That is not the same mountain that is hard for everyone. A mountain that is hard for everyone might be something like the "living island" in Giant Size X-Men number 1 - and when peasants try and climb it it only fights them with a little bit of effort, whereas when superheroes try to climb it it fights them tooth-and-nail. Hence it is hard for whomever climbs it.
Yeah, I guess I can imagine that scenario, though its not one that has actually ever occurred to me in the past. Well, once my sister made a 'test of heroes' scenario, which was in 3e, but in 4e you might do it with scaled level DCs, where the test wasn't "can you pass the challenge" but was more "will you make the heroic choices". Its a pretty niche application of the rules in any case.
I don't think there are any such mountains in default 4e. You are the first person to talk about such a mountain, in this post. @
AbdulAlhazred didn't talk about such a mountain - he talked about imagining a blizzard in the gameworld, deciding that he wants it to be a challenge for paragon tier PCs, and therefore setting the blizzard DC appropriately. Such a blizzard would obviously be impassable to peasants, and would blow them off the side of the mountain, given that peasants are self-evidently far less capable than paragon tier heroes.
When @
AbdulAlhazred talks about setting the DC of a blizzard to something appropriate for paragon tier adventurers, he is not supposing that the blizzard has no consistent nature in the fiction. Rather, he's talking about
introducing a new element into the fiction - a blizzard - and deciding, as GM, that he wants it to be a challenge for the PCs in his game, who are paragon tier, and then looking at his handy DC-by-level chart to see what a good DC would be to set for that blizzard. He then narrates it appropriately. (For me, the storm on Caradhras is my reference point when I want to narrate a fierce mountain blizzard to my players.)
Yeah, in truth there's some mixture of things going on. In terms of fiction there are a range of blizzards. In the real world you might have a blizzard in Vermont where a bunch of snow falls and if you're outside in it you should be equipped, but any hardy adventurer will just bed down. If they have to push on, maybe they might get lost, but even low level PCs could survive there, vs the blizzards that happen on top of Mt Everest that routinely kill off dozens of highly equipped and trained climbers and might well be a paragon challenge to survive, vs the side of Pemerton's Obelisk of Ice, which could kill an epic hero.
So, I could say "yeah, I have these mountains on the map, and its winter, and I gave the PCs a reason to go up there, lets hit them with a blizzard and lets make it the storm of the century, paragon DCs for paragon PCs. Its not that the world is built around the PCs, but we're telling the tales of heroes here, not of the guy that walked up the mountain on a sunny day and back. If the players want to forgo being heroes and just climb in the sun, well, why even play that with rules? Its fine to have things that are already scaled where say "the dragon is way to powerful for you to defeat" but see my comments below about that...
Do you mean that you never design gameworld elements having regard to the likely capabilities of the PCs your players will be bringing to the table? If so, that speaks to @
bert1000's suggestion that part of this DC discussion is about scene-framing vs sandboxing. Though in D&D (as opposed to, say, Runequest or Rolemaster) discussion of sandboxing is complicated by the fact that there is a well-established convention of dungeon levels with graduated difficulties of monster, which mean that some of the elements of scene-framing play can be achieved within a more sand-boxy architecture.
I don't really follow this. The idea that a GM might build encounters, or indeed a gameworld, in order to provide a fun play experience for particular PCs brought to the table by particular players, is not new to 4e. I started doing this as an AD&D GM in the mid-80s.
We all did this from day one, and this is one of the things that drives me nuts in these discussions is that there's a vocal element of DMs who INSIST that there's this 'unicorn' of "true sandbox play", which really just doesn't exist. You always arrange the world in some fashion that it can be presented to the players in a graded series of challenges. The first thing Dave Arneson did when he built the first dungeon was establish the convention that deeper levels equaled greater danger. Come to a stairs and you have to decide, do you go for the bigger treasures, or do you stick to the level you're on now and hope to get stronger first?
Of course there are games that are 'undirected play' where maybe the PCs are allowed to just wander into the dragon lair at level 1 and get eaten, but if they pay ANY attention they'll surely see clues, and the kobold warren is surely more accessible to them than the dragon lair. No DM wants to waste table time setting it up otherwise, unless he's just a sadist, and he won't have players for long!
So, I don't object to the sandbox terminology, but its clearly not what some people try to pretend it is. Nor IME do DMs really live by some sort of hard-core ethic where when the players got into deep water through no fault of their own that its just all tough luck. In some sense every DM except the sadist who wants the level 1 meat grinder, has somewhere in his agenda the story of mighty heroes who actually made it, and so every DM is in some sense an advocate for the PCs. DW just makes this utterly explicit, which is a great reason to play it.
The main thing that 4e does is make this easier, by setting out DCs in a handy series of level-appropriate lists (eg DC-by-level, Monster Manuals with monsters listed by level, DMGs with traps and hazards listed by level, etc).
Exactly. Think about it this way, in 4e EVERY SINGLE GAME ELEMENT can be assigned unambiguously to a level and that assignment is pretty accurate. That was a really significant advance, and one big reason I personally am not fond of the idea of DMing 5e is I'm not giving that up.
) about how great it was that the "weak" characters always had a small chance to be successful at things a "strong" character was expected to do (but would still have a small chance of failure). 
