serves well as an introductory module just like the Sunless Citadel.
Android 19 heh, i was playing dark souls and got invaded by a cheater, the cheater had made themself invulnerable, no matter what I did, none of my attacks could damage this cheater. we fought for an hour, rolling and dodging and we inched our way closer and closer to the edge of a cliff. the cheater tried to roll dodge my attack and , fell off the cliff. remember kids, winners never cheat and cheaters never win *the more you know* *ding*
To be fair as long as you don't get nat 1. Your chance of failure increases. So lucky people are people who don't roll a important dice after being successful consecutively.
@@temkin9298 your chances actually don’t increase or decrease at all no matter how many times you roll well or badly. It’s always a 1/20 chance on every roll. That’s just how odds work. Gambler’s fallacy.
I remember one game I was running where the players had just entered a new dungeon. Now I'm a fan of show don't tell in my dungeon designs so one of the first rooms the PCs came across existed solely to make it clear to them that this was a trap heavy dungeon. It consisted of an open pitfall trap with no spikes at the bottom that is so obvious it didn't require a check to see, some torch brackets on the walls and nothing else. This room resulted in a total party wipe. You see there was one other thing I had yet to mention, the reason the pitfall was open was that it had been triggered and there was a dead body at the bottom of this very deep pit. PCs being PCs decided to go down there and loot it despite my telling them that its equipment looked inferior to what they where using. This only served to encourage them. Deciding that the torch brackets couldn't hold the weight the teams fighter handed one end of his rope to the barbarian and tried to descend down to get the goods. The barbarian rolled a strength check and rolled a nat 1. The rope slipped from his hands and the fighter slammed into the bottom of the pit taking enough fall damage to put him below 0. Now that the teams fighter was bleeding out they had to figure out a way to get down there but alas they had only brought one rope which was now at the bottom of the pit. Before anyone else could react the rogue announced "I jump into the pit and use my acrobatics check to negate the fall damage" His view it seemed was it was best to get down there as quickly as possible to get aid to his friend and he had faith that he could negate some of the damage and tank the rest. He rolled a 2. Now with two party members dying at the bottom of a pit the remaining ones really needed to get down there. The Golaith barbarian had a backstory as a member of a savage mountain tribe and had put a decent number of ranks into climbing as a result. To everyone's surprise he rolled well and managed to descend the smooth walls of the pitfall trap well. He was able to stabilize his two friends and then attempted to throw the rope up to the cleric. This however did not go well. After about twelve failed attempts he gave up and decided to climb up with the rope (but not before tying it around the fighter so he'd be able to pull him up once he reached the top). This time he did not roll well. He slipped and fell off the wall repeatedly. He was taking small amounts of fall damage here and there but he was a barbarian so he powered through. Eventually he got to the top of the pit and cleric healed his wounds and they both attempted to pull the fighter up. Keyword here being attempted, they both rolled nat 1s and again the rope slipped from their grasp and was at the bottom of the pit with two unconscious PCs. The fighter hadn't taken any extra fall damage as they hadn't managed to lift him any. It was at this point they decided that having the cleric ride piggy back on the golaith as he climbed down would probably work. There was some concern about not having anyone at the top of the pit to help them get out but it was ignored in favor of getting the players at the bottom up and functioning again. They rolled and it was the fourth nat 1 of the day. The golaith landed back first crushing the cleric beneath him. The cleric was killed outright. After a few more failed attempts to get out of the pit injuring himself in the process the party called it. The golaith never escaped from that pit, he died slowly surrounded by the bodies of his friends. Afterwards open pitfall traps become a running meme in our games, regardless who was running them an open pit fall trap would often show up some where and the party would be more wary of it than facing down dragons. It also serves as a reminder to always bring health potions and lots of rope.
...The PC's absolutely insisting on looting a corpse, in the middle of a trap, that is clearly just meant to serve as a "warning", is the most true introduction to a DnD story I've ever heard.
