iserith
Magic Wordsmith
Sure, coming up with a physical solution still requires thinking about how to resolve the physical problem, but you don't actually physically interact with the problem, you still roll a die to determine success or failure. So I suppose the resources aren't wholly within the game.
I disagree that you can't challenge a character, you can by setting the appropriate DCs so that based on the roll of a D20 and their modifiers, success has a low probability. I think that sort of argument relies on how you define a challenge though. Is it a challenge to plug in the number-generating machine to the security keypad? No, not really. Is it a challenge for the number-generating machine to produce the correct pin in order to hack the keypad? Not really, since the number-generating machine (the character) doesn't inherently comprehend the concept of "challenge" (it can't, on which we agree). But is a more complex, alpha-numeric w/special characters password more difficult to generate? Sure. In that sense the character understands the difficulty of the situation and if we consider a challenge to be basically, nothing more than a less probable output, in that sense the character has been "challenged", just as the number generating machine has been challenged by a more complex password.
Does the character comprehend the "challenge"? No. Does the greater difficulty still exist? Yes.
Challenge and difficulty are, of course, different things. And those things are player-facing. The character is just the interface the player has for dealing with the challenge. I would also add that we don't always roll a die to determine success or failure. Player skill can remove uncertainty altogether such that no die roll is required. In fact, I would say that this is the ideal strategy and that, when the player has to roll a die, they've effectively failed at achieving automatic success via application of their skill in most cases.