I think objective DCs have to be spelled out. That is a system really needs to list them out because the only way to determine them is by analysis of game world
That seems right to me.
Knowing how fond you are of the RM skill list and tables, I can only imagine how much you would love Burning Wheel's page after page of skill descriptions with DCs (how hard is it to make a candle, or etch a design onto a sword blade, or . . .)!
This may point out a place where 5e is incoherent. It not only says basically "DCs are based on objective physical reality", but THEN it says "and we don't want to make firm rules for that objective reality!" Its kinda weird. If your game is going to use objective DCs, it should go out of its way to explicate how to set them objectively. The most logical approach would be a very large and comprehensive list of DCs and factors which should modify them.
I think this is a point where 5e is trying to straddle approaches and avoid prescription.
Hence some posters in this thread (eg [MENTION=6784868]Erechel[/MENTION]) can insist that 5e uses objective DCs, while others (eg [MENTION=5834]Celtavian[/MENTION]) can argue that it uses subjective DCs pretty similarly to 4e (but without the handy guidelines for level-appropriateness).
I don't think it even HAS to be boring, its just up to the DM to elaborate the fiction if he wants to have a plethora of Cave Slimes. They could be the spoor of some sort of Far Realm entities that the PCs are after, with each one being the sign of a different aberration.
True.
I guess the theory is that a purely 'emergent story' is in some sense better than one which is an explicit above-board consideration. The usual response is "but you just plan these things covertly instead, which leads to various forms of DM force being applied to get there." etc.
On the aesthetics of "emergent" vs "authored" story, I incline towards
Ron Edwards's view:
How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power.
Taking this idea to role-playing . . . [t]he primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors; they emerge from some ineffable confluence of Exploration per se. It's kind of a weird Illusionism perpetrated on one another, with everyone putting enormous value on maintaining the Black Curtain between them and everyone else. . . .
My call is, you get what you play for. Can you address Premise this way? Sure, on the monkeys-might-fly-out-my-butt principle. But the key to un-premeditated artistry of this sort (cutup fiction, splatter painting, cinema verite) is to know what to throw out, and role-playing does not include that option, at least not very easily.
Once GM force is introduced to "move the planchette" (as you describe) then we're out of ouija board roleplaying in the strict sense and just back to good old-fashioned illusionism.
If you think about even the simplest form of fantasy story - say, finally defeating a recurring villain - that won't occur in an RPG unless (i) the GM decides to set up situations in which the same villain recurs, and (ii) the players play their PCs in a way that orients themselves towards caring about this recurring villain.
When I look at a lot of fairly typical railroading modules, they are especially weak in respect of (ii): the recurring villain (or the princess who needs rescuing, or whatever) is just a McGuffin, a plot device to motivate the encounters which are the real crux of play (and carry no real story weight).
To avoid GM force in respect of (i) and failures in respect of (ii), you need some sort of device for the GM to exercise control over scene-framing in an overt way, and some sort of device for giving
players a degree of control over the content of those scenes, so their emotional/thematic concerns can be dealt in. (Upthread, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] was talking about Sorcery-style "kickers" as a way of doing this.)
You can see a fairly simple illustration of how 4e tackles this just within the context of a combat encounter - assuming that (ii) hasn't been completely mishandled in setting up the encounter in the first place, the system (a) lets the villain "recur" by preventing insta-kills and pushing the combat to unfold through a series of interactions between monster/NPC and PCs, and (b) sets up a dynamic of the monsters/NPCs starting more strongly which helps to answer (ii) simply by giving the players a basic reason to care about defeating the villain.
One thing that I find weird is to hear the 4e approach to combat (including power-rationing, the need to unlock surges, etc) decried as "artificial" or "gamist" (sic), from people who are perfectly happy with hit points, as if the latter aren't an artifice!
If you prefer your artifice to be one that makes repeated combats possible (the basic function of hit points, as a non-death spiral ablative barrier against PCs being killed) rather than an artifice intended to produce story dynamics, there's no faulting that - but supposing that one is artificial while the other
natural has always struck me as bizarre.
(The weirdness gets even weirder when someone follows up with a criticism to the effect that clever plans can't work in 4e because there's no bypassing the hit point system, without regard to the fact that (i) a SC might do just that, or (ii) in traditional D&D non-magical efforts generally can't bypass the hit point system either - non-hp condition infliction is almost entirely the province of magic-users except in 4e.)