I don't think I would've required that many checks. I'm assuming the barbarian was pretty strong, why require a roll for every single time he uses his strength? He's even a goliath, meaning that he has powerful build which specifically mentions how good they are at lifting things. Sure he has to make checks for climbing and things like that, but I wouldn't have made him roll to lift his friends out of the hole. There's no way they were close to his carry weight, especially as a goliath. It would be like asking Dwayne the Rock Johnson to roll for picking up a 100lb dumbbell. Sure it's heavy, but he can absolutely do it because he's simply that strong. Checks are used to determine the results of something challenging or uncertain. When you start making people roll for everything any game will quickly devolve into a comedy of errors where the party fails really basic things like holding onto a rope.
@@tylermucha9281 If the rope is in any sort of sub-optimal condition, I'd say it warrants a check. lifting an unconscious person by rope with an improvised system will be non-trivially challenging, and thus warrants a skill check. Granted, the DC should not be high. Pulling up a shifting load on a cheap rope is fucking difficult. I've tried to lift my climbing partner before, and even with good gear, in an optimal setting, it's fucking HARD to lift someone without dedicated mechanical assistance.
As one druid said before leaping to her death from a 1000ft cliff and turning herself into a goldfish moments before hitting the rocks at the bottom instead of water (Like that would help)- "It's fine, We're gods"
This is literal in my game, as one of my players is being hunted by someone who keeps sending Slithering Trackers after them. They check for puddles literally everywhere the party goes.
Ah the water. Having once DM'd myself I recognized its danger immediately as my companions rented a boat to cross the bay to the Lighthouse that was our destination. My dwarf hated swimming and refused to get in the boat unless he had a life vest, he was wearing full plate and didn't want to die falling in. The DM and other players mocked both me and my dwarf and I was given "floaties (water wings) and to rub it in, an extra one for my warhammer." Some hours later in a sea cave our boat was pushed over by a monster and all of us had to swim. The DM smiled. "You're wearing plate armor right?" His grin was malicious. I grinned back, confident in my character's choices. "FLOATIES" I cried! Everyone lived that day.
We had this happen on the second session of a campaign. I gave the players a choice: we could start over, play it through (with terrible yet _interesting_ consequences)... ...or we could decide that these events happened to an entirely different group of adventurers who just happened to resemble their group a lot, and their story would officially begin with them witnessing the massive fireball rising into the sky a mile away.
My group ran this dungeon. We used massive charisma skills to actually befriend the orcs. After a single fight, we became the leaders of the tribe. We then proceeded to clear out the rest of the dungeon, though duergar we also befriended (sort of), and we've been living in the dungeon ever since. We've also built upon it. We now have a small town outside of the dungeon, called Stone's Foot. It has been several in game years now, and Stone's Tooth is now the seat of a new kingdom in the game. It has been awesome.
Christopher Breazeale I was making a reference to an anime, as your story is essentially the plot. A sentient slime befriends various monsters and creates a benevolent kingdom of monsters.
My rule of thumb for any game with physics is: the moment gravity becomes a factor to survival, someone will invariably fall prey to it, often in the dumbest way possible.
When your players start naming their characters "Johann von Generico," or Krelthin preceeds Krelthin the II, Krelthin III, the IV etc., or the infamous stream of ill-fated Bob the Fighters, your dungeons may have developed a reputation for lethality.
This is really common in games of all sorts. Dark Souls protagonist: slays literal gods, can't kick down a rickety old wooden door, dies if he falls down a height of three floors. Megaman: can withstand plasma blasts, dies if he touches blunt metal spikes.
The deadliest thing in D&D? *OVERCONFIDENCE.* The Monte Carlo Fallacy and Hot Hand Fallacy have claimed more player characters than every dragon, demon, and god combined. Just because you've been rolling hot or crap all night means nothing on the next roll. Every roll of a D20 has a 1 in 20 chance of coming up a 1, just as it has a 1 in 20 chance of coming up a 20. The dice don't care how important the roll is, they will crit or fail at will, without warning or mercy.
Yup, I was feeling pretty confident in my new totem warrior hitting level 5 so I shouted "I'm basically immortal" the next session, the DM threw an adult blue dracolich at us I lived by a thread, it taught me not to tempt fate.
