Why not?
In earlier editions, when monster damage didn't grow, character damage increased considerably - which meant your fighter types were very strong classes and not being outshone by the casters. Worked quite well actually.
Then you can't have weak monsters continuing to provide a challenge across levels. Characters mow through them far too fast. That was literally part of the selling point of "bounded accuracy" (hence why I so often say it has very little to do with
either bounding anything OR accuracy).
Especially because 5e gives characters so many attacks, so having ultra-powerful attacks makes them negate any difficulty from "weak" monsters in short order.
DC 20 is not "nearly impossible". A 75% chance of success is pretty much where you want it. Where's the problem?
It was a DC you provided--and I showed how it could be trivialized almost instantly, within the first five levels of the game. A DC 25 check--something you claim is essentially unknown in published adventures, though others have claimed otherwise--would be in your "roughly 66%" range for an expert with some buffs.
At level 5.
Further, 5e itself calls 25 "very hard" and 30 "nearly impossible." Any specialist character (+5 stat, expertise) with some ordinary buffs (e.g.
guidance, BI, or an Artificer's Flash of Genius; or various subclass-specific buffs spread throughout like Diviner Portents or Circle of Stars' Cosmic Omen; or any of various self-buffs like Divine Soul's Favor of the Gods, Battle Master maneuvers, or Fiend patron's Dark One's Own Luck) turn a DC 30 check into a regular occurence by level 13.
As far as data goes, bards according to the D&D Beyond stats were just above Druids as the least played class in the game. Tied with monks, sorcerers and rangers. 7% of characters. Which is about one bard in 4 (ish) tables. 75% of tables don't have a bard. (again, roughly before poeple start getting ultrapedantic about the math, which I can pretty much guarantee someone will.)
Yes, because we know for sure that all of those characters actually go to real tables to play, there's definitely not a million Fighters named Bob...except that we've actually heard that, yes, there's a ton of characters on D&D Beyond with names like "Fighter" and "Bob." That they are not as common on DDB is not, at all, the same as saying that they are ultra-rare.
I will point out there are other games that grow characters conservatively vertically but still have advancement. They do so horizontally, and that may not play well with a class system, but none the less its not an unsolvable problem.
Yes, and I specifically called out why horizontal growth is also verboten.
But if you're of the mindset that "the fiction tells me what the difficulty of this task/check ought to be and so that's where I'll set it", completely agnostic of any characters that might ever have to do this task, then I have no disagreement.
So for example: if your adventure contains a slippery cliff that in the fiction would be pretty tough to climb for those without much skill, you might set the DC of climbing it at, say, 19* - whether the adventure was intended for 1st-3rd level characters or for 14th-16th.
* - yes, 19. There is no reason whatsoever to limit DCs only to numbers divisible by 5.
Okay, but the problem is, you don't always pick your DCs three weeks in advance. You need to be able to improvise in response to unexpected player choices. (Isn't that kind of the point?)
Why is it good--laudable, even--for a DM to develop an internal idea of "oh, if you're trying to do that, in this context, the check should be X," but utterly unacceptable for a table to do
the exact same thing, it just happens to be written down? Does the DM suddenly go from laudable to blameworthy if she writes down her intuitions about DCs?
I get this. And as long as that context doesn't include anything about the characters attempting the task, all is good.
How can it not? If you're improvising a check, how can it NOT include at least
some kind of consideration for that?
The whole point of Page 42 is to be an improvisation aid. That is literally what it is
for. If you don't need to improvise, the books have reams and reams of fixed DCs for all sorts of things (locks, social rolls for particular NPCs, perception checks to notice things, etc., etc.
ad infinitum).
There's my issue. The fiction you're writing/designing
And if you're improvising? Because that's what this is for. That's what it was always for. It even explicitly says that that's what it's for.
While I agree with this to a fair extent, I still want those trivial challenges (e.g. the 2d6 fire trap) to mean something even at high level, even if it's only a minor inconvenience. This is why I don't like how 5e (and 4e, for that matter) have moved so far away from a long-term attrition model.
Just make the traps cost a Healing Surge rather than HP. People will start caring
real quick about traps at that point!
If it helps, think of 4e HP vs surges as "vitality" vs "wounds." Set off a bad trap? You've taken a minor wound. Too many minor wounds, and you have nothing left to keep yourself going in combat. (Incidentally, this also gives the 4e DM a huge amount of control over attritional recovery, especially when coupled with the AEDU system: Differential resting becomes not only possible, but effortless. "You recover only half your surges and dailies when taking an extended rest in dangerous areas" or "you may regain your encounter powers
or spend surges, but not both, during a short rest" are both valid, and IIRC the something like the former was used in 4e Dark Sun for anyone who tried to rest without sufficient food/water.)
Cage of names?
Care to elaborate? What's the cage of names?
Believing that you cannot play a warrior of grit and skill, whether fighting with mighty thews or quick strikes, unless you have a specific name written across the top of your character sheet. That is, being more attached to what things are
called than what they
do; being unable to accept something that functions in every way like what you desire because it has the wrong name, and
only the wrong name, no other faults.
Hence: the cage of names. The name alone is
more important than getting something made to do what people wish to do. If it has the wrong name, it
cannot be right; and if it has the right name,
it cannot be wrong. Both of which are ridiculous, but convincing people of that is like pulling teeth.
) and maybe play a demi-human for the bonuses and you could have a reasonable chance of success for most skills by about third or fourth level. At least the ones that mattered anyway.
