If I had the bulk to have an 18 strength, I'd probably have fallen as the grass probably would not have supported that amount of mass. I was a very thin teen.
This is what a 18 STR human looks like when climbing.
To reach 18 STR, you need a lot of body mass which does not help in climbing at all as it puts more stress on your fingers/joints and requires you to pull more mass up over and over.
If you look at Magnus in the video, he probably is around a 15-16 STR, high DEX, and high CON, but probably isn't maxed at any of them.
This is what a 18 STR human looks like when climbing.
To reach 18 STR, you need a lot of body mass which does not help in climbing at all as it puts more stress on your fingers/joints and requires you to pull more mass up over and over.
If you look at Magnus in the video, he probably is around a 15-16 STR, high DEX, and high CON, but probably isn't maxed at any of them.
Combat has more rules, because it's a complex part of the game. I don't think it has that many rules because of uncertainty. Unless you are saying that the complexity of combat creates confusion which also means uncertainty, and so the combat rules are needed. That I can agree with.
This is what a 18 STR human looks like when climbing.
To reach 18 STR, you need a lot of body mass which does not help in climbing at all as it puts more stress on your fingers/joints and requires you to pull more mass up over and over.
If you look at Magnus in the video, he probably is around a 15-16 STR, high DEX, and high CON, but probably isn't maxed at any of them.
I think there's two pretty important caveats here, one in-universe, one about we the IRL gamers.
One: Remember that a Small-size Halfling with 18 Str is as strong as a "very big Medium" Dragonborn with 18 Str. So...Strength score doesn't seem to be as strongly linked to body mass as it is IRL. So...sure, on Earth, someone with incredible prodigious strength might struggle to climb because of body mass, but that doesn't necessarily generalize. Particularly because this man, Eddie Hall, has enough drag strength to pull a 44 ton airplane under his own power. For comparison, an 18 Strength 5e char has a pull strength of 30x18 = 540 pounds. He does a 25-meter pull in 60 seconds, meaning he covered a distance of 82 feet in that time. That's a bit more than one and a half times as fast as 5 feet per 6 seconds (as 10 rounds would mean only 50 feet, not 82), so his drag strength cannot be less than 44 tons in 5e rules terms--in theory, that means he has a Strength score of over 1400. Even if we presume his actual drag weight is less than one-tenth of that (e.g. only 3 tons), he'd still have a Strength score of 100. So....yeah, we're looking at one of the places where D&D mechanics are simply, flatly, not realistic.
Which leads to...
Two: What does this say about the ability of IRL DMs to actually work with how things really work? Because it tells me that all of us are already wrong. None of us, not one, is actually realistic. We aren't actually working with physics or real-world simulation. All we are doing is relying on our (frequently very wrong) intuitions about physics. I'm specifically reminded of one of the pedagogy things that came up in my education classes (taken because I was working as a professional tutor), specifically talking about the teaching of physics.
See, a lot of college students are required to take at least one "hard science" course as part of a liberal arts education (something I heartily approve of, to be clear). So there are a lot of students who take first-year, (sadly) non-calculus physics--which provides a ripe opportunity for collecting information for a data set. Some pedagogy researchers did just that, examining student ideas/beliefs about physics before, during, and both shortly after and long after taking this introductory physics course. Before, nearly all of them espoused something loosely comparable to Aristotelian physics...with all of its extremely wrong but highly intuitive ideas. Things like "heavy objects fall faster than light objects" (factually false, e.g. a bowling ball and a baseball will fall at nearly identical speed), "objects naturally slow down and stop" (false, objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force or changes to space itself), etc. At the midpoint, the correct ideas had significantly taken hold, but Aristotelian-like physics remained present in a minority. By the end, most of the students could accurately state the actual way physics works. But six months or a year later (can't remember which they did), most of the students had returned to their pseudo-Aristotelian physics intuitions.
TL;DR: The problem is, humans are pretty garbage at learning how the world works by pure intuition. Most people operate on deeply mistaken beliefs about physical reality--but those mistakes are usually not quite significant enough to directly affect their lives. Sometimes it will (I imagine a number of traffic accidents would never have happened if people in general understood physics!), but often it won't, like how absent strong drag two objects will fall at the same speed if released at the same time, regardless of weight.
So....if "realism" is our standard, and human beings are objectively bad at realism, where does that leave us? We have, again, a work operating on a superficial appearance of realism, and iterating logic on that appearance and what people simply expect to be true, not what actually is or would be true if the situation were physically real.
My point is that, if all of your Scout troop survived it, then - assuming that they were not prodigies - it should pose no risk to a 5th level Barbarian PC with STR 18. Which means it can't be more than DC 5 to DC 10.
Something which is DC 25 is almost impossible for that same Barbarian (+7 has a 3 in 20 chance of success). That barbarian, who is one of the strongest people around and better trained than nearly anyone (+3 proficiency bonus; 1st level expertise is +4).
Whatever exactly that looks like, I would find it odd that the Barbarian in question can't intuit, by looking at it, that it will be pretty hard. I mean, you - AlViking - think you can do that, insofar as you're looking at a real-world climb and labelling it DC 25.
This is El Capitan. On average 2-3 people die climbing it every year.
There is no way from the base of the cliff that you can tell if there are handholds for any particular route up this from the base. You simply won't be able to see enough detail. The first woman to free climb it in history was in 2020. It is an incredibly difficult climb. There are worse of course, cliffs no one has ever climbed. I mention this one because I've seen it up close and even in my young and stupid days there's no way I would have considered climbing this.
I don't really care though because this is not about the DC I set for this particular cliff. In D&D the default is that the DM decides the DC, the monsters, the NPCs, every tree, bush and blade of grass that is relevant to the game. I set the DC at what makes sense to me. Making accusations and nit-picking things you obviously do not understand does not change that. You may not like the base assumptions of D&D, I do.
Suppose that the player has their PC try to bribe a guard, and the GM has a secret note: this guard is resolutely honest, and cannot be bribed.
What is actually at stake in the situation - how will this resolutely honest guard respond to the PC's offer of a bribe - is not know to the player when they declare their action. The GM is not actively revealing the situation in play.
This is what a 18 STR human looks like when climbing.
To reach 18 STR, you need a lot of body mass which does not help in climbing at all as it puts more stress on your fingers/joints and requires you to pull more mass up over and over.
If you look at Magnus in the video, he probably is around a 15-16 STR, high DEX, and high CON, but probably isn't maxed at any of them.
This is what a 18 STR human looks like when climbing.
To reach 18 STR, you need a lot of body mass which does not help in climbing at all as it puts more stress on your fingers/joints and requires you to pull more mass up over and over.
If you look at Magnus in the video, he probably is around a 15-16 STR, high DEX, and high CON, but probably isn't maxed at any of them.
There are a lot of things D&D doesn't accurately model and really can't because of how simplified attribute are. Climbing is just one. Still an interesting video.
So....if "realism" is our standard, and human beings are objectively bad at realism, where does that leave us? We have, again, a work operating on a superficial appearance of realism, and iterating logic on that appearance and what people simply expect to be true, not what actually is or would be true if the situation were physically real.
but this has been addressed many times. People have generally said they are looking not for realism in the sense of 100% close to real life but something that fits our expectations of realism: call I plausibility, real enough, naturalistic or even superficial realism. But when you guys keep trying to undermine the approach by arguing actual realism is impossible…..it isn’t really demonstrating anything except a failure to engage what people are actually saying or trying to say