I, too, have a horror story about water. Me and a handful of other players were playing a fairly simple campaign, and were doing Itpretty well. By this point, we were all very close to getting to level 2, and I think one of us may have already reached level 2? Regardless, we got to a bridge that we needed to cross in order to progress, only to encounter an ogre guarding it. The battle on the bridge began. Our party consisted of a dwarf paladin, a gnome warlock (me), a half-orc fighter, a ?? (I forgot their race) thief, and a dragonborn bard. The battle went smoothly, until I used a spell and pushed the ogre into the river, really not a big deal honestly. I only did it for the rule of cool, only..the ogre kept failing checks to get out. It managed to get out eventually, after being pelted by attacks for a few rounds, and in retaliation, smacked some of us into the river. The players still on the bridge managed to kill us, so now, it was as simple as fishing everyone out. We folks in the river continued failing checks, so the others tried to swim into the river, and pull us ashore. They also failed. Several rounds of panic later, we were all alive, on dry land, but almost every single one of us was unconscious, except for the dwarf paladin, who had to fish everybody out.
i like how dnd can tend to be a lot more like real life than movies with this kinda thing. movies and tv shows have people saved from fast running water towards a waterfall like its no big deal but just a few things going wrong means instant death and in real life more often than not something goes wrong
@@spritemon98 Our barbarian punted our halfling rogue up a wall. Halfling gets a surprise round against the group of guards we didn't know was up there, and he managed to kill them before they alerted their fellows. He then snuck around to the gate and let us in. It sort of became our go to tactic for entering strongholds and crossing narrow canyons and rivers. And it was great to see the look on a new player's face when we would pull this. Good times.
@@1tomdmot1 Yep. Untrained unarmed for a medium sized creature, and then an amount based on how far he had to travel, based on fall damage for a similar distance cut in half.
Never played with a DM who uses critfails on ability checks or saving throws, since you can't crit with them (thus immovable rod is truly immovable without incredibly high str).
The thing with Feather Fall is that, while it might only come into play once in a campaign, that one time makes it worth it... People look at me like I`m crazy for taking Wall of Stone...
@@anonymouse2675 yep. I recently had a group convince me not to take it. First fight one of them gets thrown off a cliff. Stone wall is so handy though.....
Generally depends on the kind of gm you have. Or the adventure you are playing. Some games truly reward utility while others focus on optimising damage and such. I prefer the former.
As a DM, the most deadly encounter I ever created for my _Level 15_ players involved a Roper (CR 4 monster) suspended inside an _Anti-Magic Field_ over a spiked pit. Normally they wouldn't have had any problem killing this mere _CR 4_ monster, even without their magic. Except... they quickly realized that its tentacles were the only thing keeping the players it had already grabbed ALIVE. It made for a pretty high-stakes puzzle trap.
@@NinjaGerbil98 Their solution involved the creative use of rope and a collapsible rod wedged into the entryway of the cavern. The paladin kept the creature distracted while the rest of the party tossed the fighter (who was the only one still outside the field) all of their rope. Since the entrance was 40 ft away and nearly level with them, they would be swinging downward at a pretty steep angle, so he doubled the rope up so that it would take their combined weight for _juuuust_ long enough to swing them sharply out of the field, where their various means of flight would reactivate. The wizard still had one divination left for the day, which they used to *ensure* that the rope wouldn't break when it snapped taut. When everything was ready, the paladin struck the final blow to kill the Roper. _"YEEEEAAAAAGH-_ Oh hey we're still alive!"
Marcin Mazurek the worst (best?) is when the players asks the DM something like “is the door unlocked?” and the DM’s eyes light up and their voice raises an octave “You’re opening the door?!” and the player is like “no! no! I was just asking if the door is locked” and now they have the metaknowledge from reading the DM’s body language that the DM obviously wanted them to open the door without checking it first. so, then, i’m not even sure how to continue there without metagaming...
