Thanks for these. It’s always nice to talk concrete examples vs. generalities.
I do see some difference in what you are describing in some of the examples. Maybe I just object to the terminology. “Objective DC” and “Subjective DC” don’t get to the heart of the matter for me and also seem to have a bunch of baggage attached to the terms that further cloud things.
In the Dwarf and forge example, I imagine in the “objective DC” system you would look for an already established DC that indicates super hot – say resisting the heat of Hell – and set the DC close to that. But you’re right, that doesn’t take into consideration the PCs narrative place in the world. When the Dwarf makes the Endurance check it’s not really a straight up ‘can my skin handle this fire’. It’s more like ‘can this Dwarven paragon of XYZ pit himself against the forces of Moradin’s fire and magic forge and prevail’. There are ways to model this in the “objective system” if you had an exhaustive list of DCs and/or modifiers say
Regular Forge DC20
Forge of Moradin +10
Paragon of Moradin sticking hands into a fire created by moradin-10
Etc
But the “subjective system” has already pre-loaded all these assumptions into the math. This pre-loading might be the essence of “subjective”. It’s more like “narratively empowered skill checks”.
The “subjective DC” system involves loose definitions of what a skill check can mean. Encourages you to make sure you’re in the right ballpark in terms of appropriate challenge, and then use the level appropriate DC that gives you higher levels of drama. It also certainly encourages the ‘just in time’ DMing you talk about.
Thanks. I agree there is definitely something here that is independent of sandbox/exploration-led and scene framing/drama-led split.
Consider how a 'simulationist' approach to this might be constructed. The question in this case, can the dwarf withstand the forge and hold the hammer, can be broken down into elements. The first question is which elements are relevant. The hotness and 'power' of the forge is some sort of baseline here. However, a LOT of other factors could be included, and the more that are, the 'more faithful' the simulation is. So what is the dwarf's CON, that factors in, what is his STR, that factors in, how much help is he getting from Moradin, that factors in (and that might be purely modeled by bonuses that have to be gained in explicit ways, from items, spells, etc). Level CAN be used as a factor, presumably as a proxy for 'mettle', luck, and some of that divine favor. In an idealized system however they would appear as separate factors that could be applied differently in different situations (IE luck in combat might not translate to luck at gambling or forging weapons).
The real difference here is just the way that things are broken down. In 4e's sort of 'subjective' approach you picked a number, based basically on dramatic considerations, and maybe tweaked it a bit, certainly for any explicit resource use or something that was calculated to increase the odds. But overall its pretty much one base number. The ideal simulationist is cataloging all possible factors.
It just gets muddy in that IMHO the 'simulationists' are really not trying to simulate anything, because nobody really ever knows enough about all but the most trivial game situations to really accurately judge DCs in any objective fashion. The above example is a great one, you can't possibly equate this dwarf's actions to the real world, unless you just discount anything in the fiction that isn't realistic and mundane, at which point the answer is "its impossible, when you stick your hands in 900C fire they burn away in seconds" (which is literally true BTW, you'd get maybe 5 seconds, tops). So ANY DC that anyone contemplates that is achievable is based on some other agenda, or else has to be based on unknowable factors like the effects of magic, which is effectively whatever the GM wants it to be.
This is the process by which I came to the conclusion that gamist or dramatic considerations are really the driving agendas and its better to set DCs by what serves them best. You can now refer back to a gamist agenda, the game as a contest, and justify that DCs AUGHT to be 'neutral', that is set without reference to any specific narrative considerations at all, but this is now revealed to be an extreme gamist agenda of a certain sort, not 'simulationism'.