D&D 5e. Party is on ground floor of a tower. In a floor

>>51455342
Also floors are connected by flight of stairs.

>>51455342
A 17 is enough to hear whispering on another floor?

That'd just end up with the players getting upset, since you'll be nullifying all of their careful planning without even a chance for success.

>>51455342
think of it this way: PCs want to hear goblins whispering in a level below them. what would the DC be?

>>51455366
I was thinking 15.

>>51455386
i guess you got your answer then

Does the dragon know they're there?

>>51455342
An advisory Skill DC of 15 for a "normal" difficulty, and 20 for a "hard" difficulty is the standard.

17 is somewhere in between there.
Does "hearing someone whispering, trying to be quiet, on another floor of a building" fall in the category of, roughly - a challenging but achievable task for a regular person?

It does not.
There is no way that dragon should be hearing them, unless they make a racket, or it somehow knows they are coming.
At the very least, let them roll stealth, man.

Otherwise, this just seems like the worst kind of railroading.

>>51455342
>party is whispering
DC20
>upstairs
Disadvantage
cmon man this isn't hard

>>51457244
Not to mention there's an increase in DC for every... what, 10 ft away the source of the sound is?

Set the DC very high, like 30. Dragons have stupid high perception anyway, so there's still a chance.

>>51455342
It's a green dragon isn't it. Let it perceive things through rats and birds. Have it hear and see the conversation through a rat

>>51457111
This. The DC for such a case should defnitely fall in the upper extreme of difficulty, if not be outright impossible. A dragon's senses mean that it's capable of beating higher DCs, not that the DC itself should be lower.