My version of this involved Casks of wine instead. My party and I were tied together with a magical invisible chain which didn't get in our way but kept us from wandering apart more than a handful of meters, we were in a castle's wine cellar and I had decided I was bored (My character got bored easily) so I donned the cloak of invisibility and began to prank my team-mate. Our dwarf warrior lost patience and tried to stun me with the flat of his axe, critical fail, the axe missed my invisible form and instead struck a massive cask of wine unleashing a torrent of fermented brew which struck me with full force, I failed my roll to keep my footing and was swept away failing another save and knocking myself out in the process, my body sank downstream of the grapey wave tugging at the chain, the first to roll was the dwarf who had unleashed it who failed, then came our paladin who failed as well and finally our cleric who also failed, the entire party was swept to the other side of the room along with barrels which shattered unleashing more wine drenching us all in it meanwhile I laid unconcious, my face bellow the level of the liquid pooling in the chamber, slowly drowning. The party wanted to rush to find me before their thief drowned, as much of a pain as I was, only to keep on slipping on the now comically slippery stones while also having to repeatedly roll against drunkeness as every dip in the drink had them gulp some down not to mention the vapors. In the end one of them managed to stand up and force the door open the wine pushing us all outside with it's force and sweeping the cloak off my body so the team could find me, dead, to then need to drag me around until we could be helped by "Deus-Ex Machinus" The NPC who had freed us and kept on saving us in that castle as it was our tutorial area.
Oh yeah, seriously, I've been pulled under and swept away by a river that "doesn't look like it's going too fast" before, I fortunately had somebody to fish me out, elsewise I might not have it out of that one. They're definitely no joke
It's very difficult to judge the depth and speed of a moving body of water. In fact the deadliest body of water in the world, is an unassuming stream in yorkshire called the strid, it has a 100% mortality rate, everyone who has ever fallen into it drowned.
This may have been addressed or simply not 5e, but pg. 182 of the PHB gives you a Long Jump up to your Strength score if you move at least 10 feet. If anyone in the future is going to try this, remember that knowing the PHB backwards and forwards will give you a bunch of options!
I think the REAL deadliest thing in D&D that this video demonstrates is bad luck - three crit fails in a row could turn a kitten with a bit of string into a TPK if you're not careful
@@anthonykafka42 Oddly enough I've never had a character *die* as a result of any of _those_ hings: I've had 3 characters die as a result of a rogue being very rogue'esque. Twice by traps and once by trying to conduct illegal deals behind the party's back, and then tried to double cross the person with whom he was dealing: who then ambushed us and managed to kill my character. . So if the topic is *"deadliest things"* in D&D, in my experience - the deadliest thing in D&D is when the rogue does something stupid and the DM starts smiling.
JayCruzer VM that’s not how it works. SRD gives “typical difficulty classes” and 15 is medium. 20 is hard. Those are examples. It’s not that 15-19 is medium.
I have never played D&D but find this hilarious. Environmental damage is OP in games. In Darksouls you slay literal gods but die if you fall three floors.
the true culprit here is overconfidence, the players decided to try a dangerous and foolhardy tactic without observing the water's speed. "Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer" indeed
Wait a second! Long Jump. When you make a long jump, you cover a number of feet up to your Strength score if you move at least 10 feet on foot immediately before the jump. … Either way, each foot you clear on the jump costs a foot of movement. If that stream is 5 feet across, that means this character’s Strength Score (not modifier, score) has to be 4 or less. Or he couldn’t get that running start, took the half distance penalty, and has a strength of 9 or less.
Or (I think a more likely situation) the DM hadn't memorised those rules, and asked for a check. I know those rules exist, and sometimes I even remember them, but my players always seem to have more fun rolling dice, then me quoting a rule no-one remembers.
@@Three_Tiny_Robots 3rd or 4th can't remember but I do know what they are talking about is a module by wizards so yea a 5ft jump may as well be impossible to jump
Yep, now every character I make in every edition learns to swim. The ones that didn't, all drowned. Except one, a gnomish tinker that was eaten whole by a giant fish, but same ballpark. XD
@@keatonbash2217 my luck never turns around!! XD my party finds it funny tbh. And so the DM dosent totally kill me for each Nat one I get .... I had to rebuild my character meant to fight close up, and adjust him to mostly do AOE spells so that I wasn't rolling to hit, the enemies would roll to see how much damage they took. DM allowed it because otherwise I was usally flopping on the ground with a ton of health but no damage output. XD
Surprise twist! The gap is enchanted/hexed by the dragon to cause those who try to jump it to fall into the water and quickly loose their resolve essentially making a semi-reliable food delivery system.
