Two things. First, in 4e, if you can pick the lock of Vecna's safe, then you are a MASTER at the task in question. There is nothing about 4e, or the fiction that it generates, that prevents characters from being MASTERS, or that precludes players from knowing this to be true of their PCs.
If you pick Vecna's lock as a level 5 character, at a hard DC (because the story took you there) then it is hard to feel like when you're picking tomb locks as a level 10 character at a hard DC (because that's where the story is then) that you've actually gained much mastery.
That's the show vs. tell distinction.
Second, your presentation of 4e's DCs is relatively controversial. For instance, nothing in the way the books are written suggests that a DC 20 lock might be both an adamantium dwarven lock and a rusty tin lock. A rusty tin lock sounds fairly easy even for 1st level PCs. And DC 20 is a moderate 10th level DC (in fact 10th level moderate is 21 on the DMG p 42 chart and 18 on the Rules Compendium p 126 chart).
But it's up to the DM to determine what those DC's mean in the fiction, they don't have any inherent qualities. So there's no reason presume that an adamantium dwarven lock or a rusty tin lock have ANY particular DC - they have the DC that seems relevant to the DM at the time, whatever offers the players that narrow band of success.
It's hard to feel that sense of accomplishment when there's no objective basis for determining what you've actually accomplished.
The Rules Compendium even
explicitly talks about this: "Some DC's are fixed, while others scale with level.
A fixed DC represents a task that gets easier as an adventurer gains levels...
In contrast, a DC that sales with level represents a task that remains at least a little challenging throughout an adventurer's career."
5e just decided that its DC's are fixed by default (and they can do that because even an easy DC has some chance of failure for even high-level characters and even a difficult DC has some chance of success even for low-level characters).
But in fact there are guidelines, and I imagine that most 4e GMs do at least try to maintain a consistent fiction. And hence wouldn't set a "rusty tin lock" at DC 20.
Good DM's magically fix all problems, yes. You can't use the best case scenario as the basis for rules discussions, though. My argument was never that all 4e tables inevitably must always have this problem, merely that 4e's structure can create this problem.
This is what I am denying. Not the flexibility, but the irrelevance of the fiction.
The fiction is where 4e generates its payoff in play.
In the Neverwinter Campaign book, paragon-level threats are rewritten with Heroic tier stats, so that players can have the full Heroic-Paragon experience (fiction, not so much mechanics) in 10 levels of play. That is a different experience - an accelerated one - compared to default 4e. The flipside is that you don't use 10th level Neverwinter mindflayers and aboleths in a default 4e campaign.
Neverwinter mindflayers and aboleths are a signifier of what I'm talking about. If you save the world at level 7, when there's 23 levels left to go in the game, there's no mechanical accomplishment there, so it can make the fiction feel entirely empty of relevance.
This "mechanical relevance" thing is puzzling to me. Just looking at the DM PDF for 5e, a CR 17 dragon has about four times the hit points of a CR 2 awakened tree. That seems to correlate, more-or-less, to the four-times damage output of a 17th level compared to a 2nd level character. They also have a 6-point difference in AC, which seems to correlate, more-or-less, with the expected growth in to hit bonus over the course of those 15 levels.
Is it irrelevant to 5e play to fight a dragon as a 17th level PC rather than an awakened tree as a 2nd level PC because the mathematics is roughly the same in both cases?
Bounded accuracy means that you might go up against that dragon at level 11 or level 20 rather than level 17, if the story leads you there, and it will still be the same threat. It doesn't change into a lower-tier threat just because you're confronting it at level 5. That consistency is key for this feeling of achievement, because it means there's something to
measure yourself against.
If you always fight precisely on-level monsters, I imagine it would indeed feel more like a treadmill than it currently does. Some tables have a high treadmill tolerance and appreciate a more regular experience. That's possible to achieve fairly easily. Bounded accuracy introduces a flexibility - you can fight divergent threats. At a table where the treadmill is a concern, the DM just doesn't worry too much about the level of his monsters, and the game works just fine. The option to get off the treadmill is there.
You can't even begin to identify the difference until you start to talk about the relationship between maths and fiction (eg different principles for setting DCs, or different ways of resolving PCs vs phalanxes), and then we are in a realm where there is no change in the fiction without mechanical relevance.
A +5 to hit a DC 20 and a +10 to hit a DC 25 can be a change in the fiction, but it's mechanically irrelevant.
In part because I don't even understand what "doing some action to move that bonus" means, in an RPG, other than engaging the fiction so as to improve your PC.
In an RPG, that's usually what it means. But as a general principle of game psychology, the fiction is irrelevant for the feeling. You can get the feeling without any fiction whatsoever.
A +5 to hit a DC 20 and then after flapping your arms and squaking like a chicken, getting a +10 to hit that SAME DC, feels like you've accomplished something, but you've done nothing narratively speaking.
A +5 to hit a DC 20 and then after a months-long story about slaying evil and triumphing and saving people and restoring order to the world, getting a +10 to hit a DC 25, feels like you've accomplished
jack diddly.
In 5e, monster AC's are not a bad poster child for this. The AC of CR 1/2 svirfneblin is 15 - tough to hit! The AC of a CR 13 storm giant is 16. At first level, you were cursing that slippery little gnome. At 13th level, you are comfortably hitting that massive giant, and it's AC is nearly the same! The intervening months of story have
done something.
Can you give examples, because I've got not idea what you mean here.
Well, since I've got it open - rules compendium, skill DC's: "the goal is to pick a DC that is an appropriate challenge for a particular scenario or encounter."
IE: "stay within these careful guidelines because the game kind of breaks if you don't."
or: "Don't do anything too weird, that would be inappropriate."
But in 4e you could easily achieve that result too, if you wanted to, by restatting balors.
That's exactly the problem - the goalposts keep moving, so it can be difficult to feel that mechanical achievement. The stats don't MEAN anything, they're just a pacing tool. That can cause issues with that feeling of achievement and accomplishment.
He means that the mechanics don't, on their own, determine the fiction. You can use 4e's system to play a Neverwinter game - go from zero to mindflayer killer in 10 levels - or a default game - go from zero to mindflayer killer in 20 levels, then take on Demogorgon by level 30 - or to play a Dark Sun game, where even at 30th level you are still confronting more-or-less mortal threats. To achieve this all you have to do is rewrite, or relabel, the monsters (which is what Dark Sun and Neverwinter do), and have the GM change the way s/he adjudicates and applies the fiction.
Yea, that's mechanical irrelevance, numbers without meaning in the game (just in the fiction, as the DM decides). That's the problem.
That doesn't mean the mechanics are irrelevant to play, though. They actually settle action resolution. A game of default 4e, or Neverwinter, or Dark Sun, or Gamma World can't get going until the players and/or GM start to engage the mechanics.
Oh there's action resolution, it just doesn't vary much from the narrow possibility window 4e paints for it over the course of 30 levels.
