I'm thrilled that you have come around.
Again, back when 4E was in print you, and Hussar, and many other highly PRAISED this innovation of mathematically purity and were highly critical of me and others for promoting the approach you have described here.
You described in detail how it was the duty of the DM to always make sure that the SAME WALL was harder to climb if and when the party came back later, the lock would always be better, etc, etc. You made it clear that this applied to anything and everything.
[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] can speak for himself, but as far as I'm concerned this is absolute nonsense. Of course you have no quotes, because I never said it.
It is possible that I said that, if the PCs return to the same lock or wall having gained levels then it would be more interesting for the game if the DC was higher, but that change in DC would not be divorced from the fiction - you make the wall harder to climb by narrating bad weather; you make the lock harder to pick by narrating bad lighting; etc. It's obvious that DCs and fiction correlate. (Though there can be looseness of fit - I have a lengthy post not very far upthread discussing this with [MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION].)
To
relink to a thread I've already linked to upthreadWhat do you think I was doing three years ago when the paragon characters in my game encountered (and defeated) a hobgoblin phalanx? I was changing the fiction so as to support the assignment of DCs in a way that would generate a mechanically, and hence narratively, satisfying experience (the "hence" is the result of the fact that 4e's mechanics are aimed at ensuring dramatically pleasing pacing when used in accordance with the DMG guidelines).
The "level-appropriate" hobgobling being a single soldier at 5th level, and being a phalanx at 15th level, is precisely an instance of the fiction changing as the DCs change.
I've been told on these boards (sometimes by the very same people) as well as in meatspace that the sliding DCs tied to PC level (and the entirety of "the math works") was a revolutionary breakthrough that made 3E a backwards, obsolete system.
But, abracadabra, now its just a matter of perspective.
I'm glad to hear from 4E fans that reverting to 3E style turns out to not be going backwards.
I feel that your tendency to frame every discussion as a contest, or as a point for vindication in respect of some past slight, is not helping clear analysis.
In this particular case, you seem to be confusing two completely different things: fiction whose mechanical specification is only loosely pinned down prior to the PCs encountering it, which then enable the GM to set the DCs at something level-appropriate (drawing upon the system's support for doing so); and fiction which remains constant from the ingame perspective yet changes its mechanical DC. The second thing is the thing that all the 4e posters in this thread are agreed is nonsensical.
Thus, when people talk about "sliding DCs" being something helpful, they are talking about things from the point of view of GMing, just as [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] did some hundreds of posts upthread when he triggered this discussion about DCs.
The point is that if I, as a GM, want to introduce an element into the shared fiction that will be a challenge for the PCs my players are playing (and hence a challenge for my players), it is useful for the system (i) to tell me what to set the DC at, and (ii) to be robust and reliable enough that what the system tells me is probably true.
4e satisfies (i) in the ways I've described in this post: it has a DC-by-level chart, a list of monsters and traps/hazards arranged by level, etc. It mostly satisfies (ii), although there are some break points (eg the Sage of Ages, which gets a +6 to all knowledge skills, definitely pushes the system limits - as I've learned from experience).
This is what is meant by
the maths works. It has nothing at all to do with
the very same lock, in the very same circumstances, having a different DC depending on the level the PCs happen to be. It has nothing to do with whether or not
the ingame "reality" is mutable in the face of the PCs.
Of course, if you think of the ingame "reality" as already being authored prior to any particular player turning up to the table with any particular PC, then you might think that the only way to implement level-appropriate DCs is to make the reality mutable. But that is not the only way to approach the GMing task - which takes us back to [MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION]'s sand-box/scene-framing contrast.
I'm sure there are some 3E/PF GMs out there somewhere who have run scene-framing 3E/PF, though I don't think the system is very well suited to it in part because it mostly lacks (i), and where it does have (i) - eg the CR system - it tends to rather weak on (ii).
Burning Wheel uses scene-framing although it lacks (i) also (and hence (ii) doesn't even come into play), but BW has many other mechanical devices to support scene-framing play within the context of "objective" DCs that 3E, and prior versions of D&D, lack.
You (BryonD) to the best of my knowledge do not make actual play posts, and so my sense of how you run your game is primarily conjecture based on more general comments you make about techniques, systems etc. I nevertheless believe that my sense of how you run your game is relatively accurate. I think you use a relatively high degree of GM control over the introduction of elements into the shared fiction (eg relatively little contribution of such material from the players, either via PC-build or via action resolution) and that you use a relatively high degree of GM control over the general direction of the game (eg in general my sense is that it is you, not the players, who decides who the "BBEG" will be - and this is fairly closely linked to the issue of content-introduction). I also think that you use a fair bit of GM control over action resolution, especially outside combat, in order to keep the game moving.
I would summarise the above as the sort of play emphasised and encouraged by the 2nd ed AD&D core rulebooks.
It is completely undisputed that 4e is not a system aimed at that sort of play - it encourages greater player authority over both content-introduction, over PC goals and (via transparent mecanics) over the outcome of action resolution. It favours scene-framing over "plot arcs". It works best when the fiction with which the players are not directly engaged, via their PCs, is treated in a rather loose way without being mechanically pinned down (as [MENTION=20998]tyrlaan[/MENTION] described not far upthread). In
some posts from early 2011 I described this a "just in time" GMing. (You were quoted in these posts, so may have read them already.)
Not pinning down the mechanics of the fiction until the players engage with it via their PCs has nothing in common with your posited "the DC changes to level
with no corresponding change in fiction, however. What it does mean is a departure from a certain sort of approach to world-building that you would probably not enjoy making.