Water campaign nightmare: the aboleth’s lair is a maze but instead of walls it’s an innumerable number of small streams circled around a central pit. You try and jump and fail, you get swept away into the pit, where you come face to face with said aboleth
There was one time, we had to go over a log to cross a stream of water. Everyone did it well, even the really exhausted paladín i, the monk, just walked over the water like it was nothing but our cleric failed... The barbarian and i, the only ones that didn't wieghted a fucking ton, needed 10 turns to take her out of the watern
Regardless of how the DM chose to rule this, I think it was super fun to force the group to clear a hurdle that they weren't expecting. That that comedy of errors followed made this story something to remember forever, rather than just another moment in a hours long session of battle.
YEP FRIGGIN WATER. Was in a campaign where we where super pressed for time, came to 10 foot quickly moving river, the snows where melting and the water was running heavily. Not wanting to try and find a way to cross and being mounted I said hey.. how hard could a 10 foot jump be for a horse? RIGHT? natural 1, horse slipped and fell into the river, managed to ditch my armor to pull myself out but lost literally everything trying not to drown.
This just happened to my group in our current campaign. The ranger and I went into the front of a front to distrait a group of bandits while everyone else snuck in through from a nearby river. The river group nearly drowned and ended up attracting all the attention on themselves while the ranger and I barely took any damage.
I've had a player once leap off of a ship in the middle of a roiling storm because he wanted to stab the Kraken in the face. It went about as well as anyone could guess. The only thing deadlier than water is water that also has an angry aquatic monster in it.
I remember in one campaign after visiting an orcish settlement in a volcanic cavern, we had two paths to make it back out. One was safer but took a lot of time, the other was very short but had pools of magma next to a narrow path. Half of us including my character took the magma path for the hell of it. I was told to roll acrobatics, I thought that was fine cause I was skilled in that. I rolled super low. I fell in the magma but it was only ankle deep taking 2d6 damage. I failed my climb check with super low rolls twice, took another 2d6. Another player managed to pull me out but my feet were almost nonexistant so I could only move at half speed, always flat footed and exhausted and each day I had to roll a Con check so my feet didn't succumb to necrosis and decay to nothing. For a few sessions I remained this way because our party lacked a healer which any cure wounds spell would heal my feet. Luckily we made it to a town where we helped a cleric fight some undead and he was able to save my feet. It was an interesting time being crippled for that long.
@@Grimmnotist I should mention we were playing Pathfinder so I think the rules for lava damage was different. 2d6 for touching it and I think 10d6 or 20d6 for being engulfed in it.
I remember killing an enemy in Pathfinder who was inside a stream manipulating a water monster form around him, and then crit failed his save on my sleep spell and slowly drowned whilst being carried downstream. good times.
My favourite water-based memory is when me and my friends will remember the time we were bested by a 1 foot stream. It was my DM's first time doing a semi-serious campaign, where a Cleric, a mage, a thief and a sorcerer were just starting out, and we were going into a keep where there was rumours that it was going to be ransacked, and we were looking to get some mercenary work done for gold. However, what i didn't realise was that there was a river in they way, and that the city was already under siege. The way across the river was apparent some distance away so we tried to cross it ourselves. Since we couldn't properly see how far the river went (for whatever reason), we decided to take about 30 MINUTES until finding out that said river was only a single foot wide.
one of the first adventures my players went on involved SCUBA diving through a cave in alaska, before that they had to cross a lake filled with naiads trying to kill them, and what turned out to just be a regular conger eel. they talk about a beach episode with caution
Rules lawyer segment right quick. In the the phb, a long jump is equal (in feet) to your strength score if you get a running start and half that if no running start is done. Let me clarify, strength SCORE not modifier. So its possible to jump 24 feet with a five foot running start (five foot running start from athlete feat and 24 strength score from maxxed barbarian.
To give credit, the attempt was to make it into melee range. A DM might rule a check for a shorter jump, to allow the players the use of their action for attacks in combat, instead of using their action for a long jump.
Long jumps don’t require an action. He should have been allowed to just jump it and attack(unless he had less than 5 strength) but hey he got a video out of it.
@@three9855 I have a feeling the stream was probably greater than 5 feet. The DC was said to be 18 acrobatics, which is ludicrous for a 5 foot jump, unless thats average for 5 feet but I feel like its not.
Crit failing multiple times in a row isn't a problem. Like if you crit fail investigating a useless campsite it's whatever. It's the ONE roll that matters. The singular roll that your life hinges on. That's when crit failing sucks
Ahhh, good times...my drunken hill dwarf failed to jump over a stream, landed face first, and he got tangled in the plant life. Nearly drowned 5 minutes into our first campaign, almost as bad as trying to fist fight a snake as hot as the sun...those were a good two sessions, wish that game never ended after two sessions.
At last, some three or so years I now have... almost fallen prey to this terror. Crit fail on a stealth check, Crit success on a dex save against falling into the river rapids in a godforsaken underground cave. 20 hit point Con-dumped Wizard (In my own words 'I will play a Kobold and die trying' - besides, my character's cursed), he would not have stood a chance.
@@Technotoadnotafrog So far I have run murky water only twice. The first time a high level paladin wielding the Holy Avenger and blessed by the Book of Exalted deeds was almost totally helpless against 5 Water Weirds, he had to be rescued from the verge of death. The second time it was 1 Water Weird in a small 25ft deep pool against a party of 6 level 3 players, 1 party member died and the rest were forced to flee. I dread to think what happens if you put something higher than CR3 in the water like a Giant Crocodile or a Hydroloth.
MrCompassionate01: What is the major difficulty of those situations? Newer player here, so not much actual experience with it. I’ve kind of been wanting to make a lizardman though and it would be cool if dragging an enemy into the water turned the scales heavily in my favor. Has some RP opportunities too with how the rest of the party might view giant crocodile-man dragging some poor bandit under.
@@skycastrum5803 Your grappling lizardman idea is actually a solid idea assuming water is nearby. Being in water does the following things -If a character has no swim speed their movement speed is halved (as if by difficult terrain) and all their melle attacks have disadvantage -All ranged attacks in or into water have their maximum range reduced to their usual short range so if your longbow usually fires 150/600ft it now only fires 150ft maximum and even within that range it is at disadvantage. -Then of course there are other threats to consider such as drowning, currents, rust and getting electrocuted All that is just the hazards for being in usual clear water but now consider the horror of *murky water*. -Darkvision cannot see through it because physical particles of stuff in the water is blocking your sight, not "darkness" -True Sight doesn't help because it's not an illusion or a dimensional thing -This means that unless somebody has blindsight nobody can see what is in the water by any means. Enemies can hide in the water, enemies can drag you into the water and nobody can help at all because they can't see you. Nobody can locate and rescue you because they can't find you unless by luck. -Murky water is so innocuous that players won't consider the lethal threat it poses until it's too late. TLDR: Being in murky water makes you blind, movement halved, all attacks with disadvantage, drowning and isolated from your allies. You could even add parasites or disease in if you are an arsehole DM like me. Edit: OH and one more thing, you know spells have verbal components? Good luck opening your mouth while submerged in disgusting, murky, possibly diseased or poisonous water.
I once took the waterfall plunge. Good news: I had a Ring of Featherfall! Bad news: I was wearing full plate and was not trained in swim. Instead of a quick falling death, I had a slow drowning death once I reached the bottom.
Remeber one of my players in a viking campaign plunged themselves deep into the water turns out the giant muscular man could not swim his way out despute the party trying to save him needless to say it hurt as a Dm to tell him his player died. However the party joked that no man could ever kill him and it took the roaring ocean to kill him a death that turned very memorable indeed beware the water.
Well, this wouldn't work in 5e anymore, RAW: 1. Jump distance is a value you don't roll for. 2. There aren't critical successes or failures on ability checks.
Catfoodbob well, yes technically everything is up to the DM, but that isn't very useful for a discussion about the rules. Any character with 5 strength can jump a 5 ft gap in 5e.
Athletic check comes in place only if you are jumping to cross distance (long + running jump) and theres is also any obstacle in way, like table, low ceiling, etc. and Acrobatics can come in, when theres any sort of difficult terrain in landing spot area, ice, jagged rocks, table.
Try jumping around in a sewer and see how easy it is to stick the landing when every inch is covered in slippery waste. That was exactly what our party tried last night, everyone kept failing on jumps and landing straight into the water to the point our biggest member decided to just go into the water and lift our smallest members across the gaps just to stop our bad rolls.
